Description
Futuristic drawings, open data, and interactive city models appeal to wider audiences, promise to open up urban planning, and anticipate potential socio-political conflicts early on in the process. However, all representations have different affordances and constraints to selectively reduce the complexity of stakes and stakeholder relations and perpetuate relations of power, more often than not, in the interests of dominant groups, such as real estate developers.Drawing on Kendall Walton’s theory of representational arts and rhetorical analysis, this presenta-tion examines affordances, constraints, and the strategic exploitation of urban models in Mum-bai’s development projects. Based on ethnographic material, images, and text, we explain how planners and real estate developers use rhetorical devises to gain authority, claim empathy or common good orientation, and appeal to emotions of upward mobility to strategically foreground some aspects of urban life over others.
We ultimately argue that for maps and models to be a means for democratizing urban futures, as opposed to a social technique for ‘colonizing the life worlds’ of urban citizens, the exclusion of is-sues and stakeholders in the planning process must be addressed by the employed rhetoric and material practice. This paper therefore seeks to contribute to the theoretical discourse on urban representations, while also grounding this discussion in a practical case study.
| Period | 28 Aug 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society: mapping |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Nottingham, United KingdomShow on map |