Images making places: the role of image rhetoric in shaping the housing ideal in London

AbstractThis article considers visual design as a complementary form of strategic planning that relies on images to sway the approval of future housing developments. The study of promotional materials in the city of London provides an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between represented and constructed space and on the rhetoric employed by the neoliberal real estate market. For this reason, the research is based on a transdisciplinary approach that merges hermeneutics and urban sciences. The results showed a strong correspondence between the alteration of the represented reality and the perception of the built environment. This trend is connected to a more general tendency towards the financialisation of architecture, which focuses on space simplification and the primacy of feelings. This exacerbates both visual and spatial inclusion processes, allowing us to address issues of access to housing, justice, and equity as a lens to observe and unpack a global trend with precise spatial outcomes. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Basil: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 18–9.2 Amy Thomas, ‘Mart of the World: An Architectural and Geographical History of the London Stock Exchange’, The Journal of Architecture, 21.5 (2016), 816–55 (p. 822) .3 See On the Verge of Photography, ed. by Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding, and Andrew Fisher (Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013), p. 14; and Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image – Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), pp. 68–73.4 Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Philosophie des images (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 296–7.5 See Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux: Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néo-libérale [Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market] (Paris: Éditions Liber, 1998), p. 42; and Patrick Malone, ‘Bourdieu in London’, The Journal of Architecture, 25.6 (2020), 679–96 (p. 685) .6 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 31.7 Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, p. 74.8 See Roman Jackobson, ‘Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems’, in Roman Jackobson: Selected Writings, Vol. II, Word and Language (Mouton: The Hague, 1971), pp. 570–9 (p. 576); and Emre Altürk, ‘Architectural Representation as a Medium of Critical Agencies’, The Journal of Architecture, 13.2 (2008), 133–52 (p. 144) .9 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 212.10 Andrew Brown, ‘The Spinning Index: Architectural Images and the Reversal of Causality’, in On the Verge of Photography, ed. by Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding, and Andrew Fisher, pp. 237–58 (p. 241).11 Vilém Flusser, Per una filosofia della fotografia [Towards a Philosophy of Photography], trans. by Chantal Marazia (Milano: Mondadori, 2006), first publ. in French in 1983, p. 87.12 See George Baird, Public Space: Cultural/Political Theory; Street Photography (Rhode Island, RI: SUN Architecture publisher, 2011), p. 35; and Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 76–8, first publ. in French in 1936.13 Umberto Eco, Marc Augé, and Georges Didi-Huberman, La forza delle immagini [The Power of Images] (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2015), p. 24.14 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1995), p. 60.15 Flusser, Per una filosofia della fotografia, pp. 62–7.16 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Selected Working Papers, vol. 2, ed. by Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, and Helen Wood (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 386–98 (p. 389), written in September 1978 as a paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy on ‘Training in the Critical Reading of Television Language’, Council & The Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester.17 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 73–4.18 Saskia Sassen, ‘Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math’, Science, Technology & Society, 22.1 (2017), 1–15 (p. 2).19 Mayor of London, ‘London’s Opportunity Area’, Greater London Authority, 2022 [accessed 6 June 2022].20 Mayor of London, ‘Policy 3.10 Definition of Affordable Housing’, Greater London Authority, 2022 [accessed 22 June 2022].21 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: SAGE publications, 2013), first publ. in 2001.22 Silvia Blanco Agüeira, ‘Image, Text, Architecture: The Utopics of the Architectural Media’, The Journal of Architecture, 21.7 (2016), 1149–53 (p. 1148) .23 Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (New York, NY: Bard Graduate Center, 2003), pp. 18–23.24 Will Wiles, ‘“Placemaking” and the Commodification of “Place”’ (unpublished paper, University of East London, 2016).25 Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, p. 71.26 Bruno Latour, ‘Che cos’è l’iconoclash?’ [‘What is Iconoclash?’], in Teorie dell’immagine, ed. by Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2009), pp. 278–330 (p. 311).27 See Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurale: recherche de méthode [Structural Semantics: Research and Method] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), pp. 46–52; Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces [Utopias: Playing with Space] (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), pp. 33–4; and Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), pp. 114–25.28 Hubert Damisch, Skyline: La vile Narcisse (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 13.29 See Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, p. 48; and Flusser, Per una filosofia della fotografia, pp. 102–3.30 Wandsworth Council, ‘Battersea Power Station Redevelopment Application. n. 2012/4586’, Wandsworth Council, 2012 [accessed 1 April 2019].31 Wandsworth Council, ‘Design and Access Statement Addendum’, in ‘Battersea Power Station Redevelopment Application. n. 2012/4586’, 2012 [accessed 1 April 2019].32 Pari Riahi, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Architectural Representation’, The Journal of Architecture, 22.5 (2017), 815–24 (p. 818) .33 John Hare, principal at MillerHare, interviewed by the author, London, 15 September 2016.34 Marc Augé, Le temps en ruines [Time in Ruins] (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2003), p. 69.35 Mario Perniola, Contro la comunicazione [Against Communication] (Torino: G. Einaudi, 2004), p. 7.36 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2012), p. 41.37 William John Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 315–29.38 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘L’immagine brucia’ [‘The Burning Image’], in Teorie dell’immagine, ed. by Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2009), pp. 241–68 (p. 250).39 Wunenburger, Philosophie des images, p. 402.40 Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 33.41 Coleen Boyle, ‘Eyes of the Machine: The Role of Imaginative Processesin the Construction of Unseen Realities via Photographic Images’, in On the Verge of Photography, by Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding, and Andrew Fisher, pp. 211–36 (p. 213).42 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 40–1.43 Perniola, Contro la comunicazione, p. 37.44 Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces, p. 55.45 On the Verge of Photography, ed. by Rubinstein, Golding, and Fisher, p. 42.46 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, p. 26.47 Federico Ferrari, La seduzione populista. Dalla città per tutti alla città normalizzata [The Populist Seduction: From the City for All to the Normalised City] (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012), pp. 103–4.48 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 271.49 Jacques Lacan, Écrits [Writings] (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 56.50 Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 92.51 Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 130.52 Sassen, ‘Predatory Formations’, p. 13.53 Pinotti and Somaini, Teorie dell’immagine, p. 15.