Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time

This book explores what’s happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of how this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life.

Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010), The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change written with Monica Degen (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fifth edition 2022), as well as many papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture.