Visualizing urban and regional worlds: power, politics, and practices

Abstract

Visualizing urban and regional worlds: power, politics, and practices In 2009 Environment and Planning A launched its featured graphics section reasoning " [m]ore and more of the way the world is communicated takes place through graphical means and journals need to reflect that development" (Thrift, 2009, page 763). Six years on developments in computing, visual methodologies, analysis, and communication have proved the decision to publish academically informed graphics well timed. Today more visualisations are being created for larger audiences than ever before, but importantly they are being produced with new techniques and by new actors, within increasingly complex scopic regimes. The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, O Globo, and many others, have embraced (interactive) infographics as a medium to communicate the most important news stories in the past few years. Governments are also leveraging the power of graphics: read a government report and you will find it filled with charts and diagrams depicting budgets and performance. For enterprises (social and commercial), graphics form major parts of annual reports and share prospectuses. In their advertising, too, charts inform customers of the life-enhancing efficiencies their product will bestow on consumers. And tech companies are treating data like the new oil.It is important, therefore, we understand the politics, power, and practices of visualisation within this information political economy. This theme issue does so through the prism of cities and regions. This focus is both timely and compelling for two interconnected reasons. First, cities and their hinterlands are special-they have 'triumphed' over other forms of human settlement (Glaeser, 2011) and the 21st century has been declared the century of the city with urban populations predicted to account for 70% of the world's population by 2050 (Burdett and Rode, 2007). Second, the confluence of big data and smart city agendas has seen cities visualised anew. 'Urban data scientists' working in city labs, urban data centres, and smart city hubs are using proprietary software and algorithms from technology giants to create dashboards and real-time models of urban centres (Kitchin et al, 2015;Mattern, 2013;. New questions are raised, therefore, about the role of different actors in the production and dissemination of visualisations, the empirical basis for city models and maps, who and what is included and excluded from visualisations, the potentialities visualisations hold, and how we should conceptualise them.To help address these questions we invited contributions from previous featured graphics authors. The contributions come from scholars working in architecture, geography, economics, environmental science and planning, and present work which visualise cities and regions through modeling, mapping, deconstructing, drawing and doodling them. Contributions include traditional papers, featured graphics (and extended versions) and commentaries. We encouraged articles...

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