Animated urbanism: Bringing cities to smart digital life

Abstract

This talk will explore the visual culture of what Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell call ‘the smartness mandate’. The smartness mandate, in brief, is a neoliberal entrepreneurial discourse that assumes that the world is a dynamic system in permanent crisis, and that the necessary resilience to weather such crisis requires the constant, experimental, computational analysis of big data. Animated images are central to this mandate in three ways: as a means of visualising data in order to act upon it; as a part of the mandate’s techno-cultural imaginary; and as a form of picturing the life that emerges under conditions of such smartness. In its latter guise, this mandate extends its formatting of urban life across many domains of visual culture. The lecture will elaborate this argument, particularly focussing on the legacies of photography for envisioning smart urban futures. It will also examine why it matters that so many animations are held in place by, and jostle across and between, urban screens.

Bio

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 was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Medal in 2025. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993) and Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010); additionally, the fifth edition of Visual Methodologies (Sage) was published in 2023, and 2022 saw the open access publication of a collection of essays on Seeing the City Digitally, available from Taylor & Francis, as well as the release of The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change, co-authored with Monica Degen (Bloomsbury). She has written many papers on images, visualizing technologies, and ways of seeing in urban, domestic, and archival spaces. Her next book, titled Animated Urbanism: Bringing Cities to Digital Life, will be published by Minnesota University Press in late 2026.