List of Titles

Authors: Smith, Naomi , Walters, Peter
Date: 2018
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Urban Studies Vol. 55, no. 13 (2018), p. 2980-2995
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Reviewed:
Description: Public space is being increasingly managed by defensive architecture, surveillance and other subtle filtering mechanisms to make it more palatable and attendant to the needs of capital. This reinforces social boundaries, making space inhospitable to those people whose presence is not welcome, and serves to ‘discipline’ city inhabitants into primarily consumption based modes of interacting with and in the city. However, disenfranchised urban populations still find ways to exist in and navigate these spaces. The purpose of this article is to highlight these ways by introducing the concept of ‘desire lines’ as a means of overcoming or re-imagining defensive space. We use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire as productive force, combined with De Certeau’s notion of ‘walking the city’, to explore how individuals and social movements might practically, and in a metaphorical sense, create new collective paths, creating ‘desire lines’ of resistance and change within what is often an increasingly unforgiving and dominated urban environment, created by and for capital at the expense of a vibrant public realm.

Authors: Walters, Peter , Smith, Naomi
Date: 2024
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Space and Culture Vol. 27, no. 1 (2024), p. 94-109
Full Text: false
Reviewed:
Description: The impact of gentrification in cities is well established. The continuous evolution in geolocation and social media is intensifying the contest between competing stakeholder claims to authenticity about gentrifying places. In this article, we examine the way that different geolocative social media define a struggle over the rights to authenticity in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brisbane, Australia. Local voices are often submerged by the voices of commercial imperative, particularly when the rent gap in gentrifying neighborhoods begins to attract abstract capital with a vested interest in commodifying local culture. We use Instagram and Facebook to critically examine how the hegemonic influence of social media can construct a gentrifying neighborhood in immaterial space and argue that these constructions work to eradicate the complex array of communities that comprise this neighborhood in material space. © The Author(s) 2022.

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