IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

The much-heralded “urban renaissance” never fully arrived and appears even less likely amid ecological instability, data-driven urbanism, and algorithmic enrichment schemes. Among many dystopian prefigurations, Ballard’s visions of drowned and desertified worlds remain potent reflections on post-urban ecosystems shaped by climate crisis. This paper examines artistic practices that speculate on such futures, foregrounding the creative potential of error and disruption within visual culture. Focusing on two forces shaping the morphology of future cities—climate change and machine-assisted design—it explores how artists employ malfunction, illusion, and digital excess as critical tools. Building on the premise that speculative visual texts embrace trompe-l’œil and glitch aesthetics to expose exhausted narratives of the urban renaissance, the paper identifies a distinctly digital baroque sensibility that reveals the ideological and aesthetic mechanisms sustaining these myths. The first case study analyses The Future Sound of London and Buggy G. Riphead’s 1990s collaborations, where overgrown wilderness collides with manipulated urban imagery to critique techno-utopian urbanism (Lifeforms, 1994; Dead Cities, 1996; Environments, 2007–ongoing). The second examines Jean Jacques Balzac’s AI-generated “wrong architecture illustrations,” whose algorithmic inconsistencies and visual glitches subvert the hyperrealism of computational design. Read together, these works form a visionary continuum—from early digital surrealism to contemporary machine aesthetics—that reactivates the tradition of paper architecture (Spiller, 2007; Harbison, 1991). Drawing on error (Fontcuberta, 2005, 2015), interruption (Jordan & Lindner, 2016), and glitch (Menkman, 2011), the paper proposes a framework for reading speculative, post-urban imagery as critical architectural theory and as a means to think beyond the exhausted narratives of urban regeneration.