Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In recent years, images of ‘futuring’ of the contemporary city –a term borrowed from the language of future management- have been largely shaped by spectral urban figures/agents within urban processes and regeneration atmospheres, described in this paper as acts of ‘future colonisation’. This paper engages with some traits of the most public and yet less explicitly visible urban agents engaged in this affective atmospheres: the ‘ghosts in reverse’ populating the hoardings of new city places yet to exist. These are the digital future citizens that manifest themselves in the architectural renderings of the social life of future cities, the paradigmatic urban actors with anticipatory agency, prefiguring the city yet-to-exist and occupying its future ahead of its time. The most troubling character of these affective urban agents is how the the algorithmic biases of their makers enters as stealth material into the futures they are imaging through architectural renderings. Looking at the motion capturing technology needed to produce these digital ‘inoperative communities’ (Nancy, 1991) and their geographic distribution, we can see how the use of the word ‘colonisation’ becomes deliberately associated with a ‘scanning bias’ that reinforces ‘whiteness’ (Dyer, 1997) in architectural visualisation of places yet to exist, sanitising the global majority out of their boundaries.