Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Using Bauman’s “Liquid Modernity” (2006) and “City of Fears” (2003), this paper interrogates film as an alternative medium that attempts to facilitate the inclusion of multiple simultaneous interpretations, voices and ideas in the discursive processes of intentional place change, focusing on the its ability to engage temporality, dynamic change and the hidden, invisible or unseen dimensions of place. Traditional visualization tools in spatial design disciplines have emphasized the (rational) manipulation of space and the inscription of order and meaning and excluded both visceral, experiential qualities that are a fundamental precondition for the formation of place and the hidden “flows” of power (Bauman 2006). Emphasizing the rational and visible reduces place to tabula rasa, destroying its inherent memories, meanings and identities, and disempowering the people it is inhabited by. Film as an alternative representational tool in the context of the recovery of post-disaster and post-industrial landscapes and communities affords previously marginalized people and communities alternative instruments to exercise their “right to narrative” (Bhabha), thus asserting their identity and empowering them to play a more significant role in spatial design and planning processes. As such, it serves as an alternative (primarily visual) language that provides a parallel “read” on actual and hypothetical/future places – a language that is frequently incompatible with traditional graphic media employed in spatial design and planning processes as a tool for the exercise of hegemonial interests. This paper will provide a critical perspective on film’s potential to participate in the conceptualization and realization of more complex adaptive human-environment interactions.