Visual encounters with platformized infrastructures: walking-with the serialized aesthetics of bikesharing in Vancouver

Keywords: platforms;infrastructure;digital;walking methodologies;aesthetics;bikesharing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 75

Abstract

This presentation engages the increasing significance of urban platform infrastructures through the lens of the aesthetics of gentrification, a mode of place-making through the visual commodification of space. Inspired by Powell’s (2018, 2018n) data walkshops, we mobilize a methodology of ‘walking-with’ the more-than-human infrastructures of platformized bikesharing in Vancouver, activating instances of these infrastructures – shared bicycle vehicles and docking stations – as devices of epistemological attunement that sensitized us to the visual registers of their surrounds. Here, we report on platform walks across a selective sample of three Vancouver neighbourhoods, each classified as experiencing a different degree of gentrification: gentrified Mount Pleasant/South Main, gentrifying Strathcona/Chinatown, and the East Village, an enclave primed for gentrification that straddles the Grandview-Woodland and Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhoods. Drawing on photographs, reflections, and observations of the visual fields of select bikeshare stations’ visual surrounds, we theorize that platformized bikesharing infrastructures function aesthetically through dynamics of serialization, which designates both how urban platform materialities express a serialized (replicated) aesthetics in their own right, and the ways in which they have emerged as a constitutive element of the serialized (repeatedly encountered) visual tableaus of gentrification aesthetics in Vancouver, a city that has been experiencing rapid and intensifying gentrification for many decades. We theorize that through dynamics of serialization, the aesthetics of platformized bikesharing in Vancouver contribute to and expand modes of visual place-making by informing the commodification and priming of spaces for gentrification in ways that are specific to their digitally-mediated materialities.