Walking (with) the platform: bikesharing and the aesthetics of gentrification in Vancouver

Abstract

This paper engages the increasing significance of urban platforms through the lens of the aesthetics of gentrification. We report on “walks-with” platformized bikesharing infrastructure across three neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada: gentrified Mount Pleasant/South Main, gentrifying Strathcona/Chinatown, and the gentrifiable East Village. Drawing on photographs, reflections, and observations of the visualities of select bikeshare stations’ microgeographical surrounds, we theorize that bikesharing materialities (stations and cycles) function aesthetically through dynamics of serialization, which designates how urban platform materialities express a replicated aesthetics in their own right, and the ways in which they have emerged as a constitutive element of the repeatedly encountered tableaus of gentrification in Vancouver. We argue that these dynamics of serialization inform and expand modes of visual place-making by commodifying spaces of/for gentrification, and condition reconciliations of contradictory visual elements in the built environment as consistent with processes and/or prospects of gentrification occurring at the sub-neighborhood scale.