The future gaze: City panoramas as politico-emotive geographies

Abstract

In this article, we show how the abstract city - media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance - is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze. Through analysing two cities - Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai - we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban panoramas sustains a sense of futurity through two (overlapping) forms: the conjunctional and the hyper-representational. We argue that together these panoramas invite an emotive future gaze which, through the combination of practical enactment, haptic movement in the city and political vision, constitutes an ideological force of modern urbanism. By introducing the conceptual framework of encapsulation/decapsulation, we propose a way of deepening the understanding of the symbolic and emotional negotiations involved in the production of spectacular city landscapes. Copyright © The Author(s), 2009.