Visualizing Gentrification in Ancoats, Manchester: A Multi-Method Approach to Mapping Change

Abstract

This chapter explores how we can come to better understand global gentrification through a variety of visual processes, including visual ethnography, social and spatial semiotics, and image analysis of developer hoardings. In particular, this chapter looks at New Islington including the Ancoats Marina and Cutting Room Square, close to the North Eastern edge of Manchester. This chapter is also about the optics of visibility, the battle over perceptibility and the ways in which gentrified space can be interrupted (Jordan and Linder in Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space. Bloomsbury, London, UK, 2016), through socially engaged visual practices and the ‘deglamorizing effect’ that blogs and social media can have upon a development project. By foregrounding researcher-produced imagery to narrate the physical and cultural change of the landscape in addition to the analysis of visual works produced by others, professional or otherwise, the final aim is to continue to normalize the use of visual imagery as a valid and relevant type of data for sociological research (Nathansohn and Zuev in Sociology of the Visual Sphere. Routledge, New York, 2013).