Agnieszka Leszczynski

This article engages signage as a medium through which urban stakeholders negotiate the politics of housing redevelopment and gentrification in cities. Focusing on Toronto, we examine housing‐related signage in three neighbourhoods where social mix approaches to redevelopment have ushered in gentrification: Parkdale, Regent Park, and Moss Park. We identify three types of signs through which these politics are expressed: notice of proposed development boards, developer‐branded placards, and paper posters. By analyzing both the original contents of and ad hoc changes made to select instances of these signs, we identify that gentrification through housing (re)development is contested , de‐ and re‐politicized and resisted . In Parkdale, notice of proposed development boards communicate imminent transformations of the neighbourhood, while constituting a medium through which they are contested . In Regent Park, developer‐branded placards depoliticize redevelopment through discursive commodifications of diversity, while also allowing for these commodifications to be repoliticized . In Moss Park, paper posters mobilize grassroots resistance to private condominium development. We argue that more attention should be paid to ad hoc alterations to signage beyond their explicit messaging, as a source of street‐level insight into how multi‐stakeholder gentrification politics materially unfold in cities.

360-degree photography is an emerging form of visual media that is increasingly used in research. However, little methodological evidence exists on the use of this technology for field-based data collection and analysis. Drawing on an “urban objects” research project, we describe procedures to capture, process, store, code, and analyze 360-degree digital photos, highlighting considerations particular to this imaging format. 360-degree photography is a powerful field method, particularly for research that requires “whole scene capture” and/or strives to analyze the relational connections between objects and their wider surrounding environments. The procedures outlined are applicable to field-based research projects across the social sciences.

360-degree video is an affordable and easy-to-use technology for social science research. It holds significant potential for capturing spatio-temporal aspects of the social world from a fully omni-directional spatial perspective; however, gaps remain as to how it can be used to support field-based data collection and analysis. In this short piece we offer two contributions to the literature on 360-degree video for qualitative social science research on place. First, we draw on evidence from our multi-city study of ‘urban platform temporalities’ to develop a step-by-step procedure for producing and analyzing 360-degree digital video datasets, demonstrating the potential of the technology for what we term whole scene capture . We provide practical advice on software, hardware, camera usage, video processing, and ethical considerations; and introduce the 360-video qualitative coding technique of spherical simultaneous perspective . Adding new evidence of its use to already established literatures on 360-degree immersive video ethnographies and virtual human-environment exposure research, our method for systematic 360-degree capture of spatio-temporal data is applicable to a range of social science studies with a field-based data collection component. Finally, drawing together technological understandings of immersion from the field of VR with its ethnographic meaning, we then articulate the notion of immersive holism as a quality of 360-degree video that enables deep, meaningful, and comprehensive knowledge of place.

In this article, the authors engage with visual representations of smart homes, examining whether and how these media constitute emergent narratives of Western meanings of home. They do so by reporting on the findings of visual content and semiotic analysis of smart home images published in architectural media. They identify two modalities of smart home images published in these media – images in which smart home technologies are visible and those in which they are implicitly hidden. They read these images as constituting two semiotic myths of home: as familiar places of belonging for both people and smart objects, and as exceptional spaces of luxury associated with freedom from domestic labor delivered by smart technologies. They argue that these myths are central to securing social acceptance of the smart home by signifying it to be both trustworthy and aspirational.

Dockless micromobility sharing systems have wrought significant visual changes to urban streetscapes worldwide. These changes are often described in terms of the ‘mess’ of micromobility, characterised by dockless vehicles abandoned in roadways, sidewalks, and recreational paths, tossed into waterways, and graffitied, burned, and otherwise vandalised. In this paper, we argue that efforts to govern this dockless micromobility mess – which most frequently comes in the form of parking regulations – effectively impose and enforce normative visual order on the cityscape. Based on an analysis of primary image data and publicly available documents, we identify that efforts at governing docklessness also have the effect of governing the aesthetics of urban space in three ways: through (1) visual-material interventions (e.g. parking corrals and mats, app interfaces); (2) linked strategies of visual verification (digital image capture and assessment) and computer vision (the use of AI and machine learning); and (3) visual erasure (e.g. impounds and bikeshare graveyards). We discuss the implications of the aesthetic effects of micromobility governance for docklessness itself and the utilisation of dockless micromobilities and potential impacts on transportation equity and sustainability, and most significantly, for the right to the city.

This paper reports on a comparison of the spatial equity dimensions of dockless bike and e-scooter sharing in Calgary, Alberta. Using trip data from the City of Calgary’s Shared Mobility Pilot (between July-September 2019), this study investigates differences in micromobility utilization by dockless mode between areas characterized by different levels of deprivation. ANOVA and linear regression results show that utilization of both dockless modes was spatially inequitable, with e-scooter and dockless bike trips concentrated in the least deprived areas. Dockless bike and e-scooter sharing utilization declined with each increase in deprivation level by 0.138 trips per 1,000 persons per vehicle for dockless e-scooters, and 0.015 trips per 1,000 persons per vehicle for dockless bikes, suggesting that more equity considerations are required to ensure that the benefits of dockless micromobility sharing are available to all areas regardless of the relative advantage or disadvantage.