Images making places: the role of image rhetoric in shaping the housing ideal in London

Abstract

This article considers visual design as a complementary form of strategic planning that relies on images to sway the approval of future housing developments. The study of promotional materials in the city of London provides an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between represented and constructed space and on the rhetoric employed by the neoliberal real estate market. For this reason, the research is based on a transdisciplinary approach that merges hermeneutics and urban sciences. The results showed a strong correspondence between the alteration of the represented reality and the perception of the built environment. This trend is connected to a more general tendency towards the financialisation of architecture, which focuses on space simplification and the primacy of feelings. This exacerbates both visual and spatial inclusion processes, allowing us to address issues of access to housing, justice, and equity as a lens to observe and unpack a global trend with precise spatial outcomes.