Urban/Rural Hybridity in Pictures. The Creation of Neighborhood Images Using the Example of San Diego’s Urbanizing Inner-Ring Suburbs East Village and Barrio Logan

Abstract

As extensive privately driven development efforts in Downtown San Diego started to cross its southeastern boundaries in the early 2000s, the former industrial sites and inner-ring suburbs East Village and Barrio Logan were facing fundamental urbanization and infill processes. Within these developments functional restructuring, new uses and reutilizations, symbolic charges and staging took place. In this context the present article uses a poststructuralist, discourse theoretical-oriented Google image analysis to examine the question to which extent the medial, pictorial representations of the neighborhoods East Village and Barrio Logan are characterized by similar motifs and thus lead to discursive determinations of meaning and the creation of neighborhood images. The analysis revealed clearly different medial representations of the two neighborhoods which testify to regularities, recurring argumentations, and certain breaks, as well as heterogeneities: While the pictorial representations of East Village strengthen a rather clear image of an upmarket, urban environment for young professionals, Barrio Logan obtains a plural and diverse image of drastic upheavals in a pastiche-like, hybrid manner.