Rendering new futures for disadvantaged housing areas

Young women in summer dresses biking through cosmopolitan urban areas where children are catching butterflies and growing vegetables in lush green gardens. The architectural renderings applied in current regeneration projects typically conjure a bright new future for disadvantaged areas. These areas were in fact typically designed by prominent modern architects as utopian welfare spaces providing quality housing for all, well-designed communal facilities and easy access to green spaces where children could play freely. Yet, some of these areas have today come to occupy the reverse role as dystopian places, included on the Governments ghetto-list and publicly notorious for their social problems, crime and deprivation. 15 of these disadvantaged housing areas will be regenerated over the next ten years entailing extensive physical and social makeovers. This paper explores the rendering of new futures deployed in this process, and discuss how such architectural visions of spatial changeovers affect local communities of residents as well as newcomers. I focus particularly on the colorful computer-generated images used as part of the place making process, where not just future built environments but also the cultural identity and social life of these neighborhoods is designed: What futures do they evoke, and how does this affect local perceptions of the place and residents’ own future in it? Though such images are often brushed aside as utopian sales material, I argue that architects by copying, cutting and pasting images, also shape urban imaginaries, reconfigure social spheres and outline possible futures of places and people.