Poster Presentation
5. Transmitting Knowledges: Institutions, Objects and Practices
In the recent transition towards more neo-liberal forms of autocratic governance, Chinese urban waterscapes have incurred the attention of local governments interested in a rapid re-evaluation of invisible territories by forcing the social imaginary of ecological society in the materiality of place branding. As a prominent natural and symbolic resource of the Chongqing landscape, water represents a common ground of dialogue between the different actors involved in urban sustainable development.
This poster is designed as an exercise of spatial assemblage to show how immaterial heritage, local knowledge, and technocratic place branding policies are intertwined with territorial and bodily constriction mechanisms that should materialize the desired visitors’ performance while consuming the waterscape. While eliciting a narrative of human care towards nature, biopolitics is challenged by daily walking routines, unnatural stops, and access bans, trail signs, forced detours along the way, vegetation, illegal activities, and polluted materials. The failed top-down spatial reconfiguring of green passages to abide by the national standardized landscape of Beautiful China points out how engaging with the local community in the decision process of waterscape renewal is vital for a long-term sustainable vision of spatial re-significance and performative embodiment of the spatial ecological footprint.
Michela Bonato
University of Padova, Italy