Abstract:
Adtopia investigates the pervasive nature of ‘Advertisement Culture’ and the forms
of representation of social life it has introduced to dominate urban dwellers’ everyday
practices. The work focuses on the Wynyard Quarter’s spectacle-oriented
development in Auckland, advocating a rethinking of urban creative activism as a
pivotal force for ensuring the production of public spaces through discursive engagement
and involvement of all parties involved. Informed by the analysis of the
antithetical nature of the architecture of commercial advertisement and subversive
urban art, the core methodology of the thesis adopts the critical theory approach
and deploys the speculative architecture method. As such, the thesis identifies
advertisement architecture as the epitome of an extensive series of irrationalities
found in our postmodern affluent society and explores ways in which it is exploited
to disempower and marginalise parts of the urban society.
Through an in-depth analysis of the subversive practices of distributed creativity,
this study envisions new architectural infrastructures that re-establish the emancipatory
role of urban centralities. It uses the recently redeveloped Wynyard Quarter,
once a pivotal site for Auckland’s industrial development, as a case study to depict
a new emerging trend of financialization of central public space. Claiming that its
quality design, lush landscaping and eventful activation has transitioned it into a
selectively utilised site, the thesis foregrounds how a finance-driven renewal has
blurred the boundaries of the public and private sphere to serve a post-civil agenda.
Advocating for spatial justice and countering the commodification trend, the thesis
proposes a speculative scenario where some critical structures of urban life are
radically reimagined to foster acts of civic reappropriation. The final proposal is
an assemblage of experimental interventions that transform Wynyard Quarter into
an inclusionary and open realm of antagonist pluralism. Integrated creative spaces
of appearance facilitating spontaneous communicative acting subvert the existing
apparatuses relying on commercial advertisement culture. The delineation of these
spaces results in a twofold operation: firstly, the deconstruction of paradigms of
abstractive or dehumanising architectures of the consumerist advertisement-culture;
and secondly, the transformation of these paradigms to create structures for an equitable
and inclusive political, convivial, recreational and commercial city that re-empower
and re-enfranchise the dispossessed. Thus, the proposed Wynyard Quarter
is a thematic urbanscape where architecture acts as mediator of multiple artforms,
whilst channelling voices of the unaffirmed urban commoners.