Visualising Creative Destruction: A Photographic Study of Urban Change in Salford, UK

This thesis centres on a case study located in the City of Salford, UK. Practice-based, it employs photography as a critical research tool to identify, formulate, and visualise the wide-scale urban change currently taking place across parts of the City. Situating Salford’s real estate revolution within Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction’, the research navigates the contemporary urban landscape where the production of the apartment has become the prevalent commodity form. The study grounds the global networks of investment, highlighting how the international commodification of housing operates locally, facilitated by the City Council’s entrepreneurial model to enact housing development. Employing documentary and expanded photographic practices and taking critical inspiration from Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula and Bertolt Brecht, I produce a series of visual studies into the processual, material and spatial characteristics of this unique form of transformational urban change. Creative destruction, almost invariably addressed directly in text or visualised through graphs and statistics as an abstraction, is here educed photographically as a dynamic consequential force active at a granular level in the sites and spaces of Salford. Confronting the radical disruptive energy of such dynamic urban change through montage, the study ultimately constructs unstable photographic works, evoking the processual flux reconstituting Salford’s transforming landscape.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Ph.D.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

PhD thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Westminster

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Aitken, John

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Bate, D.
• Deriu, D.

Identifier

oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:x1706

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:x1706