With the rise-of the era of post-truth politics, established definitions of urban
activism need to be revisited. Covering different territories and media, this
dissertation proposes new ways of thinking about architecture and its digital
representation as a medium for political engagement. It is my argument that
built environment as an information space can be deployed to reduce the
‘uncertainty’ of a message encountered online and can therefore be used for
legitimization by increasing image’s credibility. Starting with Times Square in
New York, the context of the research expands to Asia and investigates how
actors on the global political stage such as China, India, and Pakistan have
been using the built environment of another global power, the USA, to
validate their competing political claims about each other. While employing
iconic urban backgrounds for legitimizing political messages is far from new,
campaigns using another country’s public places and monuments to gain
repute at home represents a new territory for geopolitical discourses to be
articulated and contested. The research reflects on the possible implications of
these novel forms of political messaging for a ’trustworthy’ national politics in
an age of globalization.