As a handy pocket-sized artbook intended for the urban walker-investigator who seeks to avoid conventional heritage tour narratives, Plaintiff Press’s Parallel Urbanisms: Los Angeles in Whitechapel recreates, through a montage of text and image, the commentary of Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Simon King as they lead fellow walkers on a unique time-travelling circuit of this iconic area of East London. The 90-minute walk, originally commissioned as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s first Nocturnal Creatures evening of art events in July 2018, begins in Angel Alley, E1. Joseph-Lester, principally an artist, and King, principally a writer, consider the notion of ‘parallel urbanisms’ not in terms of physical resemblances but rather in relation to deeper causal, psychic and economic points of convergence. Aside from the key literary and filmic touchstones of Jack London and Ridley Scott, their approach is informed by writers, geographers, artists and philosophers who have repeatedly shown that traditional physical geographies, fixed political boundaries or sites of economic exchanges can no longer be understood as stable measures of the fluid interchanges and connections that exist between cities. The daily reality of living in a networked technological mediascape inspires them to explore the invisible infrastructural connections between Whitechapel and Los Angeles. Their tour takes both a historical perspective and a more contemporary analysis, one which also looks to the future in terms of how LA exists deep within Whitechapel and London in general.

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