The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication

Zlatan Krajina, Deborah Stevenson, Zlatan Krajina, Deborah Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415792554
• eBook ISBN: 9781351813266
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication traces central debates within the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on mediated cities and urban communication. The volume brings together diverse perspectives and global case studies to map key areas of research within media, cultural and urban studies, where a joint focus on communications and cities has made important innovations in how we understand urban space, technology, identity and community.

Exploring the rise and growing complexity of urban media and communication as the next key theme for both urban and media studies, the book gathers and reviews fast-developing knowledge on specific emergent phenomena such as:

• reading the city as symbol and text;
• understanding urban infrastructures as media (and vice-versa);
• the rise of global cities;
• urban and suburban media cultures: newspapers, cinema, radio, television and the mobile phone;
• changing spaces and practices of urban consumption;
• the mediation of the neighbourhood, community and diaspora;
• the centrality of culture to urban regeneration;
• communicative responses to urban crises such as racism, poverty and pollution;
• the role of street art in the negotiation of 'the right to the city';
• city competition and urban branding;
• outdoor advertising;
• moving image architecture;
• 'smart'/cyber urbanism;
• the emergence of Media City production spaces and clusters.

Charting key debates and neglected connections between cities and media, this book challenges what we know about contemporary urban living and introduces innovative frameworks for understanding cities, media and their futures. As such, it will be an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication studies, urban communication, urban sociology, urban planning and design, architecture, visual cultures, urban geography, art history, politics,

cultural studies, anthropology and cultural policy studies, as well as those working with governmental agencies, cultural foundations and institutes, and policy think tanks.

PART I

Trajectories of Mediated Urbanity

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

Trajectories of Mediated Urbanity

Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson

Cities have never been only about buildings and media have never been only about symbolic transaction. Indeed, as we emphasized in the General Introduction, outlining the central argument of this volume, the parallel study of cities and media/communication offers unique ways for deeper understanding of each other. This Part identifies key sites and origins of the media–city connection as well as highlighting phenomena particular to urban media and communication. Specifically, contributors explore conceptual issues such as historical lineages of mediated urbanity, including semiotics of space and screen cultures; institutions such as cinema, television and journalism; infrastructures such as mobility and consumption; and modes of experience pertaining to habitation and conviviality. Concepts, spaces and practices, which we identified above as key areas of this interdisciplinary scholarship, will continue to enfold in the ensuing sections and chapters that explore more specific cases.

As Scott McQuire proposes in Chapter 1, if urban processes are identified with communication, a historical perspective on this duality, an “archaeology”, might help us better understand its present formation and potential future headings. As opposed to linear historicization, McQuire opts for identifying “thresholds”, which, though crystalizing in different periods of time, overlap: the “big city life” of the 19th century, the “electropolis” of the early 20th century, the “suburban media city” of the postwar period and the 21st-century rise of the “digital media city”. Observing those thresholds together, McQuire suggests that “creative experimentation” in combining new tech with old spaces will be needed to support conviviality in the mediated city.

Whatever the technology, it is through communicative practices, inherent to humans as social beings, that cities come to exist as meaningful environments. Immense diversification of agents and contexts engaged in sign production and exchange drives the essential slippage between the signifier and the signified. The multiplication of meanings given to social environments is, for Barthes (1986), best read from urban landscapes (of varying physical and digital variety) and semiotics remains foundational for exploring how ideas translate in space and how space is practiced as a communicative battlefield. Postmodern spatial design famously abounds in signage but particular meanings can be recognized in styles self-declared to serve “general” human needs and opposed to decoration; Le Corbusier’s horizontal window can be read as the owner’s camera pointing at the street and the glass kitchen door an internal surveillance system of gendered housework (Colomina 1996). Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos in Chapter 2 provides accessible yet generous theoretical synthesis for reading “space-as-text” and “space-in-text”. Along with examples like the 20th-century reconstruction of Thessaloniki and the place of Indian mandala in pre-capitalist urban planning, the chapter spans a range of perspectives, such as social and political economic.

Glass was arguably the building material that offered most opportunities for thinking about urban space as communicative interface. It embodied the modernist obsession with visibility and control through a separation between the inside and the outside thus instituted. Famous examples include 1851 London’s Crystal Palace, 1976 LA’s Bonaventure Hotel and 2003 Diller+Scofidio project Facsimile at the SF’s Moscone Convention Center, the latter involving a moving public screen showing fictional footage of the inside and thus criticizing the unquestioned legitimacy and deceptive capacities of glass-supported surveillance. It is thus no coincidence that the essential form of urban mediation, as Zach Melzer demonstrates in Chapter 3, remains the screen, encompassing such coexisting mutations as frame, window and display. Urban screen cultures have provided cities their communicative vocabulary from as far back as the linear perspective scripted in the renaissance all the way to “Windows”, the computer interface and the popular metaphor for media (Friedberg 2006).

The screen has come to figure as a key site for understanding the contradictory forces of modern, technological urbanity. Diverse as the store front and the mobile phone, the screen intervenes in transactions only to connect those involved; it diverts us from surroundings so as to expand them. Historical change in urban screen cultures that occurred during the 20th century, according to Robins (1996), was the shift from the authority of “electronic presentation” of the city, provided by cinematic narration as a space of reflection, to “electronic presence”, created by pockets of networked data flows (public traffic information, advertising) offered without beginnings or endings and designed for chance encounters rather than viewing: a multi-screen impression rather than screened analysis of urban living.

The screen has embodied the tension between the desire to capture the endless city as totality and its semi-visible alleyways that are only trackable at the level of daily use and escape bird’s-eye mapping. It is through the screen that we come to know the city as a gathering of segments, drawn from diverse vantage points. The primary urban media institution, cinema, gave this specific sensibility from its beginning in the early 20th century, a tangible form, through montage and perspective, as well as centering light as the equivalent of truth. First, the theater and now also more niche-oriented places, such as galleries and the multiplex (Harbord 2002), provided temporary excursions from the physical city. As Robins put it, “people went into movie houses as they went into dreams . . . aware that they were screened from actual dangers” by achieving a sense of (aestheticized) order of the city (1996: 132). Engaging with such fundamental areas of connection (representation, production and perception, Mennel 2008), James Donald, in Chapter 4, locates cinema at the origins of the modern city, which rests on the link among “the city”, “the person” and “the machine”. Donald explores this relationship across filmic cities such as Taipei, Berlin and New York, with a reflection on the development of this, arguably widest, area of urban media and communication scholarship.

Movement of capital between renaissance city-states circumvented other, competing forms of power such as the more static, territorial ownership by the church (Pirenne 1925). City walls, which had defined the horizon of city life, were gradually removed and cities opened up to transport connections which became vital infrastructure of communication. Now cities are gated through “data banks” (Virilio 2002). Relationships among people were given over to depersonalized social facilities of production and reproduction (factories, roads, welfare, shops) and systems of meaning (ideologies, lifestyles, aspirations); even the self was to be sought in the labyrinths of urban space and technology. Film set photography into motion to produce a meaningful presentation of movement (of people, goods, information) as the perceived essence of then-new modern city spaces (Nead 2007). In Chapter 8, Erika Nagy explores how intellectual turns (spatial, cultural) and sites (the mall, the bazaar and the street) in consumption studies harnessed issues like urban planning, policy and informality. The chapter in particular observes how urban consumption in post-socialist cities narrates an “alternative”, non-binary, “modernity” to the conventional framework of “Western capitalism”. Similarly, the most pronounced form of consumption-related communication in urban space—outdoor advertising—raises issues beyond matters of commercialization. In Chapter 7, Cesare Silla traces outdoor advertising in the 19th century as part of the development of “American consumer capitalism”, which matched manufacturing with transport, distribution and marketing. Post-industrial developments (like “ambient marketing”), as well as concerns about “visual pollution” and social intervention (such as billboards), can challenge assumed gender roles, as exemplified in Philippine, Nigerian, Iranian and Kyrgyz cities.

Mobility is always more than transfer “from A to B”, as Ole B. Jensen explains in Chapter 9. It involves different modalities, speeds and contexts (particularly access) concerning the capacity to move, hence propelling new forms of participation in the urban society. For instance, urban mobilities can combine physical stasis with virtual motion and vice-versa, as Jensen explores in the cases of Los Angeles and Beijing, leading to “mobile agoras” and “networked selves”. In fact, as Shaun Moores demonstrates in Chapter 10, urban mobility, such as automatic acts of walking, driving and typing, rests on modes of being and knowing which are felt, rather than thought, and lived before being cognized and projected. These “sensuous . . . dealings” with surroundings remain precious, yet under-appreciated, sources of what we know about the urban media worlds we inhabit.

It is safe to argue that we are always in more than one location in the city, whether while standing before a back-lit storefront in a dark, cold street or engaging with like-minded others on social media in the midst of physically present and socially contrasting strangers on public transport. Separated by industrial organization, time and space were to be rejoined through technological systems such as the networked screen. As Morse famously noted, “the freeway, the mall and television” together formed the ecology of the urban postwar everyday, which involved citizens inhabiting spaces characterized by persistent “inclusion of . . . elsewheres and elsewhens in the here and now” (1990: 193–195). In Chapter 5, Charlotte Brunsdon excavates the usually ignored entanglements of television and the city: first its role as a symbolic counterpart to the physical (automobile-driven) postwar extension of the city, articulating the ideology of retreat and gendered construction of the suburban household; second, the ways in which post-industrial changes in production, distribution (broadcast to streaming) and reception (increasingly out-of-home) informed new television–city links, such as global city branding (e.g., Birmingham, drawn from BBC’s images of “heritage aesthetic, dynamic violence and rock soundtrack”; Istanbul through the popularity of Turkish soaps). This circular relationship between media and cities is further elaborated in Chapter 6 by Scott Rodgers who ponders the ways in which journalism historically has infused city spaces with evocations of the public sphere by relaying “public address”. Journalism continues to participate in urban place-making too, if now less from the centrally located print newsroom (which saw the analogy between “rectilinear” skyscrapers and print lines) and more in dispersed and digitally networked stations, servicing “hyperlocal” and “citizen” reporting.

If central figures of modern urbanity remain the stroller and the stranger, their navigation of city spaces can involve personal photographic tools (Kodak in the early 20th century, Instagram in the early 21st century). They enact what Gordon called “possessive spectatorship”, whereby “the spectator could collect artifacts of experience with his camera, and he could just as likely be collected as someone else’s artefact” (2010: 61). But what kind of visibility is good for whom? Myria Georgiou and Jun Yu raise this issue in the closing Chapter 11, on urban media subjectivity. They remind us that “tenuous commitment and proper distance” among strangers have always conditioned “freedom and cosmopolitanism in the city” and question the moral dimensions of media use in the negotiation of strangeness. Media can increase any group’s visibility but also “challenge proper distance”, depending on how and by whom the stranger is thus established. Contrary to celebratory visions of technology, which suggest that more communication equals more understanding, the media-savvy city is a space where difference remains constitutive of identity, and where, as Georgiou and Yu accentuate, “struggles for voice and recognition remain unresolved”.

References

Barthes, R. (1986) “Semiology and the urban”, in M. Gottdiener and A. Lagopoulos (eds.) The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 87–98.

Colomina, B. (1996) Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Friedberg, A. (2006) The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gordon, E. (2010) The Urban Spectator: American Concept-Cities from Kodak to Google, Lebanon, CT: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College Press.

Harbord, J. (2002) Film Cultures, London: Sage.

Mennel, B. (2008) Cities and Cinema, London: Routledge.

Morse, M. (1990) “An ontology of everyday distraction: The freeway, the mall, and television”, in P. Mellencamp (ed.) Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 193–221.

Nead, L. (2007) The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Pirenne, H. (1925) Medieval Cities: Their Origins and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part I Trajectories of Mediated Urbanity
• Part II Media as Urban Infrastructure; City Spaces as Media
• Part III Media Cities as Sites of Creative Industries and Post-Industrial Urbanism
• Part IV Spaces and Practices of Daily Life in Mediated Cities
• Index