The Routledge Companion to Media and the City
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Book Description
Bringing together leading scholars from around the world and across scholarly disciplines, this collection of 32 original chapters provides a comprehensive exploration of the relationships between cities and media.
The volume showcases diverse methods for studying media and the city and posits "media urbanism" as an approach to the co-construction and interactions among media texts and technologies, media users, media industries, media histories, and urban space. Chapters serve as a guide to humanities-based ways of studying urban imaginaries, infrastructures and architectures, development and redevelopment, and strategies and tactics as well as a provocation toward new lines of inquiry that further explore the dense interconnectedness of media and cities. Structured thematically, the chapters are organized into four distinct sections, introduced with editorial commentary that places the chapters into conversation with each other and frames them in relation to an overarching question, problem, or method. Part I: Imaginaries and cityscapes focuses on screen representations and mediated experiences of urban space produced and consumed by various actors; Part II: Architectures and infrastructures highlights the different ways in which built environments and socio-technical substrates that sustain differential mobilities, urban rhythms, and systems of circulation and exchange are intertwined with various forms of media and mediation; Part III: Development and redevelopment examines efforts by urban planners and designers, municipal governments, and community organizers to utilize media forms to imagine and shape the construction of the space and meaning of the city; finally, Part IV: Strategies and tactics uses categories for practices of control and resistance to investigate media and struggles for power within urban environments from surveillance and place-branding to activist media and the right to the city.
The Routledge Companion to Media and the City provides a definitive reference for both scholars and students of urban cultures and media within the humanities.
Table of Contents
Introduction How to Do Things with Media and the City, Part I: Imaginaries and Cityscapes, 1. Cinema as Urban Modelling: Understanding Urban Phenomena through Fiction Films, 2. Imagining Migrants in Cities, 3. "The Last Time I Saw Paris": The Contemporary Parisian Omnibus Film in Context, 4. Backlot Urbanism: The Constructed New York City of How I Met Your Mother, 5. Nollywood Film Posters and Print Urbanism in Lagos, 6. Architectural Symbolism in Latin American Cinema, 7. Skylines of the Mind: How City Building Games Reflect Urban Imaginations and Shape Urban Realities, 8. Voicing New Life: Prostitute Reform and the Socialist Public Sphere in 1950s Chinese Cinema, 9. Urban Labor and the Cinematic Nocturne, Part II: Architectures and Infrastructures, 10. The Architecture of News Media in New York City, 11. Amsterdam Film Festival City, 12. The Sportification of Place: Governance, Mediatization, and Place-Branding through the Stadium, 13. Ambos Nogales Repair: Critical Play and the Infrastructures of the Border City, 14. On Emptiness: Spacing in Media Architecture, 15. Rethinking Public Projection as Traction: The Case of Imagining Publics (2019), 16. Land Use Mapping and the Topologies of a Cinematic City: San Diego’s Backlots from 1985-2005, Part III: Development and Redevelopment, 17 Masterplanning: Urban Redevelopment and the Racialization of American Urban Cinematic Space, 18. A Layered Landscape of Western Movie Production: Combining Geographical and Historiographical Methods at Old Tucson Studios, 19. At Home in the Metropolis: Reimagining Beijing and Shanghai in the 21st Century, 20. The City at 42nd Street, 21. Dreaming, Documenting, Disturbing: Independent Environmental Film in 1970s West Berlin, 22. Screening Istanbul and the Rebelliousness of Poor Images, 23. Care-ful Governance in the Smart City, 24. "City Stories": Digital Placemaking and Public History in Singapore, 25. "What am I Supposed to do with all These White People?": Fifty Years of Gentrification Anxiety on Screen, Part IV: Strategies and Tactics, 26. Studio Urbanism, 27. Locational Love and Labor: Hollywood Media Production Pre- and Post-Pandemic, 28. Who Controls the Media: the Racial Politics of Public Interest and Local Television in Detroit, 29. From Extraterritoriality to Extratemporality: Contemporary Media and Politics in Hong Kong, 30. Detroit Diplomats Represent: Hip Hop, Gentrification, and the City, 31. Rethinking Micromobility as Mobilities Justice: Location-based Traffic Apps in Rio de Janeiro, 32. Not At All Evenly Distributed
Editor(s)
Biography
Erica Stein is Assistant Professor of Film at Vassar College. Her research focuses on the spatial politics of alternative cinemas. She is the author of Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York (2021) and the co-founder of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.
Germaine R. Halegoua is John D. Evans Development Professor and associate professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the relationships between people, place, and digital media. She is the author of The Digital City (2020), Smart Cities (2020), and co-editor of Locating Emerging Media (2016).
Brendan Kredell is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Production at Oakland University. His research and writing focus on the intersection of media and urban studies. With Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist, he co-edited the book Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (2016) and is the co-founder of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.
Reviews
"This anthology brings together film scholars, geographers, designers, and urban planners to consider the mutual imbrication of media and the city. Contributors examine such disparate forms as city-building video games, local television production, documentary, hip hop, location-based apps, film festivals, and digital architecture in cities including Lagos, Paris, Detroit, and Beijing. Refracting and reframing the debate about media urbanism through topics such as immigration, race, prostitution, sports, gentrification, and protest, the book considers not only how various media imagine and produce the city but also how the city is intricately and irrevocably mediated."
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, University of Notre Dame, USA