ABSTRACT
Bringing together leading scholars from around the world and across scholarly disciplines, this collection of 32 original essays 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 towards new lines of inquiry that further explore the dense interconnectedness of media and cities. Structured thematically, the essays 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. ‘Imaginaries and Cityscapes’ focuses on screened representations and mediated experiences of urban space produced and consumed by various actors; ‘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; ‘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, ‘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.
Introduction How to Do Things with Media and the City Section 1: Imaginaries and Cityscapes 01_ Cinema as Urban Modelling: Understanding Urban Phenomena through Fiction Films 02_Imagining Migrants in Cities 03_"The Last Time I Saw Paris": The Contemporary Parisian Omnibus Film in Context 04_ Backlot Urbanism: The Constructed New York City of How I Met Your Mother 05_Nollywood Film Posters and Print Urbanism in Lagos 06_Architectural Symbolism in Latin American Cinema 07_Skylines of the Mind: How City Building Games Reflect Urban Imaginations and Shape Urban Realities 08_Voicing New Life: Prostitute Reform and Socialist Public Sphere in 1950s Chinese Cinema 09_Urban Labor and the Cinematic Nocturne Section 2: Architectures & Infrastructures 10_The Architecture of 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 Section 3: Development & 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 Section 4: Strategies & 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 in Rio de Janeiro 32_ Not At All Evenly Distributed
