ABSTRACT
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
part I|96 pages
Imaginaries and cityscapes
chapter 7|12 pages
Skylines of the mind
chapter 8|11 pages
Voicing new life
part II|79 pages
Architectures and infrastructures
chapter 12|11 pages
The sportification of place
chapter 16|10 pages
Land use mapping and the topologies of a cinematic city
part III|106 pages
Development and redevelopment
chapter 17|14 pages
Masterplanning
chapter 18|12 pages
A layered landscape of Western movie production
chapter 21|13 pages
Dreaming, documenting, disturbing
chapter 25|11 pages
“What am I supposed to do with all these white people?”
part IV|78 pages
Strategies and tactics