ABSTRACT
This chapter will address the changing relations of virtual and material geographies (and demographies) in matters of place, space, and their representation. This will entail the need to articulate questions of communication with matters of transportation (treating the mobility of messages alongside that of bodies and commodities). The English city of Birmingham - long derided within the United Kingdom as the ultimate Non-Place (in Auge’s (1995) terminology) but now the site of a seemingly counterintuitive boom in tourism - will provide us with a place-study in which these themes can be explored. The tourist boom will be considered in the context of the city council’s extensive investment in a place-making strategy designed to “rebrand” the city as a regional hub for the cultural/leisure industries and of the impact of recent televisual representations of the city, including the “steampunk” image of the 19th-century city offered in the highly successful series Peaky Blinders. These representations will then be compared to those offered by contemporary audiovisual artists, including John Akomfrah, George Shaw, and Richard Billingham - which raise, among other matters, the buried spectres of the city’s racial histories.
