1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Media and the City
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.
Erica Stein and Germaine Halegoua
Introduction: How to Do Things with Media and the City
Part I: Imaginaries and Cityscapes
François Penz
1 Cinema as Urban Modelling: Understanding Urban Phenomena through Fiction Films
Sabine Haenni
2 Imagining Migrants in Cities
Lucy Fischer
3 "The Last Time I Saw Paris": The Contemporary Parisian Omnibus Film in Context
Myles McNutt
4 Backlot Urbanism: The Constructed New York City of How I Met Your Mother
James Yeku
5 Nollywood Film Posters and Print Urbanism in Lagos
Amanda Holmes
6 Architectural Symbolism in Latin American Cinema
Bradley Bereitschaft
7 Skylines of the Mind: How City Building Games Reflect Urban Imaginations and Shape Urban Realities
Ling Zhang
8 Voicing New Life: Prostitute Reform and the Socialist Public Sphere in 1950s Chinese Cinema
Will Straw
9 Urban Labor and the Cinematic Nocturne
Part II: Architectures and Infrastructures
Aurora Wallace
10 The Architecture of News Media in New York City
Marijke DeValck and Harry van Vliet
11 Amsterdam Film Festival City
Helen Morgan Parmett
12 The Sportification of Place: Governance, Mediatization, and Place-Branding through the Stadium
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
13 Ambos Nogales Repair: Critical Play and the Infrastructures of the Border City
Dave Colangelo and Zach Melzer
14 On Emptiness: Spacing in Media Architecture
Malini Guha
15 Rethinking Public Projection as Traction: The Case of Imagining Publics (2019)
Chris Lukinbeal
16 Land Use Mapping and the Topologies of a Cinematic City: San Diego’s Backlots from 1985-2005
Part III: Development and Redevelopment
Merrill Schleier
17 Masterplanning: Urban Redevelopment and the Racialization of American Urban Cinematic Space
Joshua Gleich and Chris Lukinbeal
18_ A Layered Landscape of Western Movie Production: Combining Geographical and Historiographical Methods at Old Tucson Studios
Angie Chau
19 At Home in the Metropolis: Reimagining Beijing and Shanghai in the 21st Century
McLain Clutter
20 The City at 42nd Street
Sonja Dümpelmann
21 Dreaming, Documenting, Disturbing: Independent Environmental Film in 1970s West Berlin
Osman Nemli
22 Screening Istanbul and the Rebelliousness of Poor Images
Eric Gordon and Tomás Guarna
23 Care-ful Governance in the Smart City
Kristy H. A. Kang
24 "City Stories": Digital Placemaking and Public History in Singapore
Noelle Griffis
25 "What am I Supposed to do with all These White People?": Fifty Years of Gentrification Anxiety on Screen
Part IV: Strategies and Tactics
Lawrence Webb
26 Studio Urbanism
Vicki Mayer
27 Locational Love and Labor: Hollywood Media Production Pre- and Post-Pandemic
Annie Sullivan
28_Who Controls the Media: the Racial Politics of Public Interest and Local Television in Detroit
Victor Fan
29 From Extraterritoriality to Extratemporality: Contemporary Media and Politics in Hong Kong
Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay
30 Detroit Diplomats Represent: Hip Hop, Gentrification, and the City
Adriana de Souza e Silva and Ragan Glover-Rijkse
31 Rethinking Micromobility as Mobilities Justice: Location-based Traffic Apps in Rio de Janeiro
John Marshall and Cézanne Charles
32 Not At All Evenly Distributed
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.
"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
