engleski

Multispace: A non-media-centric approach to mediated cities

Linking to the theoretical challenge posed by the outline of the workshop, which seeks to identify key intellectual lineages that have led to our thinking of contemporary urban and media processes as ‘mediated cities’ (or any of the many related terms, chiefly McQuire’s ‘mediacity’), in this paper I propose that a triad of urban mediation might serve well. With obvious debt to Lefebvre’s anthological spatial trialectics, which understands the social production of space in three related and simultaneous developments: practices, concepts and imaginations, in this paper I straddle a number of studies and theoretically inflected discussions to argue that the study of mediated cities essentially evolves around three key research strands, linking to each of the three Lefebvre’s elements: media as cities (concepts), cities as media (imaginations), and non-media-centric urbanity (communicative practices). In the first of these instances, we accentuate that the organisation and function of certain urban systems, such as roads, pipes and networks of telecom cables, inherit the logic of media infrastructures, with commanding centres (dashboards resembling TV newsrooms), and dependant peripheries, replicated yet even more widely at the level of ‘global cities’ and their servicing local centres. If the first instance reminds of the fact that the understanding of media technologies and uses is incomplete outside the urban/material/historical context, because none of the above technologies are afforded a free- floating existence entirely independent of local histories, wider cultural boundaries and commercial logics, the second instance reminds us that modern industrial cities have always been mediated by some form of language and symbolism – be it photography, cinema or digital wayfinding services, all of which show that cities never exist outside systems of representation, which never merely ‘reflect’ an inert physical city but co-create it. And finally, we get to a point where the previous two instances left us: the moment in which the symbolic and the material as well as the global and the local in communicative urbanism coalesce, which is the world of everyday practices, the space of encounter and interaction that connects it all into a meaningful fabric, where battles are fought and repetitive banalities are constructed as a safe base of homeliness. This is where a non-media- centric perspective, to borrow from Morley, emerges, to account for how the social world transforms and is transformed, at the same time, by the technological ecosystem, in this context, an urban mash up of things, people, and signals. In illustrating these three interconnected elements of my mediated city trialectics, I will draw upon a number of exemplary studies. I will particularly seek to show how in many cases the attention to communicative cities emerges as an ‘unintended consequence’ of grounded research, especially in disciplines, like cultural geography or history, where authors are less aware of urban communication/urban media studies. Thus rather than calling for a development of a new disciplines (e.g. urban media studies), with canons, methods and initiatives, I see our increased attention to communicative cities, to link back to Lefebvre, as a scholarly production of a certain understanding of contemporary social space. This is a space which is at once mediated and mediating, and resists final definition, hence pointing to a potential future of academic work, which is less rigidly guarding the confines of disciplines (defining what counts and not as a certain tradition of thought) and is striving to be more responsive than before, through a multidimensional synthesis (Morley) to understanding the difficult and multifarious developments in the social world. There are a number of scholarly developments that have led to the increased visibility of mediated city debates in the academia and beyond, chiefly the ethnographic turn in media studies, the spatial turn in the social sciences, the mobilities turn in sociology and more currently the non- media-centric perspective, and the final part of the paper will dedicate some time to considering these ‘turns’. I will conclude by arguing that these moves towards interdisciplinarity and ‘3D’ optics (studying practices, symbols and concepts together) in empirical work, have started to open up a space for an unseen array of reconsiderations of usual urban (e.g. planning, management, regeneration, neighborhood life) and media topics (e.g. representation, infrastructure, usage) which might usefully be re-coded against and in relation to each other in mutually transformative ways.

media ; space ; difference ; cities ; technology

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