How does news circulate in a major post-industrial city? And how in turn are identities and differences formed and mediated through this circulation? This seminal work is the first to offer an empirical examination, and trace a city’s pattern of, news circulation. Encompassing a comprehensive range of practices involved in producing, circulating and consuming ‘news’ and recognizing the various ways in which individuals and groups may find out, follow and discuss local issues and events, The Mediated City critiques thinking that takes the centrality of certain news media as an unquestioned starting point. By doing so, it opens up a discussion: do we know what news is? What types of media constitute it? And why does it matter?

This book is an interdisciplinary empirical investigation of how people interact with public screens in their daily lives. In more and more surprising locations, screens of various kinds appear within the sightlines of passers-by in contemporary cities. Outdoor advertisers target audiences which are increasingly mobile, public art uses screens to interrogate urban change, while postmodern architecture finds electronic imagery a suitable tool of expression. Traditionally, urban sociology research has assumed that people seek to filter urban stimuli, but recent accounts of public screens suggest producers design and position display interfaces site-specifically, so as to engage with those moving past. This study offers insight both into the dynamics of actual encounters and into the long-term process of how people learn to live with repeated invitations to consume media in public spaces. The book includes four cases: street advertising, underground transport advertising, and installation art in London (UK) and media façade architecture in Zadar (Croatia). Krajina shows that maintaining familiarity with everyday surroundings in media cities that change beyond citizens' control is a temporary achievement--and a recursive struggle. Finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation book award, 2014

Considers how film and related visual media offer insights into the city, looking at the built environment as well as a lived social experience. It brings together an international group of filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers and media journalists who critically read, reinterpret and create narratives of the city. 80 b/w illus.

This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

In this utterly original look at our modern "culture of performance," de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time. Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University. "Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend-the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside of your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions."-O magazine "A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media...."-Washington Post "Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."-Publishers Weekly

As the social media revolution embeds itself in our daily lives, and as those who once consumed media become producers, established broadcast media producers are witnessing the dissolution of trust in their established authority. Mediated Space critiques contemporary intersections of Architecture and broadcast media that exploit spaces and places that are real, imagined or hybrids of the two in order to re-establish and strengthen the power of traditional capitalist mechanisms of production and consumption. Examining eight spatial constructions in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Mediated Space embarks on a global exploration of how architecture, spatial design and technology conspire in the service of global capitalism. In three thematic parts that focus on the automotive space of the city, the journalistic space of the news room and the mediated skyline of the city, Mediated Space makes an architectural critique of spaces that are rarely designed by architects but that are experienced every day by millions of people.

We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such »staged sounds« express the changing identities of cities? This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such as film sound theory and museum audio guides. In doing so, this book puts contemporary controversies on urban sound in historical perspective, and contextualises iconic presentations of cities. It addresses academics, students, and museum workers alike. With contributions by Jasper Aalbers, Karin Bijsterveld, Carolyn Birdsall, Ross Brown, Andrew Crisell, Andreas Fickers, Annelies Jacobs, Evi Karathanasopoulou, Patricia Pisters, Holger Schulze, Mark M. Smith and Jonathan Sterne.