a journal of cities and culture
In the latest episode of our Voices podcast series, Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast and Carwyn Morris discuss with Scott Rodgers their recent Deep Dive essay on ‘wanghong urbanism’, and how this concept might help interpret the relations of social media and urban life.
Hamed Goharipour uses personal experiences at Rome’s Piazza Navona and its depiction in the film Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow to explore how cinema shapes our perception and experience of urban space.
In this Student Voices essay, Sophie Mode explores the integration of multiplex cinemas into sprawling malls, or the “malltiplex,” in Mumbai.
In this Student Voices essay, Anna Molloy explicates the architectural set design of Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle.
In this Student Voices essay, Vassar student Junyi Zhou considers the representation of gender relations in post-war film noir set in Los Angeles.
In this Student Voices essay, Vassar student Charlie Tynan analyzes architecture and emotionality in the 2017 film Columbus.
Erica Stein discusses the syllabus for her course “Cinemas and Urbanisms” and introduces the essays in the Student Voices section.
Laura Vermeeren examines the proliferation of state-sponsored outdoor fitness areas in Beijing. Often used by retirees, these “senior playgrounds” embody both Chinese philosophies of wellbeing and neoliberal practices of self-care.
Drawing on examples from Amsterdam to Venice, Vincent Baptist analyses two emerging urban paradigms — the “smooth city” and the “wellness city” — as models for understanding the reciprocal relations of care between cities and their inhabitants.
Faye Mercier explores how first-time visitors to Seoul use South Korean film and television as sources of “self-care,” and highlights the tensions between the material experience of the city and its mediated imaginaries.
Victor Zhuang et al. interrogate the discourse of “doing good” for disabled people through smart city initiatives and digital technology, asking how we might move from “doing good” to “doing good better.”
Walkable cities are caring cities, argues Pedram Dibazar. Viewing the pedestrian city through the lens of care, Dibazar discusses the importance of walking together as a means to sense the city anew.
How can care become material through sound in the urban environment? Lucy Cathcart Frödén analyses Malmö’s “cultural-industrial sound zone” and challenges us to tune in to care in the city.
Linda Kopitz traces how the vision for Amsterdam’s sustainable future has been digitally mapped by “green” databases in ways that construct ideas of maintenance as care, and care as maintenance. Yet such mediations of urban nature risk fragmenting sustainable practices in the present.
Samuel Holleran discusses urban cemeteries as a kind of “deathcare infrastructure” and considers the questions of capacity, maintenance, and care that surround their presence in Australian cities.
Pei-Sze Chow reads the science-fiction film Tiong Bahru Social Club in the context of Singapore’s Smart Nation policies, arguing that its satirical vision of care-by-algorithm offers insights into how individuals might reclaim agency and “hack” the algocratic state.
In their introduction to the Caring Cities dossier, Linda Kopitz and Pei-Sze Chow consider how care intersects with the urban, and how care might be “designed,” through the lenses of technology, politics, and the senses.
Maria O’Brien draws on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theories to argue for the continued importance of the state in the media production process, via the example of Irish audiovisual taxation policies.
Yulia Gilich is this year’s graduate student essay winner for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Urbanism, Geography, Architecture Scholarly Interest Group. They examine how Israeli and Western media primarily depict Gaza as a site of destruction and violence, which naturalizes this perception of the Gaza Strip and absolves Israel and its allies from responsibility for the suffering caused there.
Can the phenomenon of wanghong urbanism be harnessed for positive change? Reflecting on some of her projects, the architect Anna Liu discusses the challenge of creating landmarks for a digital world and the potential for design to catalyse environmental awareness.
Emphasising the sensory experience of the digitally mediated city, Monica Degen and Gillian Rose propose critical tactics for understanding the everyday power relations of the “new urban aesthetic.”
Kola Heyward-Rotimi investigates the speculative aesthetics of “corporate Afrofuturism” as a mode of neoliberal world-building. For smart city projects such as Nigeria’s Eko Atlantic, international architecture firms render digital projections of the continent’s urban future.
In the latest episode of our Events podcast series, Lisa Schulze, Karin Larsson, Mortiz Schweiger and Derya Özkan discuss their recent research on media, cities and space with Erasmus Mundus journalism students.
Exploring China’s latest megacity, Xiongan New Area, Antonie Angerer shows how social media and urban-digital spectacle have become incorporated into the urban planning process.
The former French Concession in Shanghai has become a key destination for tourists and social media influencers. Chensi Shen investigates the area’s cultural symbolism and its new status as an urban-digital landscape.
Kath Bassett examines how locative media platforms such as TripAdvisor have shaped the development of Harry Potter tourism in Edinburgh.
Urban aesthetics have become social media aesthetics, argues Petter Törnberg. Drawing on research from São Paolo, Törnberg shows how the logics of social media have become integral to the new urban attention economy.
In their introduction to the dossier on urban-digital spectacle, Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast, and Carwyn Morris reflect on the complex roles that digital technology and social media play in the production and consumption of urban space.
