Seeking Place in Mediated Urban Space

This panel has made plain that mediated cities are difficult social spaces insofar as they keep media technologies and practices in a circuit with matters of urban construction and association, where it is not only difficult but also methodologically unwise to praise them apart. Just like representation circulates the social world by providing it with a framework for meaning,¹I draw on the circular model of cultural power from Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage, 2013). media-related processes are built into the urban. In mediated cities, issues of mediation and space are brought into sharp relief with matters of identity and power, ²See Zlatan Krajina, “Public Screenings Beside Screens: A Spatial Perspective,” in Besides the Screen: Moving Images through Distribution, Promotion and Curation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 177-196. in a dialectical way. One makes the other, and vice-versa, providing us with valuable insights into each of the above four elements through the mesh of mediated urbanity, or its “throwntogetherness.”³Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005). Thus, just like the Chicago sociologists in the early 20th century took the city as a laboratory for studying forms of human association, media scholars find it pertinent in early 21st century to observe a range of media phenomena in the urban context, where various aspects of mediation, which otherwise may remain silenced, become usefully elucidated.

I argue that one key aspect of mediation which cities make particularly evident is place-making. Though familiar from phenomenological analysis, as a name for the practice of investing space with routine and familiarity,⁴Shaun Moores, Media, Place and Mobility (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). I take it as the emblem and the lens through which the interaction between various institutions (not only media companies but also planners) and citizens (and communities) in mediated cities can be observed.⁵Zlatan Krajina, “From non-place to place: a phenomenological geography of everyday living in media cities,” in Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media, ed. Tim Markham and Scott Rodgers (New York: Peter Lang, 2017 forthcoming). If there are certain tendencies that mediated cities tend to share, then one should be recognized as the pressure exerted on citizens to be available for communication (whether via “smart” technologies that allow one to carry their work home or via public displays that compel people to keep looking around), particularly when citizens seek to withdraw from interaction. I think that place-making will be one key issue for future media and urban analysis, given the variety of questions it raises: not only the negotiation of ordinariness, identification and belonging,⁶David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (London: Routledge, 2000). in cities challenged by exclusionary politics of regeneration, racial dispute, pollution and unwanted transnational migration, but also transformations of infrastructural landscapes, from large-scale transport projects, which command new definitions of locality, to media production innovations that turn select urban spaces into spectacle. Ways in which different people seek, successfully or not, to construct a place of their own, will be one measure of mediated urbanity of our time.

Zlatan Krajina

Zlatan Krajina is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, Croatia. He specialises in media cities, media audiences, and qualitative methodologies. Krajina is the author of Negotiating the Mediated City (Routledge, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award, and a number of papers concerning urban media cultures. He also acts as a managing member of the Media & the City group within ECREA, which organises regular conferences, seminars and teaching collaborations on urban communications.