Mediapolis was actually supposed to be a newsletter. Slightly more than 15 years ago, when Sabine Haenni and Brendan Kredell began the Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG, one of the most exciting aspects was that it gave us the space to gather as a subfield, put faces to names, and share research and successes and frustrations at SCMS every year. What it didn’t give us was the time to develop a continual flow of exchange of information, support, and ideas. Brendan proposed that we start a newsletter or bulletin to support such an exchange, to allow us to, for example, let each other know about publications of interest, new classes we were teaching, relevant films and series, etc.
That didn’t happen for two reasons. First, I’ve never met an idea that I couldn’t expand, require more people to run, necessitate new infrastructures to sustain, and otherwise make into a Thing. Second, we realized that a newsletter still meant that we’d be aggregating announcements and passing them on, and what we wanted to have was a conversation. So, a journal. But, while journals are of course intended to spark conversation, and often encourage authors to cite other things published in the journal, they are not a natural venue for talking to one another, and especially not for speaking synchronously, polyphonically, and non-hierarchically.
Brendan and I wanted a journal that did all those things, especially because Mediapolis was and is an interdisciplinary journal. Each piece we publish is itself a conversation between multiple traditions – or we might say tessellations – of ways of knowing media urbanism, or cities and culture, or spatial representations and practices, or any of the other ways we define and argue about what the relationship between the drive to mediate and the drive to urbanize (or whether those are distinct drives) even is. While I do have immense respect for Charlotte Brunsdon’s critique of our subfield’s reliance on edited volumes – and it’s notable how central that form remains almost fifteen years after Brunsdon’s “Attractions of the Cinematic City” was published – there’s something to be said for the plurality of that format.1Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Attractions of the Cinematic City.” Screen 53.3 (Autumn 2012): 209-227. At its best, I think the edited volume is an attempt to have a conversation, within a shared set of ideas about media and the city that can amount to a working definition or taxonomy. But an edited volume doesn’t allow for iteration, for reply, or, often, for expansion or contestation of that definition, and a journal does. These considerations directly influenced the decisions we made about Mediapolis as a journal-based project as well as its parameters: middle-state, short form (or small-gauge), and largely editorially-reviewed, rather than peer-reviewed. Others in this dossier address those decisions and characteristics in more detail.
What I want to focus on is how the priorities detailed above shaped journal content and particularly our recurring sections. When we laid out our initial sections, we interleaved some of the ideas that would have fit into a newsletter – like a Syllabus Corner – with ideas that foregrounded the logic of a conversation: Opening the Canon, Q&A, and the Roundtable. Opening the Canon invited writers to engage with foundational works in the field. This included those produced by an earlier generation of film and media scholars whose work lends itself to urban questions (e.g. Deleuze and Guatarri) as well as those by geographers and critical theorists whom film and media scholars working on the urban often utilize (e.g. Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja). This feature put contemporary scholars, ranging from graduate students to senior scholars, in direct conversation with earlier generations of work, not merely citing or quoting, or even complicating and contesting A Thousand Plateaus, but speaking with them, engaging their structures, or case studies, or textuality and modes of writing for themselves rather than their relation to one’s own argument. Similarly, while works like Production of Space and Third Space can almost enjoy a sinecure in media urbanist writings, dutifully appearing in an introduction or early part of a chapter or article to establish a definition or indicate in what tradition an author is working, they are rarely explored on their own terms because doing so delays the introduction of case studies, or even of media itself as the “real” topic of the piece. In Opening the Canon, media scholars make these non-media-centric texts their focus, reading them from the perspective of what are often career-long considerations.
Opening the Canon, then, is a conversation between the past and the present of media urbanism. The Roundtable is a conversation that coalesces the media urbanism of the present and generates future directions. This feature, which was the heart of almost every issue Brendan and I published between December 2015 and summer 2020, consisted of a moderator and 4-6 contributors, with two rounds of posts. The moderator, generally a member of the editorial board, would introduce a topic in one post, and each contributor would respond to the introductory post and articulate their own angle on the topic. Then the moderator would write a second post responding to contributors, suggesting connections between posts, and articulating new avenues and provocations. The contributors’ own second posts would generally respond to one another and to the moderator, as well as elucidate or complicate their original idea. These were conversations in almost real time about subjects ranging from urban branding via media, to the essay film, to platform urbanism. These conversations threaded through and across an individual issue, often serving as first and last posts across a given issue’s 3-5 week publication cycle. They also unintentionally created a home-grown just-in-time publishing model that was punishing for both editors and authors. The second cohort of co-managing editors, Liz Patton and Lawrence Webb, discontinued the Roundtable in favor of the less time- and labor-intensive Dossier, which serves a similar function without the real-time response and double-post factor.
This brings me to my final comment on publication as conversation. Mediapolis is now on its third set of co-managing editors and has undergone additional content changes, from the introduction of a podcast to an exciting expansion of the kind of work hosted, which now includes pieces on disco, nightlife, and significantly more attention to Southeast and East Asian locations, theorists, and objects. These changes represent a kind of conversation among the editorial board and the journal’s archived issues, and it’s one that I think is partially responsible for us reaching the 10-year milestone, allowing us to change and expand our reach while continuing to fulfill our original goals.
At the same time, who is having this conversation has changed. Liz and Lawrence in particular have done a great job of drawing in contributors and editors from beyond SCMS, screen media, and a predominantly North American and European orientation: the journal routinely receives unsolicited submissions, which is a far cry from the days when Brendan and I considered how many pieces we and a few editorial board members could contribute before things got a little sad, a lot self-regarding, or both. But that also prompts me to ask who is now having a conversation through, in, and with Mediapolis? What is that conversation about? And where might that conversation take us next?
One key aspect of that conversation will be both its expansiveness and what it takes for granted. Mediapolis started publishing in 2015, the same year as John Durham Peters published The Marvelous Clouds and Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski released the edited volume Signal Traffic. Both of these books are indicative of a watershed in media infrastructural studies in particular and a shift in the wider field of film and media studies in general. They mark a movement toward networks as a central object of inquiry (and way of thinking) and concepts related to systematicity rather than the systematic as a general orientation and set of questions. In many subfields, this has meant a movement away from an orientation toward representation, the visual, and the textual and, concurrently, a fierce contestation of that movement.
Yet this distinction has never been a meaningful one in media urbanism because we are constantly uncovering and thinking through the ways in which apparent distinctions between texts and contexts, representations and platforms, place-making and spatial management, where and how we live and who we live with, are mutually constitutive. That has certainly always been the case for Mediapolis, and it’s especially evident in the Roundtables. For example, in “Experimental Media and the City,” from 2018, contributors explore topics from Black Audio Collective films to Google Street View. Because of the Roundtable format, the contributors responsible for each of these topics are also speaking to one another, and expanding and revising their ideas through one another’s case studies and concepts. This, in turn, can be found in individual pieces throughout Mediapolis, even, and especially, ones that do not utilize or explicitly engage with canonic contemporary theorists or terminology. For example, Ariel Dougherty, co-founder of Women Make Movies, discusses a 1970s international network of videoletters circulated largely via regional coach lines and supported by community groups in third-tier and world cities alike. Dougherty never uses the term “networked,” or considers analog video as a privileged medium for activism during the urban crisis, but she still documents what amounts to an alternate feminist media infrastructure – one that changes our understanding of how activism and community media remap and reclaim urban spaces.
Veteran media makers and activists, young scholars and established programmers, trained architects and insurgent planners are just some of the people in conversation through Mediapolis. That conversation remains expansive in topic, ecumenical in approach, and, I believe, exceptionally vital as the media-city becomes ever more intercalated and complex.
Notes
| ↑1 | Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Attractions of the Cinematic City.” Screen 53.3 (Autumn 2012): 209-227. |
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Erica Stein is Chair and Associate 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 (SUNY Press 2021) and co-editor of Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022). In 2015, she co-founded Mediapolis with Brendan Kredell. She is currently working on a book about real estate and crime in film, video, and television.
