The Horizons of Platformed Urban Politics
byIn this wrap up to the Platform Urbanism roundtable, Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore argue that horizons of a platformed urban politics should entail critical engagement and practice.
In This Issue
“Highest and Best Use” from the Plan to the Platform
byJohn Stehlin considers the historical resonances and specificity of platform urbanism.
On the Slippages in Platform Urbanisms
byMatthew Wilson argues that, as a form of “self-city-nation,” platform urbanisms enable slippages between the self and outside organizing forces that expand logics of quantification.
Platform Urbanism Rejoinder: Why now? What now?
bySarah Barns uses Henri Lefebvre’s theories of the quotidian to consider platform urbanism as a mode of ‘everyday’ urban intervention.
We Are All Platform Urbanists, But Not All in the Same Way
byMaroš Krivý asks whether platforms contribute to the dynamics of uneven urban development itself.
Platforms as urban technology?
byLizzie Richardson’s followup post explores urban plan forms as technologies of urban life.
A Historiographic Approach to Old Tucson
byJosh Gleich examines the value and limitations of historical records that will inform his cross-disciplinary study of Old Tucson Studios.
A Geographic Approach to Old Tucson
byChris Lukinbeal explains how GIS techniques, drone technology, and multi-layer mapping data can help trace the topography of location shoots.
Old Tucson: Studio and Location, Geography and Film Historiography
byJosh Gleich and Chris Lukinbeal use a perennial location for westerns to ask how film scholars and geographers might each approach such a site and what they might learn from one another.
At the margins of the market: notes on the essay film’s modes of production and distribution
byRoberto Cavallini unpacks the essay film’s potential for ideological critique vis-à-vis its position within the film industry.
Beyond the Museum of Present Pasts
byIván Villarmea Álvarez explores the politics of memory in the contemporary city essay film.
(Im)Permeable History: Notebook on Cities and Clothes (pt. 2)
byThomas Elsaesser traces Wim Wenders and Yohji Yamamoto’s intertwined history through personal upheavals and national trauma to arrive, unexpectedly, at Weimar photography.
Bad essays don’t think: reflections on a (still) heretic form of the cinematic city
byDrawing on Adorno’s account of the “bad essay”, Brenda Hollweg defends the essay film’s capacity for politico-aesthetic intervention.
Re/framing the City of Cinema
byLaura Rascaroli on how the essay film’s metahistorical nature, combined with the characteristics of post-modern space/time, produce a distinct treatment of the city as palimpsest.
Urban Palimpsests and the City Essay Film
byIgor Krstić reflects on the first round of The Essay Film and the City” and opens the second by asking contributors to rethink the classic metaphor of the urban as palimpsest.
Quantified Self-City-Nation
byMatthew W. Wilson considers the technicity of maps and ‘quantified self-city-nation’ as a general theory for the technoscientific solutions we offer to confront socio-technical problems.
Urban platforms, rent, and the digital built environment
byJohn Stehlin claims that the urban & the platform are entwined through their mutual creation of landscapes of locational advantage.
We Are All Platform Urbanists Now
bySarah Barns argues that a platform urbanism should be more than a focus of academic critique, but also a site for radical appropriations of urban space.
Becoming-Platform, the Urban and the City
byMaroš Krivý examines the smart city as both the smart city and the smart city.
Platforms and the Publicness of Urban Markets
byLizzie Richardson revises our assumptions about digital platforms like Uber and the privatization of public urban space.
Platform Urbanism: An Introduction
byScott Rodgers and Susan Moore introduce a new Roundtable on urban platforms by asking how platforms may be understood as new forms of urban infrastructure.
“(Not) Working for the Clampdown”: LINK TV Project – Pratello TV (Bologna, 1992)
byFour years ago, the Italian National Amateur Film Archive in Bologna was able to collect audiovisual materials (film and analog videos) from Bologna’s radical political scene of the late eighties and early nineties. What does it mean to archive radical records?
The city as stage: proto-essayistic elements in Chronique d’un été
byRoberto Cavallini mounts a case for Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été as an essay film
Notebook on Cities and Clothes: Wim Wenders Takes to the (Inner Ring) Road
byThomas Elsaesser reconsiders some of Wim Wenders films through the lens of the city and the essay, discovering new dialogic and self-reflexive qualities within them.
Streets & Screens
byIván Villarmea Álvarez explores the perspectives that local and outsider filmmakers bring to the essay film.
The Fiction of Beirut: Reframing Labour Migration in Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement
byBrenda Hollweg shows how Taste of Cement, part of the recent global growth of the essay film, explores Beirut through the perspective of its migrant workforce, unearthing the city’s history and role in regional conflicts, as well as flows of labor.
The Diachronic Flâneur
byIs the critical gaze on the city always a wandering gaze? Laura Rascaroli works through questions of usage and explores how the essay film thinks through its practices.
Introduction: Essay Films and the City
by[Ed. note: this post is part of a Roundtable discussion on “The Essay Film and The City.” For more background on the discussion and…
Previous Issue
Mediapolis Live: Dora Apel on “Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline” (Part 2)
byOur Mediapolis Live series continues with part two of an interview with Dora Apel, author of “Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline.” Here, she and Mediapolis co-editor Brendan Kredell discuss the legacies of Henry Ford and Coleman Young in contemporary Detroit, and the critique of “creative class” urban planning.
