a journal of cities and culture
In 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.
John Stehlin considers the historical resonances and specificity of platform urbanism.
Matthew 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.
Sarah Barns uses Henri Lefebvre’s theories of the quotidian to consider platform urbanism as a mode of ‘everyday’ urban intervention.
Maroš Krivý asks whether platforms contribute to the dynamics of uneven urban development itself.
Lizzie Richardson’s followup post explores urban plan forms as technologies of urban life.
Josh Gleich examines the value and limitations of historical records that will inform his cross-disciplinary study of Old Tucson Studios.
Chris Lukinbeal explains how GIS techniques, drone technology, and multi-layer mapping data can help trace the topography of location shoots.
Josh 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.
Roberto Cavallini unpacks the essay film’s potential for ideological critique vis-à-vis its position within the film industry.
Iván Villarmea Álvarez explores the politics of memory in the contemporary city essay film.
Thomas Elsaesser traces Wim Wenders and Yohji Yamamoto’s intertwined history through personal upheavals and national trauma to arrive, unexpectedly, at Weimar photography.
Drawing on Adorno’s account of the “bad essay”, Brenda Hollweg defends the essay film’s capacity for politico-aesthetic intervention.
Laura 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.
Igor 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.
Matthew 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.
John Stehlin claims that the urban & the platform are entwined through their mutual creation of landscapes of locational advantage.
Sarah 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.
Maroš Krivý examines the smart city as both the smart city and the smart city.
Lizzie Richardson revises our assumptions about digital platforms like Uber and the privatization of public urban space.
Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore introduce a new Roundtable on urban platforms by asking how platforms may be understood as new forms of urban infrastructure.
Four 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?
Roberto Cavallini mounts a case for Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été as an essay film
Thomas 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.
Iván Villarmea Álvarez explores the perspectives that local and outsider filmmakers bring to the essay film.
Brenda 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.
Is 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.
[Ed. note: this post is part of a Roundtable discussion on “The Essay Film and The City.” For more background on the discussion and…
Our 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.
