a journal of cities and culture
In this installment of our Q&A series, digital media and society scholar and Editorial Board member Tanya Lokot interviews Marcos Dias on his recent book The Machinic City: Media, Performance and Participation.
A collaborative team at the Getty Research Institute has been working to digitize and analyze the influential Los Angeles street photography of Ed Ruscha. Mark Shiel provides an overview of the project and discusses parallels between Ruscha’s photographs and LA cinema in the 1960s.
Helen Kim speaks to Malcolm James about his book, Sonic Intimacy: Reggae Sound Systems, Jungle Pirate Radio and Grime YouTube Music Videos.
Christoph Lindner introduces a six-part dossier on Lockdown Aesthetics and Gentrification. In this opening post, he argues that gentrification has accelerated in London under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aesthetics of vacancy.
The global pandemic has exposed fissures of race and class in Washington DC. Brandi Summers examines how the aesthetics of blackness have been co-opted in the gentrifying city during a period of crisis.
How have bike delivery services changed the aesthetics and politics of the cityscape during lockdown? Daan Wesselman discusses mobility-by-proxy, visual branding, and “gentrification on wheels” in Amsterdam.
COVID-19 has created new challenges for community activism in Los Angeles. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman discusses gains and setbacks for Little Tokyo’s anti-gentrification arts activists during the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted Montreal’s efforts to become a “design city.” Guillaume Sirois scrutinizes the city’s urban design policies and examines the impact of lockdown on its design boutiques and flagship public spaces.
Susanna Phillips Newbury looks at zoning, urban development, and gentrification in Las Vegas before and during the pandemic, critiquing the city government’s claims to make “Streets for People.”
William Smith analyzes how the film Showgirls engages with themes of the hyperreal in its portrayal of Las Vegas. The film makes a jarring break from typical representations of the city, peeling back the layers of Las Vegas to reveal its promises to be inaccessible, profit-driven myths.
Noelle Griffis introduces this issue of Student Voices with a discussion of her Fall 2020 course, Cinema and the City, providing context and an overview of her students’ work, as well as links to her course syllabus and assignment. Griffis’s course emphasizes the role that urban development has played in racial and economic inequality in the city and the ways these issues have been depicted—or neglected—on screen.
Sasha Nater explores the television series Broad City to consider the extent to which the show’s main characters might be considered modern-day flaneuses. The show demonstrates the unique struggles millennial women face as they navigate the city, while also offering up potential for women to make their own place in the city by navigating and narrating their everyday experiences amidst the urban environment.
Mediapolis Now is the new podcast channel for our journal, hosting interviews, event recordings and audio essays exploring the junction of cities, culture and media.
In the latest episode of our Voices podcast series, Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson discuss the processes and tensions of academic knowledge production in the fast-changing and interdisciplinary research area of urban media studies.
Igor Krstić discusses the ethics and politics of representing slums in contemporary film, television, and video games, from computer-generated imagery of Victorian London to documentaries about Mumbai.
David Capener reads Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City as a useful conceptual framework for understanding and acting in the archive of everyday life—the production of space by new digital technologies.
Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an elegy to the displacement of minority communities from the gentrifying city. Jacqueline Pinkowitz discusses the film’s images of movement, dislocation, and loss and the legacy of racial inequality in the Bay Area.
Malini Guha discusses filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith’s month-long projection COVID Manifesto. She argues that, unlike methods of surplus accumulation that ensure neoliberal capitalism, the piece gives viewers time to pause, process, and grieve during the pandemic without asking for anything in return.
Steve Macek reviews the PBS documentary Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America and discusses the history of race and mobility in the United States.
