a journal of cities and culture
Challenging views of social housing as dysfunctional and dystopian, Caterina Sartori examines films that reimagine everyday social space through practices of care, repair and maintenance.
Adam Ochonicky explores the relationship between mobility and precarity in the Midwestern spaces of It Follows.
Drawing on the ideas of Michel De Certeau, Isabelle McNeill discusses filmmaking practices in the banlieue as part of a wider struggle for habitability.
Arguing that mobility has to be understood intersectionally, Pamela Robertson Wojcik shows how Hollywood genres about tramps, hitchhikers, and “street people” overwhelmingly privilege white characters even as film and television have started to pay more attention to female homelessness.
Anna Viola Sborgi’s introduction to the second round explores intersectionality and social mobility as it relates to home.
Tracing the history of uninhabitable homes in the horror genre, Adam Ochonicky connects RoboCop’s narrative of precarious housing to media images of the Midwest as a blank or vacant space.
Merrill Schleier discusses her latest book, Race and the Suburbs in American Film (SUNY Press, 2021), with three of the book’s contributing authors, Elizabeth Patton, Angel Matos, and Amy Corbin.
Can cinema generate alternative visions of precarious life in the banlieue? Isabelle McNeill investigates scenes of domestic interiors that challenge the dominant media imagery of French social housing and its high rise architecture.
Caterina Sartori discusses how homeowners on the Aylesbury Estate in South East London have struggled to reclaim their property rights and the right to shape the public image of their home.
Tracing the historical roots of the current cinema of precarity via the image of the tramp, Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues that narratives about the unhomed have always been central to American film.
Anna Viola Sborgi introduces the roundtable with some reflections on the meanings of housing precarity in urban centers and the recent proliferation of images of housing inequality in popular culture.
In the latest episode of our Events podcast series, Manu Luksch, Melissa Butcher, Sarah Keenan and Joel McKim discuss the Predictive Cities VR Exhibition, specially available to Mediapolis listeners and readers until the end of 2021.
Robert Joseph reflects on teaching an interdisciplinary social science course on mapping film and television cityscapes.
Catherine Benamou discusses the urban musical In the Heights and unpacks its complex relationship with the Latinx neighborhood of Washington Heights.
