Stuck in Traffic: Car-Centric Urbanism, City Planning and the Welfare State in Swedish Commissioned Films and TV Drama From the 1960s

Florin Persson, Erik and Per Vesterlund

September 26, 2023<September 26, 2023

Stuck in Traffic: Car-Centric Urbanism, City Planning and the Welfare State in Swedish Commissioned Films and TV Drama From the 1960s

Erik Florin Persson and Per Vesterlund analyze how commissioned films and TV dramas both promoted and critiqued car-centric urbanism in Sweden during the 1960s.

September 26, 2023<September 26, 2023

City of New York, No Parking Anytime: The City and the Car in Postwar City Symphony Films

Cortland Rankin

Exploring three experimental city symphony films made between 1958 and 1972, Cortland Rankin looks at the fraught and shifting relationship between New York City and the car.

September 25, 2023<September 26, 2023

Automobilities in Walter Mosley’s Detective Fiction on Film

Judith A. Nicholson

Judith Nicholson examines the importance of depictions of African American automobilities to Walter Mosley’s detective fiction and its screen adaptations.

September 25, 2023<September 26, 2023

The Nest in the Shell: Postwar Automobility and Film Noir Cars

Michael Stock

Michael Stock develops a phenomenological reading of automobility in film noir, arguing that the contradictory space of the car – “a nest within a shell” – is frequently depicted as destabilizing the family home.

September 25, 2023<September 26, 2023

Introduction: Mediating Urban Automobility

Cortland Rankin

In his introduction to the dossier, Cortland Rankin considers the roles media has played in reflecting, interpreting, and shaping the relationship between automobility and urbanism.

June 9, 2023<June 9, 2023

A caring Beijing through public fitness equipment

Laura Vermeeren

Laura Vermeeren examines the proliferation of state-sponsored outdoor fitness areas in Beijing. Often used by retirees, these “senior playgrounds” embody both Chinese philosophies of wellbeing and neoliberal practices of self-care.

June 9, 2023<June 9, 2023

Healthy Cities and Bodies: Reflections on New Paradigms of Urban Wellbeing

Vincent Baptist

Drawing on examples from Amsterdam to Venice, Vincent Baptist analyses two emerging urban paradigms — the “smooth city” and the “wellness city” — as models for understanding the reciprocal relations of care between cities and their inhabitants.

June 8, 2023<June 8, 2023

Finding Care in Korea: Korean Media Consumption as Urban Self-Care

Faye Mercier

Faye Mercier explores how first-time visitors to Seoul use South Korean film and television as sources of “self-care,” and highlights the tensions between the material experience of the city and its mediated imaginaries.

June 8, 2023<June 8, 2023

Doing Good for Disability in Asian Smart Cities?

Kuansong Victor Zhuang, Tay Sze Hwee Jocelyn, Gerard Goggin, Meng Ee Wong and Chei Sian Lee

Victor Zhuang et al. interrogate the discourse of “doing good” for disabled people through smart city initiatives and digital technology, asking how we might move from “doing good” to “doing good better.”

June 7, 2023<June 7, 2023

Walking With and Caring For: Attending to the Self and the Other in the Pedestrian City

Pedram Dibazar

Walkable cities are caring cities, argues Pedram Dibazar. Viewing the pedestrian city through the lens of care, Dibazar discusses the importance of walking together as a means to sense the city anew.

June 7, 2023<June 7, 2023

Sounding Care in Malmö’s Cultural-Industrial Sound Zone

Lucy Cathcart Frödén

How can care become material through sound in the urban environment? Lucy Cathcart Frödén analyses Malmö’s “cultural-industrial sound zone” and challenges us to tune in to care in the city.

June 6, 2023<June 8, 2023

Sensing Nature: Green Databases and Maintenance as/of Care

Linda Kopitz

Linda Kopitz traces how the vision for Amsterdam’s sustainable future has been digitally mapped by “green” databases in ways that construct ideas of maintenance as care, and care as maintenance. Yet such mediations of urban nature risk fragmenting sustainable practices in the present.