The Media City; Media, Architecture and Urban Space

by Scott McQuire

• ISBN13: 9781412907934
• ISBN10: 1412907934
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-19
• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd

Summary

Significant changes are occurring in the spaces and rhythms of contemporary cities and in the social functioning of media. This erudite, forceful book argues that the redefinition of urban space by mobile, instantaneous and pervasive media is producing a distinctive mode of social experience. Media are no longer separate from the city. Instead the proliferation of spatialized media platforms has produced a media-architecture complex - the media city. Offering critical and historical analysis at the deepest levels, The Media City links the formation of the modern city to the development of modern image technologies and outlines a new genealogy for assessing contemporary developments such as digital networks and digital architecture, web cams and public screens, surveillance society and reality television. Wide-ranging and thoughtfully illustrated, it intersects disciplines and connects phenomena which are too often left isolated from each other to propose a new way of understanding public and private space and social life in contemporary cities. It will find a broad readership in media and communications, cultural studies, social theory, urban sociology, architecture and art history. 'Compared to the urban studies literature of say David Harvey or Ed Soja, McQuire writes with a much greater architectural sensibility. His argument is that we move from a rather centred space of the classical renaissance city to a 'relational space' where past and future are juxtaposed not in simple Newtonian chronology but in complex relation to present. Such a transformed urbanism and media (compared with say Renaissance and Beaux Arts perspective) moves from what might be seen as the panoptic to a serial succession of photographic shots, of film frames, of movements along vistas at speed. At stake is a city that is continually redefined by the media and understood along the lines of McQuire's quite novel media theory. At stake is a vision of media, which are too ubiquitous in the multiplication of screens, surveillance and other devices/interfaces in private and public space to primarily function any more as representations. Media in this (McQuire's) context are no longer primarily a set of representations, but constitute the very substance and fabric of urban public and private space' - Scott Lash, Goldsmiths, University of London

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Uncanny Home

Thresholds of the Media City

The Territory of Images

The City in Fragments

Liquid Cities

Public Space: Streets, Lights and Screens

Electropolis

Performing Public Space

Private Space: From Glass Architecture to Big Brother

The Glass House

The Digital Home

Conclusion

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