Urban Screens Reader

As mobile communication, social media, wireless networks, and flexible user interfaces become prominent topics in the study of media and culture, the screen emerges as a critical research area. This reader brings together insightful and influential texts from a variety of sources-theorists, researchers, critics, inventors, and artists-that explore the screen as a fundamental element not only in popular culture but also in our very understanding of society and the world. The Screen Media Reader is a foundational resource for studying the screen and its cultural impact. Through key contemporary and historical texts addressing the screen's development and role in communications and the social sphere, it considers how the screen functions as an idea, an object, and an everyday experience. Reflecting a number of descriptive and analytical approaches, these essays illustrate the astonishing range and depth of the screen's introduction and application in multiple media configurations and contexts. Together they demonstrate the long-standing influence of the screen as a cultural concept and communication tool that extends well beyond contemporary debates over screen saturation and addiction.

Large public screens have now become a ubiquitous part of the contemporary cityscape. Far from being simply oversized televisions, the media experts contributing to Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces put forward a strong case that such screens could serve as important sites for cultural exchange. Advances in digital technology spell the possibilities of conducting mobile modes of interaction across national boundaries, and in the process expose the participants to novel sensory experiences, giving rise to a new form of public culture. Understanding this phenomenon calls for a reconceptualization of “public space” and “ambience,” as well as connecting the two concepts with each other. This pioneering study of the impact of media platforms on urban cultural life presents a theoretical analysis and a history of screens, followed by discussions of site-specific urban screen practices on five continents. There is also a substantial examination of the world’s first real-time cross-cultural exchange via the networking of large public screens located in Melbourne and Seoul. “Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces is a provocative interdisciplinary collection that studies public screens in diverse urban contexts ranging from Shanghai to Montreal. Taken together, these essays redefine commonly held notions about cultural policy, information, citizenship, and the quotidian experiences of the Media City. A must read for anyone interested in urban media studies and cultural planning.” —Janine Marchessault, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, York University “Large screens in public spaces are almost taken for granted in some cities, while in others, they are barely present. This fascinating book provokes new thinking about mediatization as a transformative dimension of urban life. The editor and authors deserve to be congratulated for a welcome and timely volume, demonstrating how large screens in cities transform public spaces and become a platform for new modes of cultural exchange.” —Lily Kong, Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University

The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication traces central debates within the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on mediated cities and urban communication. The volume brings together diverse perspectives and global case studies to map key areas of research within media, cultural and urban studies, where a joint focus on communications and cities has made important innovations in how we understand urban space, technology, identity and community. Exploring the rise and growing complexity of urban media and communication as the next key theme for both urban and media studies, the book gathers and reviews fast-developing knowledge on specific emergent phenomena such as: reading the city as symbol and text; understanding urban infrastructures as media (and vice-versa); the rise of global cities; urban and suburban media cultures: newspapers, cinema, radio, television and the mobile phone; changing spaces and practices of urban consumption; the mediation of the neighbourhood, community and diaspora; the centrality of culture to urban regeneration; communicative responses to urban crises such as racism, poverty and pollution; the role of street art in the negotiation of ‘the right to the city’; city competition and urban branding; outdoor advertising; moving image architecture; ‘smart’/cyber urbanism; the emergence of Media City production spaces and clusters. Charting key debates and neglected connections between cities and media, this book challenges what we know about contemporary urban living and introduces innovative frameworks for understanding cities, media and their futures. As such, it will be an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication studies, urban communication, urban sociology, urban planning and design, architecture, visual cultures, urban geography, art history, politics, cultural studies, anthropology and cultural policy studies, as well as those working with governmental agencies, cultural foundations and institutes, and policy think tanks.

This book is an interdisciplinary empirical investigation of how people interact with public screens in their daily lives. In more and more surprising locations, screens of various kinds appear within the sightlines of passers-by in contemporary cities. Outdoor advertisers target audiences which are increasingly mobile, public art uses screens to interrogate urban change, while postmodern architecture finds electronic imagery a suitable tool of expression. Traditionally, urban sociology research has assumed that people seek to filter urban stimuli, but recent accounts of public screens suggest producers design and position display interfaces site-specifically, so as to engage with those moving past. This study offers insight both into the dynamics of actual encounters and into the long-term process of how people learn to live with repeated invitations to consume media in public spaces. The book includes four cases: street advertising, underground transport advertising, and installation art in London (UK) and media façade architecture in Zadar (Croatia). Krajina shows that maintaining familiarity with everyday surroundings in media cities that change beyond citizens' control is a temporary achievement--and a recursive struggle. Finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation book award, 2014

Edited by thought leaders in the fields of urban informatics and urban interaction design, this book brings together case studies and examples from around the world to discuss the role that urban interfaces, citizen action, and city making play in the quest to create and maintain not only secure and resilient, but productive, sustainable and viable urban environments. The book debates the impact of these trends on theory, policy and practice. The individual chapters are based on blind peer reviewed contributions by leading researchers working at the intersection of the social / cultural, technical / digital, and physical / spatial domains of urbanism scholarship. The book will appeal not only to researchers and students, but also to a vast number of practitioners in the private and public sector interested in accessible content that clearly and rigorously analyses the potential offered by urban interfaces, mobile technology, and location-based services in the context of engaging people with open, smart and participatory urban environments.

As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, this volume interrogates how this phenomenon impacts art practice and politics. Contributors bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. By focusing upon the Asia-Pacific region, they seek to examine how regionalism and locality affect global circuits of culture. The book also offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary art practice more generally.

The Virtual and the Real in Planning and Urban Design: Perspectives, Practices and Applications explores the merging relationship between physical and virtual spaces in planning and urban design. Technological advances such as smart sensors, interactive screens, locative media and evolving computation software have impacted the ways in which people experience, explore, interact with and create these complex spaces. This book draws together a broad range of interdisciplinary researchers in areas such as architecture, urban design, spatial planning, geoinformation science, computer science and psychology to introduce the theories, models, opportunities and uncertainties involved in the interplay between virtual and physical spaces. Using a wide range of international contributors, from the UK, USA, Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands and Japan, it provides a framework for assessing how new technology alters our perception of physical space.