I’ve just been reading through Myria Georgiou’s new book Media and the City. It’s a comprehensive account of the ‘interfaces’ of media and urban space. It looks at the complex interrelations between the two. The suggestion is that the connections between media and the city have been largely overlooked and this has restricted our understanding of both media (or mediatisation) and the city. There is not a great deal here about the work in human geography on cyber-cities or the integration of software into codified space, from writers such as Steve Graham, Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin or Nigel Thrift. Rather than accounting for the media infrastructures themselves, this book focuses more directly upon issues of cosmopolitinisation, identity and community. It argues that in order to understand media and the city we need to take a ‘street level’ view of their linkages. So perhaps this can be read alongside the existing work in human geography. It’s an interesting book that seeks to explore these connections through existing media and communications studies perspectives. I’ve not seen this before, so the take on urban media opens up some new territory.
Thinking culture 