Abstract
With this elegantly structured and empirically rich volume, Myria Georgiou offers a sophisticated discussion of the relationship between the media and urban life. Both critical and sociological in its remit, Media and the City is a brilliant addition to the burgeoning field of urban communication. The book is grounded in the recognition that the intensification of both mediation and urbanisation is linked to the interdependence of media and the city. On the one hand, media industries rely on the talent, consumers, infrastructure and narratives that are concentrated in global cities. In turn, cities need the media for their branding and public communication while also deploying numerous forms of mediation to manage the layers of ethnic, political and cultural diversity that set them apart. This dialectic leads to high concentrations of symbolic power in a limited set of urban centres, which are not solely located in the ‘West’ but are nonetheless gatekeepers of the cultural and material resources of communication. On the other hand, it is ‘images of the city as a unique location of diversity and of a fascinating openness’ (p. 15) that are overwhelmingly reproduced in hegemonic media representations. Hence, the mixing and messiness of the urban street is another crucial site where the interdependence of media and the city, quite literally, takes place.
An overarching argument here is that ‘while unevenly distributed, symbolic power is made and concentrated not only on the top tier of a media and city pyramid’ (p. 23). While scholars in communication studies and cultural geography have largely adopted a bird’s eye view, Georgiou highlights the importance of studying the nexus of mediation and urbanisation at ‘street level’. As she convincingly demonstrates through her empirical research in London and the East End in particular, it is often the bottom-up symbolic resources of urban difference – such as those engendered by urban dwellers’ access to a multitude of histories, languages and lifestyles – that become the main currency of a city’s global appeal and are consequently deployed for its strategic representation. Georgiou examines this complex interdependence through an inclusive approach to the media, which takes into account the networked, convergent and mobile dimensions of contemporary communication. She foregrounds ‘mediation’ – rather than the ‘media’ per se – as central to an evaluation of how cities become constituted as hubs of representation, connectivity and co-presence. It is through mediation and within the city that we can most effectively observe how close encounters with difference lead both to exclusion and participation, inequality and citizenship and conflict and integration. In other words, as a process and a work in progress, cosmopolitanisation is deeply ambivalent.
A major theoretical contribution of this book lies in Georgiou’s three-pronged definition of cosmopolitanism. As a version of worldliness predicated upon branded capitalism and market-driven policymaking, neoliberal cosmopolitanism promotes the integration of diversity into business and governance strategies in ways that selectively accept, normalise and commodify difference as a means to ‘sustain the city’s symbolic power and appeal to global audiences, consumers and capital’ (p. 145). Vernacular cosmopolitanism emerges from urban dwellers’ lived practice of inclusion and belonging, rather than from an intentional agenda. This experiential quality generates a set of moral sensibilities and tactical orientations towards alterity, which cities’ inhabitants apply to their relationships with close and distant others. Finally, liberatory cosmopolitanism represents a progressive project that translates ‘the experiential reflexivity of vernacular cosmopolitanism into political action and sustained vision’ (p. 146) through activist struggles around issues of equality, recognition and redistribution.
Across these three versions of cosmopolitanism, communication and the media maximise access to difference by making its social subjects and cultural products both available and relevant to multiple publics. In doing so, mediation works to augment, rather than erase, tensions between the local, national and transnational constituencies that converge in globalising cities. To complicate our understanding of how everyday encounters with difference shape and are shaped by these contradictory synergies of power, Georgiou examines the four interfaces where the relationship between media and the city unfolds. She explains that consumption, identity, community and action are the distinct, though interrelated, sites where competing ideologies produce oppositional meanings and conflicting narratives of the city as ‘a symbolic and a lived place’ (p. 17).
The book’s keen focus on London makes for an especially vivid account of each interface in relation to a wealth of current examples, including the relentless gentrification of Hackney, the creativity and commodification of urban music and graffiti, the significance of mediated networks of transnational solidarity among the Arab diaspora, the criminalisation of protesters’ use of digital media in the London riots and the politics of visibility of the Occupy movement. Thanks to her writerly style and expert knowledge of a host of qualitative research methods, Georgiou’s analysis seems effortless. In fact, this is a complex study that entailed a systematic evaluation of both the physical and mediated aspects of each research site, an ability to link the views and actions of cultural producers and audiences, a detailed appraisal of various textual outputs, continued participation in several community groups and an active engagement with both public and scholarly debates on gentrification, creativity, migration and activism.
While Chapter 1 introduces the book’s remit and structure, Chapter 2 lays the conceptual foundations for Georgiou’s empirical research. Chapters 3–6 are devoted to the analysis of each interface in relation to the dialectical relationship between corporate and government interests and both ordinary and marginalised voices. Chapter 3 examines consumption through a comparison between the aggressive, top-down transformation of Stratford into a commercial enclave and the organic, bottom-up place-making histories of Shoreditch through migration, class and alternative lifestyles. Chapter 4 focuses on the making and appropriation of identity through urban music and graffiti, drawing attention to some of the contrapuntal ways in which the marginal voices of minority media become part of mainstream popular culture. Chapter 5 examines community with an emphasis on the role of diasporic and ethnic media in shaping transnational attachments and multiple particularisms, which have important implications for urban hospitality and solidarity. Chapter 6 engages with the liberatory potential of urban action through the politics of presence of London rioters and Occupy protesters, whose respective hyper-marginalised and hyper-visible status was tied to moral anxieties around race and class.
Being familiar with Georgiou’s body of work, I was hardly surprised to realise that this well-conceived volume advances a provocative argument through a set of meticulously illustrated case studies. I was also pleased to notice that the book urges the reader to raise questions about the specific visions of cosmopolitanism that are promoted and possible in contemporary urban settings. Media and the City interrogates the opportunities for citizenship, cooperation and collaboration that exist at the intersection of hegemonic, vernacular and activist outlooks on urban proximity. If anything, this book does too much. As she cracked open the black box of urban communication, Georgiou may have uncovered the Pandora’s box of media and the city. Each of the four interfaces that she describes so richly, yet so concisely, ought to be subject matter for a research monograph in its own right. For this reason, at times, the volume may be too dense for an academic reader with little expertise in cosmopolitanism and sociological approaches to media culture. Nevertheless, Media and the City is the first and only book that clearly articulates the multilayered relationship between mediation and urbanisation. With her latest monograph, Georgiou has crafted a cutting-edge blueprint for research on media and cities, which will most certainly have a lasting impact on scholars in media and communication, cultural studies and sociology.