Abstract
This book explores the dialectical interplay between media and the city towards a renewed understanding of cosmopolitanism as a politics of conviviality through difference. Georgiou’s argument unfolds through two main points: the intensification of exchanges in the mediated city brings people closer together and enables an increased awareness of difference (or ‘the other’). Yet these encounters are also ‘necessary ingredients for the media and the city to sustain their symbolic power’ (p. 4). At stake is the conflictive role of the city both as a centre of symbolic power and as a lived place (p. 17). The book opens with an account of a dystopian representation of the global city in cinema where ‘the urban locale cannot be separated from its mediated representation’ (p. 1). However, Georgiou argues, the relation between media and the city is always dialogical: while ‘media support the symbolic power of the city’, they also depend on the city as a ‘global node in communication flows’ (p. 2). The synergy between media and the city triggers both opportunities and threats to citizens while also enabling a reflexive process where we can ‘see the self and others as part of the urban story’ (p. 2, original emphasis). This involves, as Georgiou discusses throughout the book, the struggle for presence of those labelled as ‘the other’ by neoliberal cosmopolitanism and who pose a threat to its process of commodification and control of difference.
In chapter one she situates the mediated city as both globally interconnected and grounded in social experience. This justifies her overall aim to study the assemblage of media and the city from street level (p. 3). The global city of London – where symbolic power clashes with bottom-up demands for presence and agency from its citizens – provides the empirical focus of the book. Georgiou investigates case studies of media and city assemblages at street level through four main interfaces – consumption, identity, community and action (p. 3) – providing a critical and nuanced analysis of cosmopolitanism in the context of the contemporary mediated city. In chapter two Georgiou describes the synergies of power emerging from the assemblage of media and the global city and how they promote ‘unequal distribution of symbolic power in the global city’ (p. 19). Through an analysis of different forms of cosmopolitanism and their divergent (and sometimes convergent) narratives, she argues for a dialectical viewpoint that acknowledges the interplay between such forms ‘even if opposition and conflict are still present’ (p. 37). Importantly, her case studies reveal how ‘symbolic power is often generated at street level’ regardless of the systems of control imposed by neoliberal cosmopolitanism (p. 34, original emphasis).
The remaining chapters in the book explore the four interfaces identified by Georgiou (consumption, identity, community and action) through contemporary London-based (yet globally-connected) case studies. Through these interfaces, Georgiou interrogates the possibilities that the city presents ‘for a politics of difference which is not about other-ness, strangeness and suspicion, but about coexistence, communication and equality’ (p. 155, original emphasis). Consumption is illustrated by the contrast between the top-down (and friction-free) cosmopolitanism enforced in Stratford for the London Olympics and the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Shoreditch. Identity is described via the graffiti and urban music cultures that make use of the ‘city as a canvas’ (p. 66). Community is discussed through the Arab diaspora in London and the inner city’s multi-ethnic communities in contrast with the urban (and global) nomadism of elite migrants. Finally, in the chapter on action Georgiou analyses the ways in which ‘socially and politically marginalized groups which lack economical capital and political power’ (the invisible ‘other’) struggle for visibility and recognition through presence (p. 118), as evidenced by the Occupy movement and the London riots of 2011. Georgiou defines the Occupy movement as a potential form of liberatory cosmopolitanism that seeks both presence and ‘solidarity in difference and for difference’ (p. 150).
In the epilogue, Georgiou concludes that ‘cosmopolitanization [sic] is not per se liberatory’ or a ‘shift in consciousness and political life’, but rather a starting point ‘for the development of skills of conviviality’ (p. 150). The paradoxical nature of cosmopolitanism is exposed through the interplay of interests and the struggle for ‘ownership and control of symbols and spaces in the city’, where cosmopolitanism is ‘embodied, enacted and produced through the very oppositions that challenge it’ (p. 151). Media and the City is a compelling book that exposes the interplay of disparate forms of cosmopolitanism (such as vernacular and neoliberal) that is enacted at street level. In doing so, it demonstrates how such forms can coexist, enabling new and established forms of community and supporting conviviality through difference.