February 21, 2011 6:25 Intellect/MCP Page-343 MCP-6-3-Proof-ﬁnals
MCP 6 (3) pp. 343–350 © Intellect Ltd 2010
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics
Volume 6 Number 3
© Intellect Ltd 2010. Commentaries. English language. doi: 10.1386/mcp.6.3.343_3
MYRIA GEORGIOU
London School of Economics, UK
Media and the city: Making
sense of place
Paphos, with its 76,000 inhabitants, is the third largest city in the island of
Cyprus. Its demographic composition and its economic life resemble other
cities of comparable scale in Europe, especially those with similar tourist and
service industries. While there is nothing particularly unique in terms of the
city’s urban development, there is something about its mediascapes worth noting.
Paphos has three local television stations, three local radio stations, ﬁve
newspapers of its own, a monthly glossy and numerous satellite dishes – probably
counting in the thousands – pointing to all different directions. Some point
to signals that link the local Russian community to the rich Russian satellite
mediascapes, and others to the hundreds of Arabic-language television stations
popular among the Middle Eastern diaspora; numerous dishes provide access
to British television stations for the large tourist population from the British
Isles. Similarly to its other characteristics, the city’s extensive media diversity
is probably not that unique either. It is probably typical of a middle-range city
in Europe, with mobile populations and transnational economic activity. The
abundance of media available to Paphos’ dwellers and visitors represents yet
another ordinary element of the city’s life. Importantly, they have a signiﬁcant
inward and an equally developed outward orientation, arguably providing a
window to the world and possibly also a window to itself.
It is rare for cities like Paphos to be studied in the context of research on networked
cities, or on urban cultures, and even less so in research on global cities.
It is cities like London and New York that have been systematically studied
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Myria Georgiou
for their qualities as media and cultural centres. But there is something useful
in looking closely into a city positioned outside the usual research radar. For
example, in the case of London, it is almost impossible to have an accurate
inventory of available media; they are in the thousands and they are always in
ﬂux. There are also many assumptions about cities like London or New York
being so unique that they cannot help understand the city beyond their particularity.
Look at a small-scale city like Paphos though and the easy-to-record
(but still impressive in size and richness) inventory points to the special relation
between the media and the city, this being Paphos, or London, or New
York. Look at this inventory, and the coexistence of the rich inward-looking
and outward-looking mediascapes are hard to miss. What usually becomes
strikingly visible in observing the mediascapes of any city (at a certain stage
of development) is the abundance of media looking outwards – visible in the
constant presence of satellite dishes and recorded in high levels of broadband
penetration. Satellite dishes and digital connections show that a city like
Paphos is spatially and culturally open. Linked through tourism, economy and
migration to locations across the world, Paphos, like other cities, is porous,
always on the move. Like other cities in Europe, it is increasingly dependent
upon transnational and transurban communication networks for sustaining its
economic and tourist life, its image as an exciting place and as a cultural crossroads.
Look within the city though and the abundance of local media tells some
other kind of story: a story of small-scale connections and of an audience with
interest in news that literally happens around the corner.
In this commentary I aim to illustrate how the two stories described above,
and which we tend to deﬁne as the opposing poles of global media and local
media, respectively, might not be opposing after all. What might seem as two
cases of centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in relation to place (the city)
might actually capture a single storyline: that of the media and the city and
its interconnected inward/outward systems of media and communication. In
order to understand this one story, I argue, we need to understand the reconﬁguration
of city as a place through the media, both in terms of the city’s
representation and its mediated consumption.
BETWEEN PLACE-NESS AND PLACELESS-NESS
Place has been studied in the context of media and communications research
primarily as space under erasure. Especially in the context of globalization studies,
place has been challenged as a category that bounds phenomena that
cannot be grounded in physical place anymore – for example, interpersonal
relations, ﬁnancial activity, social networking (Giddens 1991; Meyrowitz 1985;
Urry 2007). In other work, place has been seen as a counterpoint to the
macro-changes that take place in global scale, a location of resistance and
immediate connections (Bhabha 1994; Sreberny-Mohammadi 1991). However,
conceptualizations of place as reconﬁgured in the context of globalization,
as multiplied through mediated connections between places (Couldry 2000),
or as pluralized in mediated communication (Moores 2004) become more
relevant and reconﬁrmed when we look at the city as a place. As Moores
puts it:
There are opportunities in late modern life, at least for those with the
economic and cultural resources to access relevant technologies of electronically
mediated communication, for relating instantaneously to a
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Media and the city: Making sense of place
wide range of spatially remote others, as well as to any proximate others
in the physical settings of media use.
(2004: 23)
Thus, the binary of place (as the local) against, or as a counterpoint to, the
global does not necessarily reﬂect what happens around media and communications,
especially in and across cities. I am thus intrigued by the continuity
in the sense of place sustained through the media, especially in relation to the
city. But I am also interested in the reconﬁguration of place, which might not
be just about continuity and multiplication of the sense of place but also about
the sense of placeless-ness of the city, as produced by the media and as a deﬁning
element of the contemporary city as a mediated place. Only if we look at
place-ness and placeless-ness in their continuity can we make sense of the
contemporary city and the relevance of media not just as a way out of place but
also as a way in to it.
There are two aspects of the reconﬁguration of city as a place that interest
me, beyond what is proposed by Couldry and Moores above. First, the urban
as a distinct kind of place redeﬁnes relations of proximity and distance, especially
in the inevitable and continuous juxtapositions of difference encountered
in the city on a daily basis. Any city is a location of difference; difference is
an inherent and inevitable characteristic of urban life. People, products and
ideas move in and out of the city (through transportation and communication
systems) making it porous and transitive (Benjamin 1997); urban dwellers
and visitors encounter each other in the space of the city in intense and close
proximity. The proximity with difference (social, cultural, ethnic) in a city, in
scale seen nowhere but in other cities, does not just reconﬁgure, but it also
reafﬁrms the signiﬁcance of place as a unique, organic location of social and
communicational relevance. The actual place is so important, that, as Isin
puts it:
city is a difference machine insofar as it is understood as that conﬁguration
that is constituted by the dialogical encounter of groups formed and
generated immanently in the process of taking up positions, orienting
themselves for and against each other, inventing and assembling strategies
and technologies, mobilizing various forms of capital, and making
claims to that space that is objectiﬁed as ‘the city’
(2002: 49).
City becomes a difference machine largely through the media. The media
play a dual role, both in advancing ‘dialogical encounters’ (Isin 2002: 49)
between its different components and in orienting its people ‘for and against
each other’.
The second way in which the media reconﬁgure the city as a place is
through the process of disembodying and commodifying the city in ways that
not only reafﬁrm its uniqueness as a place, but also reproduce its universality as
a system of organization of social, economic and cultural life. Within modernity,
cities have become recognizable as unique locations, having internal qualities
found nowhere else. The process of their imagining as unique locations has
largely taken place through the media. Since the days of the early national
press, of the early cinema and photography, the life of the city and its signiﬁcance
as a place have appeared in images and text circulated within and beyond
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Myria Georgiou
the city. These same representations, that have reafﬁrmed the uniqueness of
each city, have also interpreted this unique location as a version of a familiar
and repeated storyline. Each city, no matter how ‘unique’ it is, is also one
example of a universal format of social and spatial organization that is known
and recognizable (for example, this is where governance is based, where the
ﬁnancial and economic centres are located, where intense cultural activities
take place). The duality of the city as a ‘unique’ place and as a universally recognized
image have been produced and sustained through the media since the
early days of modernity.
However, there is something particular in the reproduction of the dual
identity of the city at present that is speciﬁc to our times. The dual system
of production of the city as a place and as an image has now become singular.
The distinction between the place and its image is anything but clear and
the crossover between the place and its mediated image has come to shape
the city both as a place and as non-place. What media do on a daily basis
is to reafﬁrm the identity of the city as an ambivalent location between the
real and the virtual. Media and ICTs provide the technological infrastructure to
connect, communicate and exchange information within the city and beyond,
consumed by its inhabitants, prospective inhabitants, visitors and audiences.
And they also become platforms where urban cultures are produced, not just
represented, as is the case with urban music and video art, for example. In all
these cases, the ambivalence of the place takes its shape through the media –
the ambivalence of the location as neither fully grounded in a place nor as fully
virtual avoids being a contradiction. Rather, it becomes a way to think of and to
recognize a city.
CITY’S PLACELESS-NESS
A new geographical spatiality takes over the old placed geography of capital
concentration and control as the city increasingly depends on the networks
that link its ﬁnancial district to other ﬁnancial districts across the world, writes
Sassen (2002). The new, networked spatial centrality becomes as much a strategy
in deﬁning the boundaries of the city as it becomes a tactic in reafﬁrming
the city’s signiﬁcant position in the public imaginary, Sassen continues (2002).
In addition, and through increased human mobility, both the urban ﬁnancial
centres and the humble, diverse neighbourhoods of the city become networked
and connected to locations across the world through satellite and digital media.
Money is exchanged through global market networks, as well as through digital
transmissions of remittances, sent from the urban street to locations around
the world. Beyond the enormous inequalities between the transactions taking
place at the top and at the bottom of (trans)urban hierarchies, there is a commonality
in the networked urban economy developed across cities’ territories:
they all depend on digital networks in sustaining meaningful relations and connections
beyond the speciﬁc place. In these connections, the city becomes less
relevant as a place and more important as a node in a network of exchanges –
which might be ﬁnancial, but which might also be cultural and social (as is, for
example, the case of diasporic community networks, or the global distribution
networks of consumer products).
The city has developed an aura of placeless-ness not only as a node in networks,
but also as a commodity represented in the media. Often reﬂected in
representations of the exciting and the new, the city has become a valuable
commodity, packaged, exchanged and sold around the world as a visual and
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Media and the city: Making sense of place
virtual product and an attractive place-less destination. For the migrant, for
example, the European city becomes an attractive location of opportunities,
possibly of freedom, possibly a new home providing a new sense of security.
Miles away from the actual location, these potential characteristics of a western
city are reproduced in media representations and in ways that bring the distant
other into close proximity (Silverstone 2006) to the imagined location. The location
represented in the media lacks the tangible dimensions that might have
made it less attractive to its global consumers and potential visitors. For the
wider audiences that consume images of the city at a distance, the disembodied
representations of the city make it an accessible commodity. The familiarity
of a global commodity format becomes attractive to advertising markets, ﬁlm
audiences and television users. Exciting, mysterious, dangerous and multilayered
as a place, the city of desire or destination is constructed as an ever-present
space for shared (actors’ and spectators’) imagination. And as such it is easily
and virtually reproduced and reconﬁrmed. The disembodiment of the city in its
mediated exports is also a way to appropriate and commodify difference and
to market it as an attractive quality of the city as commodity. ‘When properly
marketed, ethnicity is always a resource for particular cultural industries’, writes
Davila (2004: 97).
The disembodied representation of urban difference reafﬁrms the importance
of the city as a symbol, as a product of global relevance (sold to its own
dwellers or to consumers miles away). However, this is usually a representation
sanitized and ‘cleansed’ from the real tensions emerging around difference. For
example, urban music becomes an attractive commodity when packaged and
sold in global markets, but when marketed as a commodity, it is often stripped
from its cultural roots and routes attached to particular (often impoverished and
marginalized) parts of the city. As a consequence, the representation of difference
in the media partly reproduces and partly normalizes the deprivation and
huge inequalities found within the city’s different quarters. In the same way that
the mediated urban imaginary becomes a mechanism for legitimating internal
(place-speciﬁc) hierarchies, it also becomes a system for reconﬁrming global
(place-less) hierarchies.
CITY’S PLACE-NESS
In his inﬂuential No Sense of Place Meyrowitz (1985) argues that media have
changed everyday experience in a way that place – where people are – has
become less relevant compared to who people are with. As media connections
challenge limitations of physical space, the limits of social relations also shift
and the boundedness of social groups and identities is also challenged. A result
of new forms of proximity is that groups become more aware of each other.
Meyrowitz’s book has been a key reference for a large body of work exploring
the role of the media in shaping the context, content and consequences of
communication beyond physical and symbolic boundaries. Meyrowitz’s work
is particularly important in the present discussion, as it emphasizes the significance
of who people are with as a crucial element in the formation of social
relations. The study of the media and the city takes this discussion a step
further as it invites us to think of who people are with as well as where (they
are with others). The city is a location where place does matter, especially
because unforeseen constellations and juxtapositions of differences – mediated
and physical –are attached to its demographics, and social and economic
organization (Amin and Thrift 2002).
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Myria Georgiou
In referring to the ongoing importance of city as a place, in particular, I have
in mind three forms of production of city as a place through the media. Firstly,
I am referring to urban creativity and their mediated expressions. Urban music,
a genre that has emerged in the poorer neighbourhoods of socially divided
cities, has reached across its inhabitants in various zones of the city and has also
turned into widely distributed and consumed productions and representations
of those cities as ‘unique’ places. Secondly, there is the construction of the city
as a ‘unique’ place through the development of media infrastructure and urban
media industries.
For example, when Paphos’ business people invest in numerous local
media, they participate in projects that reinforce representations of their city
as a unique, particular and distinct location (compared to other cities, the
rural surroundings, the nation, the rest of the world). In the larger cities –
and even more so, in the global cities – media infrastructure is more complex
and more fragmented. Local radio stations function within neighbourhoods,
nightlife cultures are grounded in speciﬁc zones of the city and reﬂect niche
subcultures, and often the tensions between parts of a city and its social groups
are reinforced through distinct media cultures. Even in these cases though, the
fragmented media industries reﬂect attempts (often competing) to construct
a particular (‘unique’) identity of the city and to have certain voices speak on
behalf of the city and for the city.
Thirdly, I refer to media representations of the city as a porous and transitive
place (Amin and Thrift 2002). Urban media, as also national and transnational
media, often represent the city as a location of excitement, mystery, crime,
diversity and as a location where the sense of the unknown is part of everyday
reality. Such representations are familiar when looking at images of the city in
popular media products, such as Sex and the City, the CSI series and ER located
in particular American cities. Media tend to choose cities as the location for
their stories – news or entertainment programmes – because the combination
of the speciﬁc location (place) with its unique juxtapositions of difference creates
an attractive product. Part of the attractiveness of the city, in its particularity
as a media story, is the level of difference it incorporates in its territory. A mediated
territoriality of the unknown, the exciting and the unpredictable makes
good material for entertainment and for news stories. No wonder thrillers
and action ﬁlms tend to be located in big cities – this is where the porous
city is interpreted and represented as the ultimate location of anomie, capturing
the most widespread fears of crime, loss and social uncertainty (Macek
2006).
CITY AS AN AMBIVALENT MEDIATED LOCATION
Media and ICTs are used by urban dwellers in constructing their sense of their
city as a loved as well as an unloved place, as a shared space and as a divided
place, a place providing them with a sense of ontological security against the
vastness of the global world they see at their doorstep (Giddens 1991) – a sense
of place constantly under negotiation. For its people, the city is real, it is tangible
and lived, but it is also a representation, which is positioned but which
is also dislocated from its geographical territory, mobile and virtual. Mediated
networks link it to other cities. Not only London and Paris, for example, but
also Paphos, Liege and Paris, Texas, become largely imagined, branded and
lived through their urban and transnational (mediated) connections; they cannot
be imagined outside mediation. The urban space constantly shifts between
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Media and the city: Making sense of place
stability and change, and between mediation and immediacy. City is not a
place, but a process, writes Castells (1996) in relation to the role of cities as
nodes in global networks of exchange of information. Castells’ proposition is
important in highlighting the communicative element of the city and its dependence/role
in mediated networks, yet it reproduces the assumption that media
are either with the place or against it. But the shift of the meaning of place has
to do with its dual role as both a place and a process. In the same way that
networks inform the city’s own organization but challenge its boundedness, so
have the process and the place become closely intertwined through the meeting
of urban representations, consumption, travel and transnational experience. In
dealing with the ambivalence in meanings, consumers of the image of the city –
as urban dwellers (virtual) visitors or mere media consumers –make sense of it,
without necessarily challenging the limits of its construction as a place, and its
politics, inequalities and struggles for power and control.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank Aris Georgiou for an inspiring conversation that triggered
the development of this commentary.
REFERENCES
Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002), Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Bhabha, H. (1994), The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge.
Benjamin, W. (1997), One-Way Street, London: Verso.
Castells, M. (1996), The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture–Vol. I: The
Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.
Couldry, N. (2000), The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media
Age, London and New York: Routledge.
Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Isin, E. (2002), Being Political: Geneologies of Citizenship, Minneapolis and
London: Minnesota University Press.
Macek, S. (2006), Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Roght, and the Moral Panic
over the City, Minneapolis, MS: Minnesota University Press.
McQuire, S. (2008), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space,
London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985), No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social
Behavior, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moores, S. (2004), ‘The doubling of place: Electronic media, time-space
arrangements and social relationships’, in N. Couldry and A. McCarthy
(eds), Mediaspace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, London and New
York: Routledge.
Sassen, S. (2002), Global Networks, Linked Cities, London and New York:
Routledge.
Silverstone, R. (2006), Media and Morality, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sreberny-Mohammadi, A. (1991), ‘The global and the local in international
communications’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), Mass Media and
Society, London: Edward Arnold.
Urry, J. (2007), Mobilities, Networks, Geographies, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Myria Georgiou
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Myria Georgiou teaches media and communications at the Department of
Media and Communications, London School of Economics. She has conducted
research on diaspora, migration, the city and media, primarily in the United
Kingdom and across major European cities. Her work has focussed on the role
of media in the construction of identities in urban and transnational locations.
Her recent work has examined the role of media and communications in shaping
cities as social and political spaces. She is currently writing a book titled
Media and the City (forthcoming, Polity Press).
Contact: Dr Myria Georgiou, Department of Media and Communications,
London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
E-mail: m.a.georgiou@lse.ac.uk
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Copyright of International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics is the property of Intellect Ltd. and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express
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