Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference

With the majority of the world's population now living in cities, questions about the cultural and political trajectories of urban societies are increasingly urgent. Media and the City explores the global city as the site where these questions become most prominent. As a space of intense communication and difference, the global city forces us to think about the challenges of living in close proximity to each other. Do we really see, hear and understand our neighbours? This engaging book examines the contradictory realities of cosmopolitanization as these emerge in four interfaces: consumption, identity, community and action. Each interface is analysed through a set of juxtapositions to reveal the global city as a site of antagonisms, empathies and co-existing particularities.

Timely, interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival, Media and the City will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies and sociology, and of interest to those concerned with the growing role of the media in changing urban societies.

Chapter 2 Media and the city: synergies of power

Chapter 3 Consumption: the hegemonic and the vernacular

Chapter 4 - Identity: popular culture and self-making

Chapter 5 Community: transnational solidarities

Chapter 6 Action: presence and marginality

Epilogue - Cosmopolitan contradictions

• An exciting and much-needed volume in an area of growing research interest
• Offers a systematic introduction to the topic of the mediated city, and ways of addressing the interconnections between media and the urban
• Simultaneously makes a clear contribution to moving forward the debates relating to the media, citizenship and urbanity
• Grounds its discussion in closely viewed concrete examples from the streets of real cities