in press for 2019). "Methodological approaches in urban media and communication research". In Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication. London: Routledge.

The paper examines the role of media in the processes of the production of urban space in the case of Paolo Sarpi, a central neighborhood of Milan that is characterized by long–standing spatial conflicts between the residents and the Chinese migrants. The purpose of this complex case study is to highlight the many roles played by media in the processes of socio–spatial production, as well as the benefits of reading media within those same processes. To this end, we interrogate the space by drawing on concepts from science and technology studies and media studies. Finally, by analyzing the representations and practices enacted by users of three location–based social networks (TripAdvisor, Foursquare, and Facebook Places), we show that urban processes and media are in a relation of reciprocal shaping. We find that these representations and practices are informed by and feedback on the broader socio–spatial production patterns investing the area. Our conclusion is that extracting media from broader urban processes and focusing on them could be analytically counter–productive. Instead, investigations of the relationship of media and the city should take into account their reciprocal shaping.

Starting from the middle of the twentieth century human geography has allowed social sciences to escape the prison of Euclidean, abstract space. In that prison, social actors performed within an empty, static container known as “space,” which was more or less a background to their actions. This liberation had many fathers. We could quote Henri Lefebvre’s writings on spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991), Michel de Certeau’s notion of “space as practiced place” (de Certeau, 1984), and Yi–Fu Tuan’s (1976) treatment of “humanistic geography” among the most known “co–conspirators” of this escape. Breaking free of the notion of abstract space, meant to develop the powerful theoretical tool of socio–spatial production. Space emerged as a product of human interaction and at the same time as a context structuring those practices. By the mid–1980s, Massey expressed the circular relationship between space and the social in no ambiguous terms. “Space is a social construct ... [but] the spatial is not only an outcome: it is also part of the explanation [of social processes]” (Massey, 1984). Producing the space we inhabit meant that the more people were in a space, the more rapidly and often unpredictably it changed. And the more diverse the people, the more diverse the way they thought, and what they did in space. Therefore, the more rapid and unpredictable were the changes.

This article deals with the media-related practices enacted by social actors during urban conflict. Its theoretical objective is to stress the need for audience studies to focus on social actors’ concrete practices and, consequently, to switch from essentialist notions of ‘audiences’ to ‘audiencing’ as a practice. This makes it necessary to build theoretical and methodological bridges between audience and urban studies. Focusing on a conflict between Chinese migrants and Italian residents in an area of Milan, the article employs the concept of ‘media territories’ to account for the heterogeneous assemblages of media platforms, contents and devices mobilised by social actors to make sense of the conflict and to impose their own representations of the self, of competitors and of urban space. Within these assemblages, audiencing forms an important ‘secondary’ activity, whose sense can be understood only in relation to the other practices involved. The exploration of these assemblages is necessary for coming to grips with social actors’ conflictual media practices, and to understand the dynamics of urban conflict in media-saturated contexts.