Methodological Approaches in Urban Media and Communication Research

Abstract

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.

Platforms and/as urban communication: Mediums, content, context

“…The first strand focuses primarily on cities as sites and ‘collections of different modes [and media] of communication’ (Gendelman & Aiello, 2010, p. 257), including telecommunications infrastructures (e.g., Graham & Marvin, 2002), electronic and digital screens (e.g., Krajina, 2014; McQuire, 2008), and locative media (e.g., de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012). In contrast to these engagements focusing specifically on the presences of communication media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in cities, a second strand of urban communication research instead engages urban built environments as constituting forms of communication in their own right (Aiello, 2021a, 2021b; Gendelman & Aiello, 2010; Tosoni & Aiello, 2020). In this latter vein, scholars foreground how built environments express, reproduce, and also have the capacity to reconfigure hegemonic ideologies and social relations of race, class, capital, and other vectors of structural differentiation that shape urban denizens' everyday life spaces, practices, mobility patterns, experiences, and opportunities (Aiello, 2021a; Aiello & Tosoni, 2016; Dickinson & Aiello, 2016).…”

“…Fifth, in the same way that urban media and communication have ‘extend[ed] scholars' analytic focus beyond the household’ to ‘squares, streets, parks, cafes [and] public transit’ as the sites of media engagement and interaction (Tosoni & Aiello, 2020, p. 468), they likewise shift our spatial attentions to what may be called the ‘micro‐geographies’ of platform urbanism: the restaurant front, the shared bike dock, the street sign, the lamp‐post. The scaling‐down of our spatial attentions to the micro‐geographic has the potential to open onto more inductive scholarly engagements with platform urbanism.…”

“…Aiello and Tosoni (2016) and Tosoni and Aiello (2020) identify urban environments as materially communicating in three ways. First, as mediums, cities comprise material channels of communication, capable of summoning particular kinds of actions, practices, and engagements among human audiences.…”

“…In asserting that urban platforms communicate, I position the material forms that platforms assume at street level as ‘contribut[ing] to transforming and reproducing’ the urban spatialities and ‘structural conditions that, quite literally’ allow platform urbanism to ‘take place’ (Dickinson & Aiello, 2016, p. 1295). The urban communication scholars Aiello and Tosoni (2016) and Tosoni and Aiello (2020) have advanced a heuristic of urban built environments as constituting the mediums, content, and contexts of communication by and about cities. In this paper, I deploy this heuristic across observable instances of what I and Vivian Kong have termed ‘platformized urban presences’, which designate emplaced physical objects ‘that visually cue the opportunity to access, secure, or consume goods, services, or amenities’ in the city ‘via a digitally interfaced platform entity’ (Leszczynski & Kong, 2022a, p. 9).…”

Communicating the “world-class” city: a visual-material approach

“…From an academic standpoint, this relationship has been examined in three main ways, that is (1) by researching how both individuals and communities connect (or do not connect) in cities through a range of technologies and media; (2) by interrogating the ways in which cities themselves are conveyed and constructed through the communicative techniques afforded by traditional and computational media alike (e.g. by means of cinematic representation but increasingly also through data visualizations and locative media), and lastly; (3) by examining how "the urban" itself communicates (Tosoni and Aiello 2019).…”