Communicative Cities and Urban Space: (China Perspectives)

Cities have long been recognized as key sites for fostering new communication practices. However, as contemporary cities experience major changes, how do diverse inhabitants encounter each other? How do cities remember? What is the role of the built environment in fostering sites for public communication in a digital era? Communicative Cities and Urban Space offers a critical analysis of contemporary changes in the relation between urban space and communication. This volume seeks to understand the situatedness of contemporary communication practices in diverse contexts of urban life, and to explore digitized urban space as a historically specific communicative environment. The essays in this book collectively propose that the concept of the ‘communicative city’ is a productive frame for rethinking the above questions in the context of 21st-century ‘media cities’. They challenge us to reconsider qualities such as openness, autonomy and diversity in contemporary urban communication practices, and to identify factors that might expand or constrict communicative possibilities. Students and scholars of communication studies and urban studies would benefit from this book.

Table of Contents:
1 Introduction. PART 1: RETHINKING MEDIATED URBAN SPACE AS COMMUNICATIVE SPACE. 2 Searching for the Communicative City: A Search Backwards and Forward. 3 Architecture, media, and spaces of urban communication. 4 Multispace: A Non-media-centric Approach to Mediated Cities. PART 2: PLACES, COMMUNICATION AND PLACEMAKING. 5 Embodied publicness: urban life in the age of mobile networks6 Digitising children’s public play spaces. 7 Decorating and Imagining the New City with Public Art? Study on the sculptures and installations on Modern Avenue in Suzhou Industrial Park. 8 smART city - turbulent city? Artistic Engagements with Urban Ecologies in Delhi. PART 3: URBAN SCREENS AND NEW FORMS OF PUBLIC PARTICIPATION. 9 Urban screens and spaces of civic communication. 10 Capturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square. 11 Ambient Participation, Place-making and Urban Screens. PART 4: URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE COMMUNICATIVE CITY. 12 Trams as Urban Media: Public Transportation and the Construction of Shanghai's "Circulation Civilization" in the Early 20th Century. 13 Spectacular Cities and Weak Cosmopolitanism: International Students and Melbourne. 14 Digitalized seeing: the reconstruction of urban communication network by UAV aerial photography in the big data era. 15 Spatial practices and asymmetric alignment of temporalities: How "Shanghai Fabu" Wechat account transforms government communication in Shanghai.

About the Author :
Scott McQuire is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne where he pursues interdisciplinary research at the nexus of digital media, urbanism, art and social theory. Sun Wei is Professor of Media and Communications at School of Journalism, Center for Information and Communication Studies, Fudan University.