Scott Rodgers

Where is urban politics

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in-between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.

Foreign objects? Web content management systems, journalistic cultures and the ontology of software

Research on ‘digital’ journalism has focused largely on online news, with comparatively less interest in the longer-term implications of software and computational technologies. Drawing upon a 6-year study of the Toronto Star, this article provides an account of TOPS, an in-house web content management system which served as the backbone of thestar.com for 6 years. For some, TOPS was a successful software innovation, while for others, a strategic digital ‘property’. But for most journalists, it was slow, deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Although several organizational factors can explain TOPS’ obstinacy, I argue for particular attention to the complex ontology of software. Based on an outline of this ontology, I suggest software be taken seriously as an object of journalism, which implies acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization, accounting for its ability to mutate indefinitely and analysing its capacity to encourage forms of ‘computational thinking’.

The Architectures of Media Power Editing, the Newsroom, and Urban Public Space

This article considers the relation of the newsroom and the city as a lens into the more general relation of production spaces and mediated publics. Leading theoretically from Lee and LiPuma’s notion of “cultures of circulation,” and drawing on an ethnography of the Toronto Star, the article focuses on how media forms circulate and are enacted through particular practices and material settings. With its attention to the urban milieus and orientations of media organizations, this article exhibits both affinities with and also differences to current interests in the urban architectures of media, which describe and theorize how media get “built into” the urban experience more generally. In looking at editing practices situated in the newsroom, an emphasis is placed on the phenomenological appearance of media forms both as objects for material assembly as well as more abstracted subjects of reflexivity, anticipation, and purposiveness. Although this is explored with detailed attention to the settings of the newsroom and the city, the article seeks to also provide insight into the more general question of how publicness is materially shaped and sited.

Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the media-urban nexus

The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media—urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media—urban nexus points to the always-already present conditions of possibility for a translocal, relational urban politics. Current conceptualizations of the politics of urbanized media, however, tend to fall into one of two registers: conflicts over the access to and regulation of urban media spaces; or the silent politics that media inscribe into the affective textures of urban life. Both tend to envision media as instrumental supplements to politics, overestimating the powers of ‘media’ within urban living. Drawing on recent uses of practice theory in media studies, we highlight how thinking of media-in-practices provides a basis for more nuanced conceptualizations of the powers of the media—urban nexus. Fully realizing this conceptualization requires that the restriction of the insights of practice theory to everyday life be lifted. An expanded view of media practices is required, one which emphasizes the coordination between organized fields of communication and everyday urbanized media practices.

The journalistic field and the city: some practical and organizational tales about the Toronto Star’s New Deal for Cities

This article presents Pierre Bourdieus field theory as a way to approach the under–theorized relationship of journalism and the city. The concept of field provides a way to conceive of the conditions of possibility for what journalists do in, through, and in relation to the urban. Bringing this concept together with practice theory and organizational sociology, I examine four practical and organizational tales–two narratives and two episodes–related to the Toronto Stars New Deal for Cities campaign. These tales demonstrate how journalistic practices are not only performed in and distinctively oriented towards urban space, but also are at the same time regulated by, oriented towards, and positioned in the journalistic field. I highlight how journalistic practices take place in multiple organizational sites, through changing regimes of managerial authority and legitimacy, and with shifting positioning in and orientations to the journalistic field and other social fields of the city. El Campo Periodístico y la Ciudad: Algunas Historias Prácticas y Organizativas sobre el New Deal for Cities del Toronto Star (Scott Rodgers) Resumen Este artículo es un estudio desde la perspectiva del “campo” sobre la sub–teorizada relación entre el periodismo y la ciudad. El concepto de “campo” de Bourdieu, como condición de posibilidad, provee una forma de concebir qué es lo que los periodistas hacen con, y en relación con, lo urbano. Analizo, desde la teoría de la practica y de la sociología de las organizaciones, cuatro historias prácticas y organizativas –dos narrativas y dos anécdotas– relacionadas a la campaña New Deal for Cities del Toronto Star. Estas historias muestran que el campo periodístico es un espacio social que regula, orienta, y ubica prácticas periodísticas dentro de y en relación con los espacios urbanos. Estas prácticas estructuran y son estructuradas por su relación con la ciudad. Estas toman lugar en espacios y campos organizativos múltiples y selectivos, por medio de distintas prácticas administrativas de posicionamiento y orientadas hacia la organización, y con cambios de posiciones y de orientaciones del campo periodístico hacia otros campos existentes en la ciudad. Tales prácticas no se manifiestan solo en el espacio urbano, sino que también muestran una orientación periodística distintiva hacia el espacio urbano.

Urban growth machine

Urban growth machine is an influential thesis of urban politics that suggests the objective of growth unites otherwise pluralistic interests in relation to a city. The thesis is situated within a broader theory about the commodification of place, where place is understood to be socially and economically valued land. Its key premise is that coalitions of actors and organizations (i.e. growth machines), all sharing an interest in local growth and its effects on land values, compete with growth machines elsewhere for scarce mobile capital investment, while simultaneously attempting to gain the tacit support of local publics for such urban growth. Following an introductory overview, this entry discusses the urban growth machine in two main parts. The first part sets out the key concepts underlying the growth machine thesis: use value, exchange value and place; place entrepreneurs; growth machines and their allies; competing for mobile capital; and promoting growth as a public good. The second part identifies core issues and debates in relation to the thesis (particularly those made by human geographers), including critiques of: the property focus; the human agency focus; difficulties with international comparison; the conceptualization of local dependency and scale; and the relationship of political projects with local feeling.

Digitizing localism: Anticipating, assembling and animating a ‘space’ for UK hyperlocal media production

This article presents an unconventional view of media production, not as the direct production of media content or forms, but the cultivation of spaces for media production taking place elsewhere. I draw on a close analysis of Destination Local, a program of UK charity Nesta, which focused on the implications of location-based technologies for the emergent field of ‘hyperlocal’ media. Although the first round of the program – the focus in this paper – funded 10 experimental projects alongside extensive research, my argument is that Destination Local was less a matter of enabling specific place-based hyperlocal media outlets. Rather, it was an attempt to anticipate, assemble and animate a broader UK hyperlocal media ‘space’, composed of both technical ecologies (e.g. data, devices, platforms, standards) and practical fields (e.g. journalism, software development, local government, community activism). This space, I argue, was anchored to a largely implicit political discourse of localism.

Conditions of Mediation

This paper discusses my documentary film practice, which explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity through materiality on two levels: the pro-filmic event and the film form. The concept of “materiality” offers a good starting point for identifying and capturing physical manifestations of subjectivity in line with Searle’s theory of externalized subjectivity (1992: 97). ‘Materiality refers to the fleshy, corporeal and physical, as opposed to spiritual, ideal and value-laden aspects of human existence’ (Tilley, 2006: 3). Chateau posits that the filmic mediation of subjectivity constitutes in the employment of specific signs of subjectivity, depending ‘both on the subjectivity taken as a reference point … and on the material and formal choices made to the purpose of subjectivity’ (2011: 12). This distinction between referred or pro-filmic subjectivity (observed by the filmmaker during the encounter with the subject), and depicted subjectivity (the film formal treatment of pro-filmic subjectivity that aims to elicit an equivalent experience in the viewer), is key to the process of mediation. I argue that these two levels of subjective experience require different, though interrelated methodologies, which requires their distinction from each other. But, this distinction should not be seen as a structuralist-semiotic separation. It is rather a cross-disciplinary interpretation of Searle’s anti-representationalist approach to subjective perception. ‘There is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed, between the perception and the object perceived’ (Searle, 1992: 97). For the first level that relates to the pro-filmic encounter I will propose two anthropological methods that facilitate the identification and filming of subjective experiences manifested through objects and spaces: the “biographical object” (Morin in Hoskins, 1998) and the concept of “objectification” (Miller, 2010; Tilley, 2006). For the second level that relates to film form and its impact on the audience, I will suggest methods based on film spectatorship theories, especially cognitive film theory (Currie, 2004; Smith, 1994). I will demonstrate the proposed methodology by reference to a particular scene from my current documentary film, “Material Experiences”, which is work-in-progress and explores the filmic mediation of subjectivity with regards to the representation of blind people.

Roots and fields: excursions through place, space and local in hyperlocal media

In 2012, UK charity Nesta announced Destination Local, a program focused on future developments in ‘hyperlocal media’ based on location-based technologies. The program’s first round funded an experimental portfolio of 10 small projects. In this article, I present vignettes drawn from walking interviews with four of the project leaders, putting these into dialogue with phenomenological and practice-centered media theory, as well as growing interests in the geographies of media. My argument is that practices of so-called hyperlocal media should be understood via a phenomenological duality. On one hand, as activities rooted in place: conducting media work though situated environments. Yet, on the other hand, as inhabitations of field spaces: geographically dispersed social and technical worlds. This analysis suggests we step back in order to consider the conceptualization of place, space, and the local itself in studies of ‘hyperlocal’ as an emergent form of media production.

Re-locating media production

It was arguably easier in the past to pin down media production in medium- or content-specific locales, such as the studio, the newsroom or the set. Contemporary processes of media convergence have dramatically opened up the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of media production to include all manner of quotidian practices and ephemeral places. This special issue, however, pushes back against the idea that contemporary landscapes of media production have been flattened. Each of the articles collected here accounts for significant transformations in media practices near to those that we would conventionally associate with media production, yet which are also potentially left behind in the rush to describe, theorize, celebrate and critique trends such as ‘produsage’, ‘prosumption’ and participatory media culture. Taken together, the articles in this special issue provide new insights into the locations and relocations of contemporary media production across new and under-researched liminal and peripheral geographies, and around new and unexpected objects.