Communicative Cities and Urban Space

Scott McQuire, Sun Wei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

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.

1 Introduction
Spaces of communication

Scott McQuire and Sun Wei

Cities around the world face pressing challenges, including the need to accommodate larger, more diverse and increasingly mobile populations, and the demand to develop more sustainable practices as urban life becomes the dominant form of planetary inhabitation. Overlaying such challenges – and arguably a key element in responding to them – is the need to address the changes emerging from the growing incorporation of digital media and networked communication into contemporary urban infrastructure and social practices. This volume seeks to address this historic threshold, which is profoundly altering the scale, speed and patterns of urban communication. It pursues this aim by, first, exploring the situatedness of contemporary communication practices in the context of specific urban settings, and, second, by reflecting on how the affordances of digital media are both transforming and transformed by the city as a communicative environment.

Cities are now routinely stratified by different streams of information and modes of communication. The older logics of architecture and embodied interaction are now complemented by newer communication forms such as large digital screens, web interfaces, computerized lighting and personal mobile devices. As urban spaces have become more intensively instrumented by digital infrastructure, the city’s historic function as a zone for information gathering and communicative exchange has assumed new contours and dynamics. Face-to-face interactions are increasingly imbricated with these new forms of mediation and mediatization. Local sites routinely connect to distant territories, while crowds are not only collective assemblies of bodies in space but valuable sources of data. Digital media not only alter the ways in which older constraints of site and setting play out, but are producing fundamental changes in the conditions under which any kind of “archive” might be assembled, accessed and analyzed. These changes – to public space, to public assembly and to the city as a material repository of memory and history – lend urgency to a whole series of questions.

How do networked cities remember? In what ways might the pervasiveness of new communication platforms alter older models of cultural heritage and urban inheritance, including the historic function of the urban environment in shaping a collective understanding of the past? How do diverse populations encounter – or perhaps fail to encounter – each other in contemporary cities? How are digital platforms altering the conditions for public assembly, the dynamics of public communication and the form of the public sphere? What are the implications of these trajectories for urban development and redevelopment in the present? Above all, how might the concept of the “communicative city” provide a productive frame for rethinking urban life in the twenty-first century?

If contemporary cities have become “media cities” (McQuire 2008), in which the experience of social space is co-constituted by the articulation of media platforms with the spatial logics and logistics of architecture and urban planning, what are the factors and settings that might promote qualities such as openness, autonomy and diversity in contemporary urban interactions? Conversely, what factors work to narrow, constrict or block communicative patterns and possibilities? How, in short, might we judge what makes a “good” or “bad” communicative city? (Figure 1.1)

Figure 1.1 Paris (Photograph by Scott McQuire 2016).

“This will destroy that”. Victor Hugo’s famously blunt prognosis concerning the fatal impact of printing on architecture remains noteworthy for both its prescience and its overstatement. Of course, we should remember that Hugo was “speaking” in the context of his 1831 novel Notre Dame de Paris, in which he assigned two related meanings to the statement (which was itself initially ascribed to the novel’s main protagonist Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame, before being extensively amplified by the author–narrator). The first meaning concerns the challenge provided by the Gutenberg press to ecclesiastical authority and the institution of the Church, repeating the well-trodden Enlightenment narrative in which social and political emancipation was equated with “the world shaking off the yoke of Rome” (Hugo 1917, p. 3). The second meaning, which concerns us more directly here, is the assertion that the new media of printing fatally undermines the communicative rationale of architecture.

To substantiate his argument, Hugo posits different stages of human monument-building, figuring this in terms of a linear progression that goes, in symbolic terms, from letter to word to book:

Architecture followed the development of human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads, a thousand arms, and caught and concentrated in one eternal, visible, tangible form all this floating symbolism.

(Hugo 1917, p. 9)

For Hugo, it was the “architectural edifice” which eventually became the pinnacle of social communication, combining art and politics in a “universal form of writing” (Hugo 1917, p. 20).

… [D]own to the fifteenth century, architecture was the chief recorder of the human race; that during that space no single thought that went beyond the absolutely fundamental, but was embodied in some edifice; that every popular idea, like every religious law, has had its monuments; finally, that the human race has never conceived an important thought that it has not written down in stone.

(Hugo 1917, p. 24)

It is this function of architecture that Hugo argues the printing press “destroys” by developing and offering an alternative and more flexible pathway for communication: “Human thought discovers a means of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but also simpler and more easy of achievement” (Hugo 1917, p. 26).¹

The continuing fascination of Hugo’s narrative lies in his articulation of a problematic that has continued to resonate across the centuries since he wrote: how do changes in media technology impact on modes of human thought, communication and behavior, including the storing, transmission and transformation of cultural knowledge? In fact, despite the consistency of rapid technological change that has defined this space, evidenced by the proliferation of the various teles- (telegraph, telephone, television) and -graphs (photograph, phonograph, cinematograph) which have themselves become key elements in defining “modernity”, attention to the relation between technological change and communication has been sporadic and uneven. John Durham Peters (1999, p. 22) argues that the problematic lay largely dormant in communication studies until the 1930s, when it came to be framed by the influential distinction between face-to-face and mass communication advanced in the work of those such as Paul Lazarsfeld.

While you could certainly argue for other possible points of origin where the impact of technological change on communication became an explicit matter of theoretical concern (such as Walter Benjamin’s (2003) work on “technological reproducibility”), the more pressing need in the present is to recognize the ways in which Lazarsfeld’s model – and the whole disciplinary structure derived from it – is today being forced to confront its historical limits. An increasingly evident outcome of the extension of networked digital media is the erosion of the once seemingly neat distinction between interpersonal and mass communication. Mediated practices now routinely inflect so-called “face-to-face” communication routines, restructuring the modes of attention and social protocols associated with embodied encounters, while the seemingly foundational difference between interpersonal and public communication has been significantly blurred in a context that is still only poorly grasped by the common adoption of biological metaphors such as “viral”. New capacities to rapidly “scale up” from, or “drill down” into, individual communicative acts are symptomatic of the pressing demand to rethink the contingencies of both “public” and “private” in the present. If public and private have always been relational concepts that emerge in tandem, the stakes of current transformations are evidenced by the fact that claims about forms and attributes of public-ness and privacy have been central to defining the politics of both space and communication.

This complex junction underlines the fact that Hugo’s primary concern was not just the “new media” of printing but the city in which this communication technology emerged and, according to his argument, rebuilt. Here it is important to immediately insist on the limitations of the narrative that Hugo’s text authors and authorizes into the future. Most evidently, the advent of printing did not simply “kill” architecture, but powerfully and indelibly altered its social function. This occurred in concert with a series of broader transformations impacting on built form, urban morphology and the ways in which cities are able to constitute social environments in the context of emergent industrial capitalism. However, capacity to analyze and understand the ways these concatenations might reshape architecture as a form of communication have been obscured by the power of blunt pronouncements such as Hugo’s, which evoke a linear progression in which technological change drives changes in other domains.

Recognizing this should be less about discrediting Hugo’s sloganeering than relocating it in the context of debates over media and technological determinism that have framed subsequent work by those such as Innis (1951), McLuhan (1964), Williams (1974), Virilio (1986) and Carey (1989). The task today in understanding the digital and networked urban present is to draw on the insights of this varied body of work while recognizing the need to move beyond fatal narratives in which one technological system simply “destroys” another. The need to develop accounts capable of assessing the complex, non-linear processes and multiple domains across which “technological change” is enacted and distributed seems particularly acute in relation to urban communication. If, as Kittler (1996) argued, the city itself can be considered a medium, it is that unique medium in which we dwell. Today, our mode of inhabitation is undergoing profound recalibration as networked digital media becomes routinized as global urban infrastructure (Figure 1.2).

The concept of the “communicative city” was first proposed by Gumpert and Drucker (2008) just over a decade ago. Arguing that communication was a largely unacknowledged connecting thread and raison d’etre of urban life, they suggested that studying cities from the perspective of communication could offer new insights into urban practices (including design), while, on the other hand, paying attention to the spatial aspects of communication could enrich communication and media studies. Several collections have since appeared under the “communicative city” heading (Burd, Drucker, and Gumpert 2007; Jassem, Drucker, and Burd 2010; Matsaganis, Gallagher, and Drucker 2014). This volume represents something of a new departure, in that it not only extends the geographical focus of the previous work but also highlights the extension of digital networks as a key dimension of contemporary urban communication.

Figure 1.2 New York (Photograph by Gumpert and Drucker 2018).

The book is organized in four sections. The first explores the theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. McQuire and Krajina are, each in their own way, concerned with the exigencies of communication in the context of contemporary “media cities”. The second section focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions (situated in the old French concession precinct of Shanghai), while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. Chen Lin and Lu Jieqing examine how creative industries discourse is impacting on urban development and tourism in Suzhou, while Bjorn Nansen and Tom Apperley consider the digi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: spaces of communication
• Part 1 Rethinking mediated urban space as communicative space
• Part 2 Places, communication and placemaking
• Part 3 Urban screens and new forms of public participation
• Part 4 Urban infrastructure and the communicative city
• Index