Every generation must build its own city
Mediapolis: Popular Culture and the City by Alex de Jong and Marc Schuilenburg
In Mediapolis the authors sound out an urban environment pulsing to the rhythm of the popular media. They introduce a pop philosophy whose concepts include the Urban Container, ’scenius,’ sonic communities and nodal urbanity. Here technological, political, cultural, economic and even military developments meet head-on. Mediapolis makes clear what urban pop culture is and how it has influenced our notion of city. The words of the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia are as true today as in 1914: “Every generation must build its own city.
We’re always happy to learn about new books and this one could be interesting, not least because of its playful perspective. From the review by Siebe Thissen:
The terms applied in Mediapolis also betray conceptual euphoria, a lust for life, the joy of play, and zap behaviour: ideas and concepts tumble over one another, notions appear and vanish, theories condense and evaporate, and leitmotifs turn out to be loose ends without ties … Stacking, tying together, plodding on, unravelling, and beginning all over again. That is Mediapolis. It is the realization that metropolitanism is not an entity, concept, moloch or physical reality; it is the recognition that urbanity is consistently produced afresh in various manifestations of pop culture.
via smartmobs
- Anne