Find us at our new address

Hello all – this site hasn’t been updated for the last few months, but it’s not because we haven’t been working – we’ve migrated the site to more formal quarters at http://www.cinemamediaandurbanstudies.com. Please come visit us at our new home, and pass the word along.

Welcome to the Site

Welcome to the new web home for the Urban Studies Scholarly Interest Group of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. We are in the midst of developing what we hope will become a helpful resource for scholars working on urban issues in cinema and media studies – please let us know what you think in the comments or send suggestions to urbanstudiesSIG@gmail.com.

Syllabi section is open for business

One of the most popular requests for the website was to create a way for instructors to share syllabi on urban studies-related courses. On the sidebar to the right, you’ll find a link to the Syllabi section, where you’ll find a list of courses taught and links to the syllabi for download.

We also encourage anyone who has taught a course on a related topic to share their syllabus with the group. Documents can be emailed to urbanstudiesSIG@gmail.com (please include a one-sentence description of the class for inclusion with the syllabus).

REVIEW: The Cultures of Cities

Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995.

Zukin’s book is a further exploration of the ground she began to cover with Loft Living, expanding her study of the symbolic economy and its effect on contemporary urban life. She contends that the arts have developed a “seductive influence…on urban redevelopment” (viii) and uses this book to chart some specific case studies in how the culture industries are reshaping American cities.

She posits that the Marxist base-superstructure approach for thinking about culture in the contemporary urban setting has been inverted in the post-industrial economies. Rather than considering the art museum as the patrician’s bid for immortality, and the fresco a sign of the Church’s material wealth, Zukin instead argues thatcities have come to rely on the symbolic economy as an engine for economic growth.

REVIEW: The Place of the Audience

[ed. This is the first in what we hope will be a series of short reviews posted to the site of urban studies-related texts in cinema and media studies. Those interested in contributing capsule reviews should contact us at urbanstudiesSIG@gmail.com]

Jancovich, Mark, Lucy Faire, and Sarah Stubbings. The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: British Film Institute, 2003.

With this book, Jancovich and Faire set out to establish a new framework for considering the film audience. While their project is specific in its inquiry (an historical and ethnographic account of film reception in Nottingham during the 20^th century), the authors are adept at generalizing out from their findings to talk about ways in which film studies can more profitably consider the position of the audience within it. In the course of their book, they make several provocative assertions that run counter to the conventional narrative about the trajectory of film consumption, specifically as it is conceived in spatial terms.