By Scott McQuire
Providing social remark on the inner most degrees of ancient and demanding reference, The Media urban hyperlinks Myspace to Howard Hughes; trams to cinema; protection cameras to exploding structures; truth television to Marx; and Lenin on privateness to Kracauer at the mass decoration. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated, it intersects disciplines and connects phenomena that are too usually left remoted from one another to suggest a brand new manner of realizing private and non-private house and social existence in modern cities.
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Additional info for The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
Example text
At the same time, twice as many suburban workers commuted to another suburb rather than to the city centre. ’ In his landmark essay, ‘The Overexposed City’, Paul Virilio (1991: 12) underlined the role of transport and communication technologies in this transformation: The phrase ‘to go into town’, which replaced the nineteenth century’s ‘to go to town’, indicates the uncertainty of the encounter, as if we could no longer stand before the city but rather abide forever within. If the metropolis is still a place, a geographic site, it no longer has anything to do with the classic oppositions of city/country nor centre/periphery.
Sassen (1991) points out that face-to-face contacts continue to play a vital role in business, buttressing the emergence of ‘global cities’ which exercise command and control functions in the global economy. However, core city prosperity rests on a much narrower base than previously, with declining retailing dominance and loss of corporate employment to dispersed ‘back-offices’ providing outsourced functions such as computing and call centres. Instead, the traditional ‘city centre’ is increasingly defined by its role housing major cultural institutions such as museums, concert halls and art galleries.
While technological limitations played a significant role in effectively editing people out of the city, there were other reasons that early photographers tended to avoid the street. Frontal elevations, which were the most common form of architectural photography into the 1850s, were usually taken from above street level. In a practical sense, this positioning helped to 32 The Territory of Images overcome the problem of converging vertical lines, enabling camera images to conform more closely to the established conventions of orthographic projection.