User:Kbl.studio/Feeding the Media City


 * An opinion essay, not an encyclopedia article. It's not clear what the subject is, and less clear that it passes WP:GNG.

Here, an authored work is offered as a stub to provoke continued conversation on the Media City. Entitled Feeding the Media City, the work presents an argument for a critical thinking of the media city through online texts that inhabit various forms of 'media urbanism.' The work here consists of text fragments that connect to other fragments liked, tweeted, tipped, or searched in places like facebook, foursquare, google earth, twitter, ecode360.com, wikipedia itself, and other online sources.

We explore the media city through a narrative that frames our own personal urban experience through and with it. Flâneurs of sorts, we meander through the media city, sometimes in our backyard, sometimes on our mobile devices, and sometimes on our mobile devices in our backyard examining the backyard itself through an informational lens. We live in a so-called shrinking rust belt city – Syracuse New York – and our experience of this city is quite different than that which was imagined – or addressed – through its height-of-industrial-society build-out. Without the information infrastructure of the media city, as flâneurs we lack appropriate urban distractions in the material body of the “city” that is defined through legislation and historical perception. We turn to the media city for our own urban livelihood, and present our flânerie itself here as a critical musing on the conference theme.

While we offer provocations toward a definition of a media city and an argument for a critical thinking of the media city in city planning and governance today, what we offer here really is a stub. Defined as “an article deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject,” our narrative stub is folded into other fragments of narrative already in the media city simply to “contain enough information for other editors [that is, media citizens] to expand upon it.”

Media City? City? How do we get to an understanding? SyracuseMedia City?

If the idea of civitas helps us get to the core of “city” – at least through its etymology – we can constitute the city as a body of people and the contract that binds them together: the citizenry. Interesting to note, however, that the civitas is not necessarily geographically bound.

When does the city become ‘grounded,’ so to speak – when does the body and its binding contract bind itself to a specific place on the planet (look up)? Whenever it does, then it has to include the contract with this space: who is a citizen inside it; who is NOT a citizen outside of it.

Poul Anderson on complexity

We often define the city through a measure of density, but density is an historically evolved attribute of the city rather than an intrinsic property. Density is always relative (United Nations stats on ‘urban’ – attached) and perceptual. I grew up in Los Angeles, seeing my city through the lens of what my family out east would have called a suburb. That (New York and Boston) was the real city…it had grand avenues and brick buildings…it was dense with people, architecture, and experiences. (this last seems key)

So really, we are compelled to see ‘the city’ most generally as a contract binding a populous from what it is NOT. The early Roman peregrinus the not-citizens, were those (literally) from the fields. The farmers. The source of food for the city-dwellers. The city then was most simply defined to be not-agriculture: a definition we have seen throughout the history of the western city, surviving through to definitions even today. LA and Boston (and Syracuse NY, our home town) are cities, even though they are wildly different in form. What they have in common is that they are NOT spaces of food production.

This, effectively, is the argument of the so-called suburbanites, the urban agrarians (food again), the rust belt shrinking citizens. The city is a powerful construct of social contract, not of not-architecture, not-infrastructure, nor not-population density. The density which matters to these people is a density of experience, balanced (perhaps) more systemically (ecologically?) than the physical manifestation of the idea of city as a compact, highly populated, packed-with-buildings area of land.

If I think about how I live in Syracuse… my density of (urban) experience is complimented through my connectedness online, on social media, etc. The body of people I am with electronically is framed through a social contract (most often in the form of a terms of service contract). A civitas of the media city.

Provided a data pipeline, I can shop, eat, and socialize with a pretty dense experience. The physical land and buildings (and remaining population) of Syracuse don’t provide the urban experience I desire. In the media city, I can attend shows, see foreign films, meet frequently with my friends in Singapore, and then step out into my one acre plot and assure that my chickens are well fed.

We come back to food. Food sets up all sorts of complications and contradictions with regard to the city. The city is defined in large part as NOT-agricultural. City is less, then, about the density of people or buildings, which may vary greatly in a ‘city,’ but the density of chickens, pigs, and cows which are excluded or strictly controlled. Through the 19th and 20th centuries when the keeping of livestock in the city became increasingly controlled, we can see the increasingly divisive demarcation of “urban” and “not-urban” stultifying the progress of so many struggling cities in the US.

Laws banning livestock in the city were about “city” as a construct at a particular moment of time with a particular idea of human density in a particular place…if the law had been more systematic (like “no density of livestock where a density of poop is a problem”) rather than geographically and functionally constrained (as in “no farm animals within this boundary here) we might productively envision a more hybrid post-industrial city.

The media city complements a waning urban density, but also densifies social interactions and consumer and cultural experiences in those zones which never had a population or architectural density: from first-ring and streetcar suburbs to the edges of the edge city. This is not that profound a point, really, but it reinforces the struggle between the city trying to survive as an exclusively physical infrastructure and the media city which (at least as long as we have electricity) always already engages its hybrid physical-informational infrastructures.

Foursquare, the spatially focused social networking site, has 20 million users. Detroit has 700,000. New York, eight million. Many of these social network users, of course, live in (physically) urban areas, but they also quite routinely populate this alternative media geography and quite arguably constitute a form of urban population (even if not highly populated, dense, non-agricultural, nor economically empowered, to name but a few current statistical qualifications for an urban area).

With the media city, population and architectural densities might no longer obsessively overwhelm conversations about urban recovery. Experiential densities which acknowledge the mediated overlays on top of our built environment constitute the core of the media city. What models of city development might this lead us toward?