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[ecrea] cfp: Mediated Urbanism - double special issue in International Communication Gazette

Wed Apr 11 10:15:55 GMT 2012


CALL FOR PAPERS

A special Double Special Issue of the International Communication Gazette
to be published by Sage Publishers on

Mediated Urbanism

With sections on Designing the Urban Stages & Urban Audience Activities

Guest Editors:
Seija Ridell (University of Tampere, Finland; COST Action ISO906 WG3)
Frauke Zeller (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada; COST Action ISO906 WG3)

Deadline for abstracts: May 31st 2012

Designing the Urban Stages section (CfP 1 below) focuses on the planning and design aspects
of contemporary digitally embedded and media-saturated cities.

Urban Audience Activities section (CfP 2 below) focuses on the diversity of audience activities
in the multi-spaced and multiply scaled contemporary cities.

The multiple and multiply divided nature of urban reality has deepened in novel ways through the development of networked digital technologies. The use of portable media devices in particular has rendered urban space increasingly multi-layered, as people may interact with their physically absent communities and visit online places while being on the move in the city. At the same time, through their smart gadgets, people are integrated with the software-supported urban infrastructure which grows out from an equally invisible but nevertheless material global technorhizome. This makes them active though not necessarily self-reflexive contributors to the dynamics of spatial power that today conditions the forms of urban communication and agency. The contemporary urban setting has started in recent years to increasingly fascinate scholars and practitioners as a context for people¡¦s media relations. However, there is, as yet, little research on how the complex processes of city planning and design shape the digitalized and media saturated city and how these processes articulate and are entangled with power relations. Nor is there much research on the ways people shift between various media and technology related modes of action
while dwelling in and moving about the city.

In this double special issue Mediated urbanism of the International Communication Gazette, which follows up on the 2008 ICG special issue on Communicative Cities (edited by Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker), we wish to address the digitally sustained urban environment in terms of public life. Our approach in the issue is to combine the perspectives of city planning and design, on the one hand, with the perspective of people¡¦s activities as urban audiences, on the other. We welcome and strongly encourage for both interrelated sections contributions that foster
dialogues across disciplinary boundaries.

Important Dates:
- Abstracts (600-800 words and to include author¡¦s professional status and institutional
affiliation) submission: May 31st 2012
- Notifications of acceptance: June 30th 2012
- Full manuscript submission: September 15thth 2012

Submissions (abstracts and full manuscripts), in English, should be sent electronically as Word documents to Seija Ridell (email: (seija.ridell /at/ uta.fi)) and Frauke Zeller (email: (fzeller /at/ wlu.ca)). Manuscripts should include an abstract of 100-150 words, with a suggested target of 8000 words (including notes and references) and include 8-10 key words. For specific manuscript submission
guidelines, please go to: http://gaz.sagepub.com/

If you have any queries regarding the suitability of your potential contribution or any other
inquiries, please contact the guest editors:
Seija Ridell, (seija.ridell /at/ uta.fi)
Frauke Zeller, (fzeller /at/ wlu.ca)

Cfp 1: Designing the urban stages

We are accustomed to thinking of the city as a physical setting where tightly packed congregations of people co-exist and multiple ways of life are visible to each other. Along with the ever more thorough digitalisation of infrastructure and media platforms, as well as the proliferation of portable, networked and location-aware devices, the urban environment has become increasingly multidimensional in nature by encompassing intersecting and overlapping physical as well as virtual spatial layers. While drifting about in the city with our handhelds, we are not only addressed by the pervasively present mass media and witness to other people¡¦s presentations of self, our sensibilities are mediated and extended by the ambient techno-rhizome. In this special issue of ICG, we wish to pose the question of how the contemporary digitalised city may be theorized and explored as a public space in its double sense of simultaneous showing and sharing, that is, both as a stage for personal and communally oriented public performances and as an arena for public encounters and dialogues. We invite contributions that discuss the urban environment in terms of relating city planning and design to changing spatial interaction and media use. Abstracts may be theoretically, methodologically or empirically oriented contributions as well as practice-based pieces that deal with but are not restricted to the future of physical public space in the times of neoliberal politics, cyber-capitalism, digitalised urban
infrastructure and networked mobile technologies.
There is a growing body of research on ubiquitous and ambient/associative new media technologies in present-day cities and the multiplicity of spatial interconnections that mobile devices enable for the urban dweller. Considerably less has been studied thus far how the urban stages themselves are structured and produced and in what ways people¡¦s media-related activities are implicated in these processes. Thus, both theoretically oriented and empirically-grounded contributions might consider a range of issues and questions including, but not confined to:
- Adaptive / responsive urban architecture
- Interaction design and urban spaces
- Interactive urban design for the communication with/among citizens
- New (mediated) laws of (digital) form
- The politics of digitally mediated urban form
- Pre-conceptions of media use and reception in urban planning and design
- Location-aware mobile media and the urban public space
- The role of planners, architects, designers and ICT professionals in the evolvement of
urban public sphere
- The dynamics of power in the production of software-supported and media-saturated
urban space

Cfp 2: Urban audience activities
To date, there is little research on how people act as audiences in urban environment. Yet digital technologies have not only moulded the practices of media audiencing in the home but diversified in significant ways outdoor audience activities. Networked portable devices in
particular have enabled and forced new kinds of urban audience activity.
In this special issue of ICG, we want to focus on the simultaneous specificity and multiplicity of audience activities in the present-day, spatially multi-layered and multi-scaled cities. In terms of theoretical orientation, we suggest that both the ¡¥space of appearance¡¦ and ¡¥space of collectivity¡¦, distinguished by Hannah Arendt as immanent aspects of public space, are important in investigating how people act as audiences in contemporary techno-cities. More specifically, how is the reception of urban media (such as audiencing the media facades and digitally embedded displays in museums or airports and other public and semi-public spaces), on the one hand, and the diverse uses of personal mobile devices, on the other hand, embedded in the dynamics of urban spatial power? In addition, we encourage audience-focused approaches on the softwareenabled articulations of urban public space in its collective and democratic sense. Using a Habermasian vocabulary, the question concerns the combined and intersecting public spheres that can be built differently by people in their uses of networked and location-aware portable technologies and the offerings on the urban (mass) media platforms. We invite explorations on how people act as audiences (and publics) in these spatially hybrid public sphere constellations. We welcome contributions from various disciplines and fields of research that range from historical reviews and theoretical reflections on urban audiencehood and its transformations, to discussions of the methodological challenges in the study of urban audience practices to empirical case studies. The latter may approach the diversity of urban audience activities by exploring some of its forced, accidental and/or voluntary instances that span from the reception of industrially manufactured mass media spectacles and artistic interventions to audiencing (in) interpersonal or playful communication to audience activities as part of bottom-up and corporeal
urban experience.
Contributions may deal with and combine, but are not confined to, the following topics: - Audience, public, player, activist ¡K : shifting between the mediated modes of urban
(inter)action
- Audiencing the (mass) media-saturated city
- Transformations of urban audience practices
- Mobile audiencing in the multi-spaced urban environment
- The multiple scales of urban audience activities
- Spectacular urban audience activities and their politics
- Interpersonal audiencing in the urban context
- Forms of captive audiencing and the dynamics of urban spatial power
- Bodily rhythms and routines of urban audience activities
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