Media, City, Movement: Media Change and Communicative Figurations of Urban Life

• 04.12.2015 – 05.12.2015
• Haus der Wissenschaft

Workshop on December 4/5, 2015 at the House of Science, Bremen

Historical studies show: The emergence of the modern city and the mediatization of urban living space went hand in hand. This is exemplified not only by the “mass press” that emerged in urban spaces, but also by the early cinema, radio cinema, radio, posters on advertising pillars and many other “small media” (Dayan 1999). Diverse media also play a prominent role in today’s changing urban living spaces. Just think of mobile devices, the cell phone with its diverse apps, location-based media services, the various “public screens” and the multitude of highly mediatized events. Historically and currently, the establishment of “new media” is repeatedly linked to processes of collective formation and the emergence of social movements in the city: Urban identities and other forms of collective formation in the city are always also supported by the media. And social movements are always also media movements. The workers’ radio movement is a prominent example of this from the 1920s. In the urban alternative scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, their alternative media were an integral part and today’s urban movements – “urban gardening”, “critical mass”, “occupy” – stand for an “urban life in the digital modern age” (Rauterberg 2013).
The aim of the workshop is to explore this interrelationship between media, urban spaces, constructions of collectivity, the emergence of urban movements and their activities by analyzing the diverse communicative figurations of urban life. The workshop adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and brings together researchers from the fields of communication and media studies with the social sciences and history. The guiding questions across all three panels are:

• How is the transformation of “city” and “urban space” related to the transformation of media and communication?
• What significance do media have for the communicative construction of “collectivity”, “identities” and “communitization” in the city?
• What is the relationship between “urban movements” and media, their transformation and media-related designs of collectivity?

The duration of a presentation should not exceed 30 minutes so that there is sufficient time for discussion. It is planned to publish the results of the workshop in an anthology.

If you have any questions, please contact Sebastian Kubitschko (sebastian.kubitschko[at]uni-bremen.de).

Friday, 04.12.2015

09:00 Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp, Dr. Sebastian Kubitschko, Prof. Dr. Inge Marszolek: Welcome and opening

Panel 1: Media, identity and the city in historical change (Moderation: Prof. Dr. Julia Lossau)

09:15 Prof. Dr. Adelheid von Saldern, Leibniz University of Hanover: Media
and the city in the 20th century: Coherence systems in historical perspective

10:00 PD Dr. Lu Seegers, Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg: Hamburg media and the interpretation of the Hanseatic (1920s to 1960s)

10:45 Dr. Daniel Morat, FU Berlin: Local Conversations. The early telephone in Berlin 1877-1914

11:30 Prof. Dr. Inge Marszolek & Dr. Yvonne Robel: On the medial measurement of urban space in the 1950s urban space in the 1950s

12:15 Lunch

13:15 Final discussion Panel 1

Panel 2: Media and urban communitization (Moderation: Prof. Dr. Joachim R. Höflich, University of Erfurt)

14:15 Prof. Dr. Gabriela Christmann, Leibnitz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning
Structural Planning: Spatial pioneers in neighborhood development and their communicative figurations
15:00 Dr. Regine Buschauer, Zurich: This side of the ‘Smart City’. Visions and figurations of the mobile city

15:45 Coffee break

16:15 Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp, Dr. Sebastian Kubitschko, Piet Simon, Monika Sowinska, University of Bremen: Communicative figurations of communitization in the mediatized city

17:00 Final discussion Panel 2

19:00 Dinner

Saturday, 05.12.2015

Panel 3: Media and urban movements (Moderation: Prof. Dr. Christine Lohmeier, University of Bremen)

09:15 Prof. Dr. Christoph Bieber, University of Duisburg-Essen: On the politics of the smart city – urban development and administration in the context of the “civic tech” movement
10:00 Dr. Ulrike Klinger, University of Zurich: From Tahir Square to Pegida: Urban movements and social media a

10:45 Coffee break

11:00 Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp: Pioneering communities in urban areas
11:45 Dr. Sigrid Kannengießer: Repair Cafés – urban places of the repair movement

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Final discussion Panel 3

14:30 End of the workshop

Prof. Dr. Christoph Bieber: On the politics of the smart city – urban development and administration in the context of the “civic tech” movement
The concept of the smart city is highly relevant for the future of urban spaces, but the discourse is currently still heavily dominated by technology providers and focused on increasing efficiency. Particularly in coordination with infrastructure companies, there are implicit conflicts of incentives and objectives between the economic interests of technology providers and the management objectives of the administration. In addition to perspectives for networking, product development, location and technology promotion, the smart city is also the scene of explicit political processes, as the growing number of protests in medialized urban spaces has shown. The lecture outlines current developments in the field of “smart city governance” and examines the political consequences of the increasing networking of infrastructure, public space and citizenship.
Dr. Regine Buschauer

This side of the ‘Smart City’. Visions and figurations of the mobile city
Currently prominent visions present the city system-centrically as a future ‘smart city’. In doing so, they follow a history of “mythical” (Dourish/Bell 2011) thinking of mobile and ubiquitous or pervasive media technology, which has always been juxtaposed with diverse figurations of urban mobile communication. The lecture traces moments of this field of tension in the history of mobile communication using examples from the 1970s and early 1990s in particular. From a media-historical point of view, it will examine the genealogies of contemporary visions and present-day figurations of the ‘mobile city’ in the context of movement, urban space and mobile and pervasive media technology.
Prof. Dr. Gabriela B. Christmann

Space pioneers in neighborhood development and their communicative figurations
The article examines communicative figurations of “spatial pioneers” in socially disadvantaged urban neighborhoods in Berlin-Moabit. Space pioneers are understood as actors who not only rethink and use spaces, but also communicate about them and encourage other actors to communicate. The starting point is the empirical question of the extent to which grassroots initiatives of spatial pioneers can initiate new spatial interpretations and neighborhood development processes through communication processes. The aim is to show how spatial pioneers network and what media and direct forms of communication characterize their networks. Above all, it will be shown which media forms of communication are used by the actors in large public spheres of urban space, to what extent they are heard in public discourse and can change knowledge systems. The article is rounded off with sketchy reflections on how the communicative construction of space can be conceptualized in theoretical terms.
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp, Dr. Sebastian Kubitschko, Piet Simon, Monika

Communicative figurations of communitization in the mediatized city
Over the course of the last century, the modern city has increasingly become a mediatized city. In fact, the character of contemporary cities today can hardly be understood without media. Living in the city – especially for young people – means living with cell phones and other mobile devices, location-based services and constant access to the Internet. Across all these media, there are multi-layered “communicative figurations” of urban communitization. At this point, urban communitization must be understood in two senses. On the one hand, the city is an important “mediatized context” for many communities that are of great importance to young people (friendship, affinity groups, sports clubs, etc.). On the other hand, the city itself is an important “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). This can be understood as an indication that the advancing mediatization is not only related to translocal communicative networks, but also to changes in local communicative networks. Accordingly, mediatization does not inevitably lead to a loss of local community building in the city, but rather to its transformation. Following this line of argument, the lecture is structured in four sections.
At the beginning, the current “smart city” discussion is critically questioned, criticized with regard to its decontextualization and a plea is made to view current developments in the “mediatized city” from a longer-term perspective. Following this theoretical superstructure, we will analyse urban communitization of young people in the above-mentioned double sense (the city as a “mediatized context” and as an “imagined community”). In the third part, the lecture focuses on various mediatized places in the city that play an important role in the process of community formation and reconstructs their (place-related) communicative figurations. Finally, the analytical sections are brought into connection with each other in order to make further statements about the media-related transformation of community building in the city.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp: Pioneering communities in urban space
Certain communities play a prominent role in a technology-related change of collectivity by “designing” new collectives related to media technology. In their own view, these groups can be understood as “pioneers”, i.e. they form pioneer communities of a media-related change of collectivity. Examples of such pioneering communities include the maker movement, the quantified self movement and the open data movement. Based on media ethnographic data (interviews, observations, evaluations of self-presentation), the aim of the lecture is, on the one hand, to make tangible the extent to which these groups represent an independent phenomenon as “pioneering communities” and cannot simply be described as “social movements”. On this basis, it is then a matter of reflecting on the extent to which urban space is a special context for the constitution of these pioneering communities. The argument at this point is that it is urban localities in particular where pioneering communities in Europe are constituted as communicative figurations.

Sigrid Kannengießer: Repair Cafés – urban places of the repair movement
For a few years now, a new repair movement has been emerging that opposes the consumer and throwaway society and pursues the goal of sustainability. This movement is particularly visible in repair cafés – events where people meet to repair their broken everyday items together. While some people offer repair help here, others seek support during the repair process. Repair Cafés are a predominantly urban phenomenon – these events take place in cafés, pubs and cultural centers where the repair community meets. The lecture will present the results of a study in which Repair Cafés were analyzed as an urban phenomenon from a media and communication science perspective.

Ulrike Klinger: From Tahir Square to Pegida: urban movements and social media
In recent years, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have been attributed a great deal of potential in the context of urban (protest) movements – the talk of supposed “Twitter revolutions” even suggested that they made some urban movements possible in the first place or decisively changed them. This article will take a critical look at the role of social media in the mobilization and coordination of urban political movements. In the context of media change and communicative figurations, it will be argued that urban movements can only mobilize broadly in public through cross-media and that social networks as channels of strategic communication also harbour non-democratic potential.

Prof. Dr. Inge Marszolek and Dr. Yvonne Robel: On the medial measurement of urban space in the 1950s
Media communication in urban space and about urban space always represented a kind of “surveying of the world” on a small scale. The article illustrates this by looking at media discourses in the two “media cities” of Hamburg and Leipzig. Using visual and auditory sources, the article asks which discursive strategies and regular patterns were associated with such surveying in the 1950s. What role did discourses of networking or fragmentation play in the two cities with different but interrelated framework conditions? The aim is to discuss the extent to which space-related structuring offers were reflected here, which in turn corresponded to specific designs of collective identities.

Dr. Daniel Morat: Local calls. The early telephone in Berlin 1877-1914
In the first decades of its public use, the telephone was primarily an urban medium that was mainly used for inner-city communication. The telephone also gave rise to new forms of penetration and appropriation of urban space through the new form of medial production of auditory presence in the absence of physical presence. Using Berlin as an example, the lecture reconstructs the early uses of the telephone and its effects on the auditory perception and medial networking of urban space.

Prof. Dr. Adelheid von Saldern: Media and the city in the 20th century: Coherence systems in historical perspective
The historical interrelationship between the city and the media is characterized by a growing coherence on both sides. In particular, communication and socialization processes in urban space as well as urban identity constructions were increasingly produced, expressed and conveyed through the media. Although the media, for their part, always saw themselves as ubiquitous, they always remained strongly connected to the urban economy as well as to the “city dwellers” and their urban cultures. The short introductory lecture analyzes specific examples in order to shed light on this interrelationship and the associated dynamics.

PD Dr. Lu Seegers: Hamburg media and the interpretation of the Hanseatic (1920s to 1960s)
The term Hanseatic played a central role in Hamburg’s self-description in the 20th century. In general, it diffusely denotes a basic attitude characterized by sobriety, pragmatism, cosmopolitanism and liberalism. However, there is much to suggest that the Hanseatic was associated with different meanings during the transition from democracy to dictatorship. The urban media played an important role in this. On the one hand, they acted as multipliers of the interpretations of the Hanseatic by key players. On the other hand, they reflected and shaped corresponding associations. Using the example of regional daily newspapers, the article shows on the one hand how the Hanseatic in Hamburg was connoted in the various political systems. On the other hand, national daily newspapers are used to discuss how the Hanseatic was represented outside the Hanseatic city. While the internal representations of the Hanseatic were rather connoted as community-building, so my thesis, the external representation rather emphasized the exclusive character.