In Television Cities Charlotte Brunsdon traces television's representations of metropolitan spaces to show how they reflect the medium's history and evolution, thereby challenging the prevalent assumptions about television as quintessentially suburban. Brunsdon shows how the BBC's presentation of 1960s Paris in the detective series Maigret signals British culture's engagement with twentieth-century modernity and continental Europe, while various portrayals of London—ranging from Dickens adaptations to the 1950s nostalgia of Call the Midwife—demonstrate Britain's complicated transition from Victorian metropole to postcolonial social democracy. Finally, an analysis of The Wire’s acclaimed examination of Baltimore, marks the profound shifts in the ways television is now made and consumed. Illuminating the myriad factors that make television cities, Brunsdon complicates our understanding of how television shapes perceptions of urban spaces, both familiar and unknown.

"The Case for Television Violence is a dense, dry and devastating dissection that surely counts as one of the most important books about American culture to appear in the last decade." --Andrew O′Hehir, "The Myth of Media Violence," Salon.com, 3/17/05 The Case for Television Violence makes the provocative argument that television violence has been misinterpreted. Rather than undermining the social order, television supports it by providing a safe outlet for aggressive impulses. Media scholar Jib Fowles challenges the conventional wisdom by: 1) demonstrating that the scientific literature does not say what many believe it says; 2) calling attention to the viewing habits and behaviors of the reader and those the reader knows; 3) explaining that the anti-violence critique is most profitably understood as the signature issue in the conflict between high and popular culture and 4) situating the arrival of televised violence within the historical context of the disallowance of traditionally sanctioned targets of aggression. The Case for Television Violence will intrigue scholars and students of Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics and Mass Communication.

The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication traces central debates within the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on mediated cities and urban communication. The volume brings together diverse perspectives and global case studies to map key areas of research within media, cultural and urban studies, where a joint focus on communications and cities has made important innovations in how we understand urban space, technology, identity and community. Exploring the rise and growing complexity of urban media and communication as the next key theme for both urban and media studies, the book gathers and reviews fast-developing knowledge on specific emergent phenomena such as: reading the city as symbol and text; understanding urban infrastructures as media (and vice-versa); the rise of global cities; urban and suburban media cultures: newspapers, cinema, radio, television and the mobile phone; changing spaces and practices of urban consumption; the mediation of the neighbourhood, community and diaspora; the centrality of culture to urban regeneration; communicative responses to urban crises such as racism, poverty and pollution; the role of street art in the negotiation of ‘the right to the city’; city competition and urban branding; outdoor advertising; moving image architecture; ‘smart’/cyber urbanism; the emergence of Media City production spaces and clusters. Charting key debates and neglected connections between cities and media, this book challenges what we know about contemporary urban living and introduces innovative frameworks for understanding cities, media and their futures. As such, it will be an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication studies, urban communication, urban sociology, urban planning and design, architecture, visual cultures, urban geography, art history, politics, cultural studies, anthropology and cultural policy studies, as well as those working with governmental agencies, cultural foundations and institutes, and policy think tanks.

Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.

From early first-wave programs such as Candid Camera, An American Family, and The Real World to the shows on our television screens and portable devices today, reality television consistently takes us to cities—such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston—to imagine the place of urbanity in American culture and society. Jon Kraszewski offers the first extended account of this phenomenon, as he makes the politics of urban space the center of his history and theory of reality television. Kraszewski situates reality television in a larger economic transformation that started in the 1980s when America went from an industrial economy, when cities were home to all classes, to its post-industrial economy as cities became key points in a web of global financing, expelling all economic classes except the elite and the poor. Reality television in the industrial era reworked social relationships based on class, race, and gender for liberatory purposes, which resulted in an egalitarian ethos in the genre. However, reality television of the post-industrial era attempts to convince viewers that cities still serve their interests, even though most viewers find city life today economically untenable. Each chapter uses a key theoretical concept from spatial theory—such as power geometries, diasporic nostalgia, orientalism, the imagination of social expulsions, and the relationship between the country and the city—to illuminate the way reality television engages this larger transformation of urban space in America.