Media Industries and Cities

'A long-overdue corrective to two conversations that have too often talked past one another, this volume shows — with analytical precision — that media industries are not only shaped by cities but actively shape them. It directly addresses the blind spot whereby critical media industry studies have sidelined spatiality while urban scholarship has flattened industrial complexity, and it demonstrates how urban media studies can bridge that divide with rigor rather than rhetoric.

By asking how, why and with what consequences cities become centres for media, the collection maps the local textures of production onto globally stretched circuits of capital, technology and labour, and in doing so locates media power in concrete urban sites as well as across transurban networks. It moves deftly from conceptual reframings of clusters and "places of flows", to comparative cases that range from MediaCityUK’s regeneration politics to Taipei’s cinematic city-branding, Atlanta’s ascendance as a service media capital, and the office geographies of platform-era transnational firms.

The result is a sharp, field-defining agenda that anchors media industry analysis to the material and symbolic life of cities — and gives urban studies a far more nuanced account of how media actually works'.

Petr Szczepanik, Charles University, Prague

'This collection shows, unequivocally, that cities still matter to media industries, even in an era of hypermobility. Each of its richly textured chapters persuasively re-centre space and place within media studies research, positioning the book as an essential intervention and enduring reference point for future scholarship'.

Kevin Sanson, Queensland University of Technology, and author of Mobile Hollywood: Labor and the Geography of Production