Communicative Cities in the 21st Century

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of the wonderful conversations, presentations, and community developed in and through the Urban Communication Pre-Conference Seminars held for a number of years in concert with the National Communication Association annual conference. We wish to acknowledge our colleagues and students who participated in those events for their generosity of spirit, their commitment to inquiry about all things urban, and their willingness to participate in marathon sessions devoted to ideas.

We also wish to acknowledge and thank four individuals— Mr. Joshua Reeves and Drs. Kelly Norris Martin, Anna Turnage, and Jason Kalin—who assisted with logistics related to the Urban Communication pre-conference seminars, the manuscripts, the index and the other organizational and administrative work needed to make a volume like this come to fruition. All four of these individuals worked on this project at various points during their doctoral studies in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State and added important insights to its development. We are thankful for their contributions and are grateful to acknowledge them as colleagues and friends. ← ix | x → ← x | 1 →

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The Making of Communicative Cities in the 21st Century

Matthew D. Matsaganis & Victoria J. Gallagher

Around the mid-1800s, technological innovation in transportation broke, says Melvin (1987), the “casement of the walking city” (p. 258). As people moved further away from the densely populated and geographically limited urban centers, they created and settled into neighborhoods. Researchers began to see cities, counties, states, and the entire country, more and more, as a union of many identifiable units, a quilt made up of distinct neighborhoods (Woods, 1923). In the early days of the Chicago School of urban community ecology, between 1915 and 1925, Park, Burgess, McKenzie, and others pointed to transportation, but also to communication as two of the key mechanisms of social organization shaping the American urban communities of their time. Park in particular, perhaps because he had been trained as a journalist, argued that “transportation and communication [emphasis added] are primary factors in the ecological organization of the city” (Park, 1925/1967, p. 2).

As was the case a century ago during the time of Park and his colleagues, international and rural-to-urban migration, the emergence of an information-based economy, and technological innovation, all forces we have come to associate in recent decades with globalization (Giddens, 2002), continue to transform the cities we live in today both in subtle and dramatic ways (Castells, 2009; Longworth, 2012; Madden, 2012). In the US, for instance, the challenges that stem from increasing population diversity are no longer solely a part of the public agenda of large and what we have traditionally thought of as being immigrant ‘gateway cit ← 1 | 2 → ies’ (e.g., New York, Los Angeles, Chicago). Increasingly, these issues are debated in mid-size and small urban centers across the country (e.g., Katz, Creighton, Amsterdam, & Chowkwanyun, 2010; Suro & Singer, 2002). Citizens, organizations, institutions, and policymakers are forced to change their modus operandi and adapt to new realities created by globalization. In this complex and rapidly changing environment, scholars and professionals from across the field of communication are called upon to play a critical role in helping urban communities understand and manage change.

Considerable research confirms that new and emerging communication technologies are contributing to the changes our cities are undergoing by altering the interpersonal, mediated, and public communication patterns, routines, and spaces of urban communities. Progressively, portable, user-friendly, GPS-enabled devices as well as a number of Internet-based social networking applications and gaming consoles are becoming integrated into individuals’ communication practices and lived experiences. In doing so, they are also changing the way people navigate the urban environment and relate to their neighbors; many times in unexpected ways (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011; Hampton, Livio, & Sessions Goulet, 2010; Lim, 2012; O’Grady & O’Hare, 2012). This is but one example of how urban communities change through communication.

The goal of this book is to bring together the work of scholars and professionals from across the discipline of communication to investigate our contributions as a field of research in the quest of understanding how stability and change, continuity and novelty, routine and surprise are engendered by, encouraged, or enabled via communication practices unique to urban contexts. In addition, in various ways, the contributors to this volume explore how communication research and the scholar-citizen can facilitate change management in urban communities.

This volume is the third in a series dedicated to urban communication research. All three volumes have been the result of the work of scholars who have participated in seminars and conferences sponsored by the Urban Communication Foundation (see http://urbancomm.org/) from 2003 onward. The majority of these conferences have taken place under the auspices of the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, while some have been held in conjunction with other communication and design forums, bringing together scholars from a variety of intellectual fields. The mission of the Urban Communication Foundation is to promote research designed to enhance the understanding of communication patterns in the urban environment and to encourage collaboration between scholars in communication, allied social sciences, architecture, and planning, as well as policy makers.

The first volume published as part of this series on urban communication research (Hampton Press, 2007) focused on three topics: (a) historical, philosophical, and methodological perspectives that have and can inform scholarly work in ← 2 | 3 → urban communication, (b) spaces and places as constructs that are the result of consensus or that are contested, and (c) emerging urban futures and technology. The second volume (Hampton Press, 2010), reflected contributors’ preoccupation with (a) what images tell us about a city and how images of a city are constructed over time, and (b) the city as intersection. Studies speaking to this latter theme investigated how a variety of elements of our built environment shape our patterns of communication, both interpersonal and mediated. In this third volume, contributors advance our thinking around the emergent concept of a “communicative city” and the idea of the communicative construction of the city. In many ways, this collection of works builds on the work of colleagues found in the previous two volumes and advances efforts to lay out an urban communication research agenda for the future.

The Communicative Construction of the City

Urban communities are the focus of researchers across a wide variety of disciplines, including, for example, sociology and geography, economics and public health, architecture and urban planning. However, in much of this literature on cities and their inhabitants, the city is treated as a container, a space that by the virtue of its multiple features, including its physical layout and its technological infrastructure, impacts how individuals live their lives. Still, there is also a significant body of literature in which cities are approached as more complicated ‘beings.’ In this work, the physical environment, the built environment, and the social environment of the city are tightly connected to one another, together shaping human perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. However, even when this more nuanced understanding of the city informs researchers’ work, it is often not clear what the mechanisms are through which the city impacts its inhabitants, how the city changes over time, and what roles urban community members have, if any, in shaping the course of change (Matsaganis, 2007; Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley, 2002).

Through the studies published as part of this volume, it becomes clear that communication research—in its many varieties—can and does contribute to work done in other fields of research and across disciplines meant to help us better understand what is, without a doubt, a dynamic and recursive relationship between urban residents and the city. The city is ever-emerging; it is always in flux. The city is ever-changing because residents make it what it is and, in turn, the city enables and constrains them to achieve personal and collective goals. Continuous change is the product and effect of communication: non-verbal (e.g., via public art and architecture), interpersonal (e.g., among neighbors), mediated (e.g., through local and mass media, social and locative media), and public communication (e.g., between policymakers and publics). In this sense, the city is constituted through communication. ← 3 | 4 →

All the contributions to this volume speak to the various forms or modes of communication through which cities are (re-)created. The chapters are arranged in categories that speak to at least one aspect of the qualifying and/or disqualifying characteristics of a communicative city as defined by Gumpert and Drucker (2008). This is one of the two major themes around which chapters are organized. A second larger theme that organizes the chapters is what we might refer to as a master trope of the urban experience and, indeed, of urban communication: inside/outside.

The Communicative City and Communication as Motor of Change

Hamelink (2008), the initiator of the communicative city concept, notes that,

The notion of the communicative city is the embodiment of a fundamental human right. It represents the entitlement to an urban environment where architectural, spatial, psychological, topological and time-related conditions invite people to impart, seek, receive and exchange information, ideas and opinions, to listen to each other and learn from each other in an ambiance where their autonomy, security and freedom is optimally guaranteed. (p. 298)

During the summers of 2007 and 2008, the Urban Communication Foundation sponsored meetings that included multi-disciplinary participants in Paris, Washington, DC, and Rome. The purpose was to delineate identifiable criteria that defined a “communicative city.” Each meeting brought together fifteen individuals consisting of scholars, architects, environmentalists, lawyers, journalists, and environmental psychologists, who were asked to identify the characteristics of a communicative city.

The method employed was modeled after the structured dialogic design (SDD) advanced by Aleco Christakis. SDD was designed for collaborative and systematic exploration and resolution of complex issues through discussion of diverse stakeholders (Christakis & Bausch, 2006). A special issue of The International Communication Gazette published in 2008 was devoted to the results of these meetings.

The communicative city is a construct utilized to measure and recognize urban municipalities that provide or facilitate the creation and maintenance of a healthy communicative environment. Utilizing the criteria established in these meetings, the Urban Communication Foundation introduced the Communicative City Award, as a way to honor cities with the vision and skill to enhance communication in the interest of creating a healthy and humane social environment. It is hoped this initiative will advance the goal of underscoring the need for cities to place or foreground communication needs in their public agenda. ← 4 | 5 →

The analysis of the data produced through the SDD process that unfolded over the course of the meetings in Paris, Washington, DC, and Rome suggested three primary categories of characteristics that communicative cities share:

1.Those activities that broadly constitute sites and opportunities for social interaction.

For example: a place for human interaction; a place to share experiences; places to be alone; a place with access to media; a space to play; a place with a manageable soundscape; a place that has numerous nodes of activity; a place that provides the choice to participate or not participate; a place to communicate culture and heritage; a place that welcomes outsiders and visitors.

2.Those factors that constitute the urban infrastructure.

For example: a place of press freedom; a place where individuals have access to local media and communication technologies across the city; cheap connectivity; municipal broadband; established multimedia information systems providing public information on government and health; good signage; free speech rights and zones; cultural displays.

3.Those factors that are operationally political or civic in nature.

For example: a place that commemorates its history; a place that enhances identity and identification; cooperative involvement of citizens; a place that encourages civic engagement; a place with open government information policies; multiple public dialogue spaces; public programs for the city to address the communicative needs of communities; a place with a mechanism for creative problem-solving; educational programs for communication skills.

In addition, out of the focus groups emerged a set of factors that would disqualify a city from being considered a communicative city. These included factors such as the following:

•Censorship and repression of speech;

•Rules and laws against gathering;

•A city whose citizens don’t feel they have a stake in its improvement;

•Digital panopticon (e.g., total control/surveillance);

•A segregated city (e.g., elderly segregated from young, rich segregated from poor; segregation based on ethnic, racial, or religious grounds, etc.);

•Gated and divided parallel communities;

•Non-vibrant places and dead spaces;

•Poor communication infrastructure; ← 5 | 6 →