Media practices and urban politics: conceptualizing the powers of the media-urban nexus

The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are becoming increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing and diverse literature on what can be identified as a media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a social or cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We reconstruct the shared terrain in which the phenomenology of urban politics might be theorized in light of practice-theoretic accounts of media space. We identify two prevalent lenses on the politics of urban media: as conflicts over the access to and regulation of urban media spaces; and as the silent politics media inscribe into the affective textures of urban life. Both approaches tend to envision media as instrumental supplements to politics, over-estimating the causal efficacy of media practices in shaping political processes while under-estimating the degree to which media practices are adjusted to rhythms of urban life. Drawing on recent uses of practice theory in media studies, we highlight how thinking of media-in-practices provides a basis for a more nuanced conceptualization of the political relevance of the media-urban nexus. Fully realizing this conceptualization requires that the restriction of the insights of practice theory to everyday life be lifted. We argue for an expanded view, which emphasizes the coordination between everyday media practices and more organized fields of communication, challenging standard interpretations of media as instruments of political control or resistance.