ABSTRACT
More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and by 2050, 75% will (UN 2010). Growing urbanization has enormous consequences for media industries’ development, communication infrastructures’ uneven distribution and control, and not least, for the ways in which we communicate across or against others in cities. Yet, while our world is becoming both urbanized and globally interconnected, media and communications research is still biased toward self-contained media systems, primarily defined by the nation-state. Especially within comparative approaches, assumptions about the centrality of the nation and of rigid systems are prominent: We compare media systems, professional media practices, and national audiences across countries. Yet, research shows that divides between urban and rural societies can be larger than inequalities between nation-states (Smith, 2001; Bell & de-Shalit, 2011), that certain cities have more in common with other cities of the world than with regions within the same country (Sassen, 2001), and that media industries are increasingly concentrated in a specific number of cities rather than nations (Curtin, 2003). These conditions call for more systematic engagement with the city and with the local and global consequences of urbanization for media and communications.
