Uncovering the Media City: Public Screens and Urban China

PPublic urban screens are a central locus for interrogating our encounters with the media city. Their material frames and facades – increasingly manifest in transit thresholds and corridors and incorporated into architectural surfaces of all scales – are sites for making visible and known the relations between media, urban space, and their inhabitants.1Writing in the early 2000s, not long before the last gasps of the television console’s presence in public space, Anna McCarthy presciently observed how screens are an emplaced and “flexible” medium.2 As the box-encased cathode ray tube had become an integral part of the everyday non-domestic spaces of department stores, airport terminals, waiting rooms, and transport platforms, it was not the screen technology itself that rendered significance; rather, the public (then television) screen was an expression of the scales, “powers and discourses” of its practiced places – the relations and dynamics of location, time, even aspiration that competed in its formation. For global and globally aspiring cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, medium- to large-scale public screens are not everywhere in the city.3They are predominantly (though not exclusively) emplaced in commercial centers, tourist routes, and transport circuits that are often the very locations that announce the city as global – evoking its urban future even as its inhabitants and daily commuters must figure how to sustain themselves in its light and shadows, roads and streets