| This research programme will study the way in which new media ofinformation and communication have influenced and transformed the wayin which urban communities and (collective) identities are beingshaped. It will concentrate on new types of collective identitiesthat seem to depend to a larger extent on the influence of globalmedia and that have serious effects on the spatial unity of urbanculture and the urban public domain. The programme is a balancedmixture of a case study (new communities in Rotterdam), aninternational comparative survey of various new, transnational urbancommunities in Europe(Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, Berlin), ahistorical study of changing representations of urban identities (esp. from a gender-perspective) influenced by the development of variousmedia, from 19th Century art, via film and photopgraphy to the newestdigital(mass)media, and a critical philosophical comparison of theways in which different scientific disciplines have dealt with therepresentation, imagination and transformation of modern urbanculture by various (global) media of information and communication.By combining these different perspectives on one clearly definedproblem this programme wants to develop a new, problem oriented andinterdisciplinary, account of one of the most pressing and troublingissues of recent urban culture and of the urban public sphere: theircrucial but contradictory role in the process of cultural |
