Voices 01: Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson on the Histories and Futures of Urban Media and Communication

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson. Zlatan is based at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia, where he is Assistant Professor of Media Studies. His work has focused on urban screens, media and everyday life and qualitative methodologies. Deborah is based at Western Sydney University, in Australia, where she is Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research. Her work has centred on cities and urban life, arts and cultural policy, and gender in relation to cultural production and consumption.

Together, Zlatan and Deborah are co-editors of the Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication. Published in 2019, it is a book that was the result of a multi-year process. Its resulting 44 chapters are notably wide ranging, taking in the urban-mediated dimensions of everything from architecture, infrastructure, digitalisation and regeneration to globalisation, identity, consumption and branding.

Our discussion not only centred on the Companion itself, but the lens it provides onto the processes and tensions of academic knowledge production in a fast-changing and interdisciplinary research area. Throughout, Zlatan and Deborah stress the importance of properly historicised perspectives on urban media and communication, and the value of the field as a genuinely transdisciplinary set of dialogues.

This is an episode within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)