The political responsibility of artists in a globalized society is debated in this collection of articles by authors from Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, and Scandinavia. Bemoaning the competition for tourist dollars among the world's great cities and the commodification of cultural artifacts, these artists propose real and imagined places where art might resist capitalism, such as failed urban developments, among refugees, and in rural outposts.

De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice throws new light on the terrain between theory and practice in transdisciplinary discourses of design and art. The editors, Elizabeth Grierson, Harriet Edquist, and Helene Frichot, bring together diverse approaches to design theory, practice, and philosophy from leading scholars in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Themes include spatiality, difference, cultural aesthetics, and identity in the expanded field of place-making and being. The concept that design can be de-signed is presented as a way of exploring different approaches to an experimental and experiential thinking-doing that promises to further open up research possibilities in the fields of design and art thinking and practice. The book enacts a series of cartographic devices to articulate the spaces between theory and practice.

Cities have long been recognized as key sites for fostering new communication practices. However, as contemporary cities experience major changes, how do diverse inhabitants encounter each other? How do cities remember? What is the role of the built environment in fostering sites for public communication in a digital era? Communicative Cities and Urban Space offers a critical analysis of contemporary changes in the relation between urban space and communication. This volume seeks to understand the situatedness of contemporary communication practices in diverse contexts of urban life, and to explore digitized urban space as a historically specific communicative environment. The essays in this book collectively propose that the concept of the 'communicative city' is a productive frame for rethinking the above questions in the context of 21st-century 'media cities'. They challenge us to reconsider qualities such as openness, autonomy and diversity in contemporary urban communication practices, and to identify factors that might expand or constrict communicative possibilities. Students and scholars of communication studies and urban studies would benefit from this book.

Cities have long been recognized as key sites for fostering new communication practices. However, as contemporary cities experience major changes, how do diverse inhabitants encounter each other? How do cities remember? What is the role of the built environment in fostering sites for public communication in a digital era? Communicative Cities and Urban Space offers a critical analysis of contemporary changes in the relation between urban space and communication. This volume seeks to understand the situatedness of contemporary communication practices in diverse contexts of urban life, and to explore digitized urban space as a historically specific communicative environment. The essays in this book collectively propose that the concept of the 'communicative city' is a productive frame for rethinking the above questions in the context of 21st-century 'media cities'. They challenge us to reconsider qualities such as openness, autonomy and diversity in contemporary urban communication practices, and to identify factors that might expand or constrict communicative possibilities. Students and scholars of communication studies and urban studies would benefit from this book.

This overview of modern visual culture explores the relationship between technology, society and identity which underpins contemporary `media culture'. While tracing historical shifts as they have developed through, or intersected with, different camera technologies, the book is not so much about the camera's field of vision: it is concerned with processes of modernization and the dramatic changes - perceptual, experiential, epistemological - which characterize modernity. Using the camera and its technologies as symbols of `realism', Scott McQuire interweaves: the history of visual culture from Lumiere to virtual reality by way of photography, cinema and television; the broad social and political transformations of the last 150 years; the ambivalent relationship between `image' and `reality'; and the changing relationships of time and space, particularly related to colonialism, globalization, the modern city and cyberspace available in every home.