Media Industries and Cities

Andrew Spicer is Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His recent publications include Sean Connery: Acting, Stardom and National Identity (2022); Go West! 2.5: Bristol’s Film and Television Industries (2025), co-authored with Jelena Krivosic; and The Politics of Place: Space and Location in European Screen Industries (2026) co-edited with Ruth Barton and Amy Genders.Paul McDonald is Professor of Media Industries at King’s College London. Recent publications include editing The Routledge Companion to Media Industries (2022), and co-editing Locating Media Industries: Spaces, Places, Platforms (2026), Global Film Policies: New Perspectives (2025), and Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines (2021).

'A long-overdue corrective to two conversations that have too often talked past one another, this volume shows — with analytical precision — that media industries are not only shaped by cities but actively shape them. It directly addresses the blind spot whereby critical media industry studies have sidelined spatiality while urban scholarship has flattened industrial complexity, and it demonstrates how urban media studies can bridge that divide with rigor rather than rhetoric.By asking how, why and with what consequences cities become centres for media, the collection maps the local textures of production onto globally stretched circuits of capital, technology and labour, and in doing so locates media power in concrete urban sites as well as across transurban networks. It moves deftly from conceptual reframings of clusters and "places of flows", to comparative cases that range from MediaCityUK’s regeneration politics to Taipei’s cinematic city-branding, Atlanta’s ascendance as a service media capital, and the office geographies of platform-era transnational firms.The result is a sharp, field-defining agenda that anchors media industry analysis to the material and symbolic life of cities — and gives urban studies a far more nuanced account of how media actually works'.Petr Szczepanik, Charles University, Prague'This collection shows, unequivocally, that cities still matter to media industries, even in an era of hypermobility. Each of its richly textured chapters persuasively re-centre space and place within media studies research, positioning the book as an essential intervention and enduring reference point for future scholarship'.Kevin Sanson, Queensland University of Technology, and author of Mobile Hollywood: Labor and the Geography of Production

• The Nexus of Media Industries and Cities Part I: Conceptual Groundings 1. Media Industries In/Between Cities: Intracity and Intercity Embeddings 2. Transnational Media Corporations in Global Media Cities Part II: Media Production Hubs and Urban Transformations 3. Media Cities and the Reconstruction of Space and Place: MediaCityUK 4. Digital Media City Seoul: Creating a Korean Hollywood 5. Re-Branding Taipei Through Cinema: Municipal Policies and Cultural Strategies 6. Tracing an Alternative Cinema Ecosystem in Mumbai 7. Mavericks, Black Moguls and Outkasts: Atlanta’s ‘Southern Hospitality’ and the Making of a Service Media Capital 8. Broadcasting Spaces: Public Service Media, Built Environment and Regional Transformation in the UK Part III: Perspectives on Cities as Loci of Media Industries 9. The Place and Placelessness of the BFI London Film Festival 10. Ethnoburban Exhibition in Los Angeles 11. ‘Weird’ Austin: The Attraction of Local Event Imaginaries for Global Industry Networks 12. Representing Southeast Asia in Sino-Singaporean Television: The Geopolitics of Coproducing Place in Transnational Media Production