Mediated City

As a center of media and culture producing and expressing, city is always to be a focus in many ways. There are full of space metaphors in the description of cities. It is not only a geographic sample, but also a cultural sample. We can use our own eyes to watch and our hands to touch to get the city experiences. But now, the world that made of media gives us a new method to know more about the cities' substantial and spiritual features. So, this research uses geography of media as a visual angle to observe the city landscape, expecting to explain the culture, space, society, and human beings in cities. There are so many aspects of city culture, and they will present all kinds of landscape and cultural maps through different media and imagination. Any kinds of research views are different ways to watch and describe the world, so they will form different points of view. Geography of media is one of them.City and media make up maps of meaning. The media includes mass media and geographic elements, such as streets, buildings, and roads. Each media has its own function in city culture. Media can shape landscape and change the appearances of cities, and it has double identities in the city. It is not only a mirror to reflect the city itself, but also a part of the city network.The introduction of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Edward Soja's space theories are very helpful for this research. City is a complicate space which has material and spiritual characters. Sense of space and boundaries keep a city in a perfect order. Men and women with different social relation and cultural background can find their own groups to identify themselves.In the view of geography of media, the formation of city space can not deny subjectivity. So the geographic imagination is emphasized in this dissertation. The center and margin, the mainstream and "others", east and west, Utopia and heterotopias are all mixtures of geography and culture in the lens of media. Besides, political and gender landscape are also built up. Moreover, in the background of globalization, internet subverts the traditional geography and rebuild city of "Etopia" to shape new geographic maps and develop new senses of place. These geographic imagination and imaginary geography are important contents of this dissertation.