De-westernizing mediated city research: display and decay in Zagreb’s urban signage

ABSTRACT

Studies of mediated cities argue that urban signage (public screens, outdoor advertising, media façades) symbolizes the centrality of communication in post-industrial urbanism. This correct general argument also tends to be geographically limited to centrally positioned cities in a service economy. I explore how the peripheral position of Zagreb, constructed during permanent political transition (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Yugoslavia, EU, etc.) has made its urban signage especially diverse and seemingly chaotic. I argue that relating urban communication to national and transnational identities offers important, under-explored directions for research, particularly reminding us that display usually also means the opposite.

KEYWORDS:

• Screen
• city
• Zagreb
• Europe
• communication

Notes

1 Zlatan Krajina, “Multispace: Flows, Thresholds and Difference in the Study of Mediated Cities,” in Communicative Cities and Urban Space, eds. Scott McQuire and Sun Wei (London: Routledge, 2021), 45–59.

2 Elisabeth J. Sedano, “Advertising, Information, and Space: Considering the Informal Regulation of the Los Angeles Landscape,” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 2 (2016): 227.

3 Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication (London: Routledge, 2020).

4 Katja Vretenar and Zlatan Krajina, “Politics of Naming and the Patriarchal Construction of Zagreb,” Politička misao 53 no. 6 (2016): 50–81.

5 Hannes Tauenböck et al., “Patterns of Eastern European Urbanisation in the Mirror of Western Trends – Convergent, Unique or Hybrid?” EPB: Urban Analytics and City Science, 46 no. 7 (2016): 1207.

6 Robert Venturi et al. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977).

7 Zlatan Krajina and Deborah Stevenson, “General Introduction” in Krajina and Stevenson, Companion, 5.

8 David Morley, Communications and Mobility: The Migrant, the Mobile Phone, and the Container Box (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2017); Zlatan Krajina and Nebojša Blanuša, eds. EU: Europe Unfinished: Mediating Europe and the Balkans in a time of crisis (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

9 Suzana Milevska, “The Renaming Machine in the Balkans as a Strategy of “Accumulation by Dispossession,”” in Krajina and Blanuša, EU, 77–92.

10 Zlatan Krajina, Negotiating the Mediated City: Everyday Encounters with Public Screens (London: Routledge, 2016).

11 Marco Abram, “Building the Capital City of the Peoples of Yugoslavia: Representations of Socialist Yugoslavism in Belgrade’s Public Space 1944–1961,” Croatian Political Science Review 51, no. 5 (2014): 44.

12 Gruia Bădescu, “Traces of Empire: Architectural Heritage, Imperial Memory and Post-War Reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut,” History and Anthropology 30, no. 4 (2019): 369.

13 Darja Radović Mahečić, “Architecture and Modernization of the City,” in Zagreb Modernity and the City, ed. Fedja Vukić (Zagreb: AGM, 2003), 67.

14 Abram, “Building,” 53.

15 Ibid., 39.

16 Danica Stojiljković and Jelena Ristić Trajković, “Semiotics and Urban Culture: Architectural Projections of Structuralism in a Socialist Context,” Social Semiotics 28, no. 3 (2018): 345.

17 Ibid., 338, 339.

18 Ibid., 337.

19 Bădescu, “Traces,” 367.

20 David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).

21 Kevin Robins, “Prisoners of the City: Whatever Could a Post-modern City Be?” in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, eds. Erica Carter James Donald and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993), 303–330.

22 EIU Democracy Index 2020 (Economist Inteligence Unit, 2020). https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020/.

23 Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik, Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (Barcelona: Actar, 2007), 13, 14, 16.

24 Ibid., 15.

25 Blau and Rupnik, Zagreb, 152. See also Göran Therborn, “Eastern Drama. Capitals of Eastern Europe, 1830S–2006: An Introductory Overview,” International Review of Sociology—Revue Internationale de Sociologie 16, no. 2 (2006): 209–242.

26 Krajina, “Multispace."

27 Dejan Jović, “1989: godina koja nam se nije dogodila” (1989: the year that never happened to us) Politička misao (2014). https://politickamisao.com/1989-godina-koja-nam-se-nije-dogodila/.

28 Irina Gendelman and Giorgia Aiello, “Faces of Places: Façades as Global Communication in Post-Eastern Bloc Urban Renewal,” in Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, eds. Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (London: Continuum, 2010), 263.

29 Blau and Rupnik, Zagreb, 23.

30 Ibid., 14.

31 Ibid., 10–12.

32 Ibid., 12.

33 Ibid., 12–14, 22.

34 Ibid., 19.

35 Ibid., 112–29.

36 Ibid. 129.

37 Ibid., 16.

38 See also the Instagram page “Malo smo nadogradili” (We added a bit) documenting such unapproved-tolerated modifications of urban morphology by citizens of Belgrade.

39 Blau and Rupnik, Zagreb, 24.

40 Ibid., 23.

41 Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, Ulice moga grada (The streets of my city) (Beograd: XX vek, 2000), 51.

42 Blau and Rupnik, Zagreb, 23.

43 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

44 Taubenböck, “Patterns,” 1207.

45 Blau and Rupnik, Zagreb, 8.

46 Ibid., 8–9.

47 Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, “Urban Theory Beyond the ‘East/West Divide’? Cities and Urban Research in Postsocialist Europe,” in Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities, ed. Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne (London: Routledge, 2011), 71.

48 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

49 Anne Cronin, Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban (New York: Palgrave, 2010).