Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Reinhold Martin

Reinhold Martin’s Mediators is a series of linked meditations on the globalized city. Focusing on infrastructural, technical, and social systems, Martin explores how the aesthetics and the political economy of cities overlap and interact. He discusses a range of subjects, including the architecture of finance written into urban policy, regimes of enumeration that remix city and country, fictional ecologies that rewrite biopolitics, the ruins of socialism strewn amid the transnational commons, and memories of revolution stored in everyday urban hardware. For Martin, these mediators—the objects, processes, and imaginaries from which these phenomena emerge—serve to explain disparate fragments of a global urbanity.

Ideas First  is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

60 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2014

Reviews

[Rilka]

I adore Reinhold Martin's ways of seeing. It seems mildly scandalous to write a Goodreads review of your professor's book so I'll leave it at that.

[Tracy Conway · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wholly unnecessary noise in both the concentration of media studies and the fantastic Forerunner series. Many of these essays consist entirely of the summation of others works and reads like overly wordy undergraduate term papers. My expectations for this series are high, having previously read Shannon Mattern’s Deep Mapping the Media City, Jussi Parikka’s Anthrobscene and others of similar insight, depth and intellectual quality. I am just overwhelmingly disappointed with this entry which is why it took me six months to read the five essays.

[Marco Salazar valle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Encouraging new thoughts on the city

Voracious resettlement of city discourses, that not fall under the veil of nostalgic disciplinary revisionism. The scope of the essays is settled under a Marxist point of view, that recognizes history as evidence but that leaves open questions for the future of cities and human habitats at large.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

just read the kim stanley robinson chapter....