In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai — we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban panoramas sustains a sense of futurity through two (overlapping) forms: the conjunctional and the hyper-representational. We argue that together these panoramas invite an emotive future gaze which, through the combination of practical enactment, haptic movement in the city and political vision, constitutes an ideological force of modern urbanism. By introducing the conceptual framework of encapsulation/decapsulation, we propose a way of deepening the understanding of the symbolic and emotional negotiations involved in the production of spectacular city landscapes.

During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory studies, the argument is that we may approach the anniversaries as an electronic “lieu de mémorie”: a material-symbolic space reappropriated annually as media become vehicles for “working through” in commemoration, mourning, debate, and critique. Despite the fragmentation of both television and collective memory in the context of digitalization, on the anniversaries, Swedish television promotes itself as a central “nucleus” for connectivity offering viewers a return to the traumatic site—to the television set—while interpellating them as a “global we,” of media witnesses.

Expatriate spaces on the outskirts of New Shanghai constitute a new transnational social space inhabited by many different nationalities. Yet these areas are often understood as 'American' spaces, filled with virtualities of everyday Americana, and with franchises to cater to the transnational elites such as KFC, Diner's, Papa John's Pizza, etc. What meanings does the old 'New World' retain in the context of this hyper-modernizing Chinese megacity, with ambitions to become a world center? And how do Americans negotiate and appropriate these spaces? This article is based on three stints of fieldwork among Americans in Shanghai in 2007 and 2009, with a particular focus on white, female, corporate transfer expatriates living on Forest Manor, Rancho Santa Fe and the Racquet Club. Pitting these spaces against some of the most important theorizations of the virtual bearing on them, I propose that in order to analyze the human face of global mobility we need to move beyond postmodern notions of the simulacrum where people are stripped of agency. Through the voices of those who reside on 'Disneyland' I stress the sense of lived virtuality on the compounds, inclusive not only of the rhythms of the everyday in these virtual spaces, but also of the possible getaway from them.

This dissertation examines the construction of an imaginary America in Swedish travel writing from 1945 to 1963. By placing focus on the intersecting dimensions of gender, media, and visuality, the aim is to analyze Swedish notions of the US that surface both in the written word as well as in the illustrative material, by contextualizing these imaginings within the expanding media culture of the time. Visuality is recognized as a meaning-making process and a vital aspect of travel culture; apart from ways of seeing, a range of pictorial expressions as well as visual metaphors are explored. What is argued is that the publications fostered a perspectival pluralism that bears witness to a mobile and ambivalent stance towards this emerging superpower and its modern mass culture.

While the first chapter introduces the theoretical framework of this study as drawing on the fields of visual culture-, gender and media studies, the second chapter seeks to map out the historical as well as generic aspects of travel literature in relation to imaginings of America. Next to situating the travel books within a cultural history of media, the study addresses the interface of traveling and mediation. Travel writing is, moreover, conceived as scripting. The third chapter examines the viewing positions adopted by the Swedish travelers by focusing on how the arrival scene in New York and hence their first encounter with the US was depicted. What is stressed is that the presence of America within the Swedish mediascape heavily shaped the travelers’ expectations as well as perceptions, creating a mediatized gaze, which often turned their journeys into a ‘cinematic’ experience. Six stereotypical viewing positions are further discerned among which the travelers oscillated: the Tourist, the Natural Scientist, the Colonialist (expressive of a medial attitude toward the nation) and further the Anti-Hero, the Detective, and the Flâneur (expressive of criticism, reflexivity and ambivalence).

The fourth chapter deals with the travelers’ discussions of American media and mass culture. What was voiced was often a highly ambivalent position. On the one hand, travel writers exposed a positive and enthusiastic response to American mass culture as being young and playful - ‘just for fun’. On the other hand, (visual) media forms such as cinema, television, comic strips and illustrated magazines were deemed as highly problematic and America, implicitly a ‘feminine’ culture, was regarded as lacking history and maturity.

The fifth chapter approaches the representation of the American inhabitants. While whiteness was secured as the norm (through the American as bread-winner and the American woman who comprised a range of ideals about femininity), travelers nevertheless also paid attention to the hybridity of the American population. Afro-Americans and native Americans were approached as the other and were attributed along the lines of contrast. In addition, Americans were captured as creatures of transition and transgression. They challenged in provocative manner, norms about binary oppositions between masculine and feminine, high and low, ultra-modern and primitive, civilized and wild.

In the final chapter, the study concludes that ambivalence was the key notion that Swedish travelers of the Post-war era came to develop towards America, a matter which foremost needs to be related to the realm of mediatization. Because of the mediated relationship to the country, America offered a high potential for self-reflexivity and the nation became a complex and moving projection screen for Swedish fears and fantasies. In all its materiality, America was also potentially a figment of the imagination.

Visitors on sight-seeing tours in contemporary globalizing Shanghai observe the futuristic ambitions, exponential development and chaotic polyrhythmicity of New Shanghai. The nostalgia industry simultaneously ` teleports' the tourists on tours back to a time when Shanghai was a legendary world metropolis; the Golden Age of the inter-war era. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's critical rhythmanalysis, and by Jonathan Sterne's conceptualization of communication as organized movement and action, this paper explores bus tours by commission of the municipal government. Shanghai is the place where the movements of the buses, as well as the tourists on board, become part of communicating the place identity and multiple rhythms of the city. The buses are conceived as means of communication, in a twofold sense, and as both underscoring and binding together the many incommensurabilities of place: old and new, Western and Chinese, industrialism and post-industrialism, nationalism and globalism. The author argues that mobility, media modernity and a confounding mixture (reflexively manifested on the tour ` Confused and Mixed Shanghai') constitute a collective memory of the city, and that the buses in all their seeming banality, communicate Shanghai's particular rhythms of retromodernity.

The current resurgence of the Chinese mega city of Shanghai involves a radical restructuring of the urban fabric, infrastructure, economy and media culture. New Shanghai competes to become the information communication hub in the Asia-Pacific, and partly through the display of wide-ranging digitalization at the World exposition of 2010 and in the city, the municipal government has set its mind on once again detaining the future right here. In this paper I probe the question of how one place becomes continually endowed with futurity. Futurity, I argue, is in fact an essential part of a collective memory in the city: it is Shanghai’s genius loci. Moving from the Golden Age of modernity and cosmopolitanism of the 1920s and 30s, through the city under Communism, into the current global/digital city of Shanghai I inquire into they ways in which media and communication have been historically, and are at present, a backbone of the Shanghai imaginary. I further discuss how the future is both obsessively desired in Shanghai of today and at once under seizure since New Shanghai is, as much as it is a place of physical monumentality, an elusive and contradictory space of temporal co-existence as well as of hypermobility and hypermediation.

The Chinese mega city of Shanghai is currently undergoing a radical restructuring of its infrastructure and urban fabric and aspires to become a future city and a world center. This article delineates an encapsulation of a future gaze in the city among cosmopolitan visitors, mediated through travel reporting, travel guides and expatriate websites. Shanghai is a multisensuous and highly engaging geography and invokes a future gaze which, in contrast with the alleged detachment of the tourist gaze, has to be interpreted in terms of an immersion of the whole body, and in relation to acts of drinking and eating in the chronotopes of nostalgic dwelling - the mansion garden and the restaurant. In addition, futurology in Shanghai is dependent upon a craze for history, and as travelers engage with and perform a collective memory of the Golden Age of the twenties and thirties, the city enacts a specific experience of time travel. This article shows how analyzing the intersensorium may yield a more critical evaluation of how visitors make sense of and contribute to the transformation of the city and further probes how sensory response, sentiment, memory and mediation work together.

Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, the mega city of Shanghai on the Eastern seaboard of China is once more jockeying for the position as Asia's foremost modern place. An essential part of the regeneration of contemporary Shanghai has been the return, not only of foreign direct investment, but of 'Westerners' to the city since the 1990s. Contributing to current debates about the globality and mediatization of memories, Lagerkvist critically interrogates Shanghai's spectacular resurrection into an emergent world center from the vantage point of how Western elites (tourists, expatriates and travel bloggers) partake in the production of New Shanghai. Through performances of memory, Westerners consume the regenerative nostalgia of the city. This book shows that these mediatized memory practices become essential for the city and tie in with how the municipal government (in tandem with international scriptings of the city in for example films and travel journalism) is currently theming Shanghai by situating memories of futures past and visions for the future in a coherent narrative and sensory-emotive realm of experience.

Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, Shanghai resurges with large-scale ambitions of becoming the world center of trade and finance as well as the information and communication hub of the Asia-Pacific region with an Infoport advancing beyond the era of the Internet. This article ponders the relationship between memory and futurity in Shanghai, and suggests that in celebrating temporal coexistence, Shanghai offers the contours an alternate social ordering of retromodernity. In this media city, media forms constitute a backbone of the Shanghai imaginary, and the enthusiasm for new communication technologies in Shanghai today is reminiscent of the role that media forms played in modernizing Shanghai in the past. Probing how memories of media futures past may trigger digitalization, the author argues that temporal anchoring in Shanghai does not represent a refusal to partake in the fast-paced world; instead, it pursues a memory of modernity and anchors in a “Bergsonian terrain” where mobility is, in effect, its “natural tradition.”

The alluring traits of ‘new media’ have spurred new research interests. This article discusses the discourse of ‘new media’ from the vantage point of critically reviewing three emissions from MIT Press during the years 1999-2003 within the series Media in Transition, as to the fundamental concepts used and introduced in these works. It cautions against any reductionist perspective on new media forms, and while highlighting the many merits of writing new media histories, the article shows that this discussion, also nascent within an interdisciplinary Swedish research environment, also carries other important features with implications for the relationships between communication and (time)space. It concludes that it is not enough to acknowledge that ‘new media’ call for a deep awareness of the historicity of the technological imaginary; deeper understandings of transitions in media also call for thoroughly expounding the socio-spatial ramifications of communication.

What happens to people’s relationship to places that have been subjected to a high degree of mediation? The aim of this article is to engage in current debates on mediaspace and the mediatization of travelling, by offering an empirical and conceptual qualification to this discussion, through a study of the experiences of Swedes travelling in the US in the 1950s. This article shows that in understanding the relationship between communication and geography, it is vital to focus on the level of experience and on what Edward Soja, following Henri Lefebvre, calls ‘thirdspace’. The argument is that while the journeys were scripted, travellers’ ’knowledge’ of the land was seriously challenged as they ended up in thirdspace suspense, displaced in a country that was both fiction and fact, known and unknown. Studying the intersection of travelling and mediation will render new insights into the meanings that mediation carries, which push beyond common polarizations: mediation has to be conceived in terms of more than either powerful images or playfulness/resistance. As mediation interlaces with the imagined and the lived, ambivalences, dissonances and incommensurable affections towards the places at hand are generated.

In this article I explore the many different meanings of the mediatized meeting with New York (how gazing at the Manhattan skyline ‘felt like being at the movies’) from the point of departure of how traveling Swedes – mainly male, middle aged and of middle- and upper-class backgrounds – made sense of America in travel writing from 1945–1963. By analyzing the pivotal arrival scenes in these narratives in conjunction with the accompanying illustrations, I investigate the kinds of gazes that were called upon. I set out by arguing that their gazes reinforced a kind of ‘medial attitude’ which resonated with strong traditions of traveling and visualizing the other. But the article ultimately shows that when they approached the new world, experiences of mediatization and movement also invoked a range of other viewing possibilities that bore witness to their stance being first and foremost that of ambivalence, which implied that their gaze, their masculinity and their authority were set in motion.