The Politics of Place: Space and Locality in the European Screen Industries

Profound transformations in the ways media products are produced, distributed and consumed caused by digital technologies that have ‘disrupted’ established business models, markets and relationships, has led to a renewed interest in the industry’s spatial patterning and hence the importance of place in which locality, paradoxically in an era of globalisation, has been seen as having heightened significance. This renewed interest in space and location – sometimes characterised as the ‘spatial turn’ in media studies – has become a particularly pressing and urgent issue across Europe over the last decade as the effects of digital disruption become more pervasive. In an era of the increasing internationalisation of media production and an orientation to global markets, policy makers have recognised the importance of preserving, even enhancing this spatial plurality. As many studies have shown, the strength and influence of Public Service Media, – which have traditionally embraced this role of cultural identity-building, albeit with mixed results – has weakened in the face of increasingly powerful alternative providers: satellite channels or streaming platforms. These competitors, such as Sky or Netflix, operate to a global commercial logic in which ‘territories’ – not defined by either established national or regional boundaries – are conceived as markets not cultures. This new logic does not entirely displace or supersede the older logics of analogue broadcasting but introduces new layers of spatial complexity that need to be investigated and analysed.

This wide-ranging collection seeks to address these ‘layers of spatial complexity’ through a series of interconnected chapters investigating and analysing the importance of place, space and locality across the breadth of Europe from Greenland to Romania. Although the collection attends to the paradoxes and contradictions of space, place and locality revealed by detailed investigation, it is inspiredby the desire to identify, and find ways of valuing, the various strategies, practices and specific productions that resist homogenisation, ones that encourage plurality and sustainable growth and which contribute to the European cultural ideal of unity in diversity.

This is an open access book.

Andrew Spicer is Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England Bristol.

Ruth Barton is Head of the School of Creative Arts and Associate Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin.

Amy Genders is a Wallscourt Fellow in Screen Business and Creative Enterprise at the University of the West of England Bristol.