Martijn de Waal

I am part of the New Media, Public Sphere and Urban Culture research project on New Media and Urban Culture headed by prof. René Boomkens, at the University of Groningen.

Institutional Context

My research project is part of the NWO-program Transformaties in de Kunst en Cultuur and my supervisors are Rene Boomkens and Jose van Dijck

This research programme will study the way in which new media of information and communication have influenced and transformed the way in which urban communities and (collective) identities are being shaped. It will concentrate on new types of collective identities that seem to depend to a larger extent on the influence of global media and that have serious effects on the spatial unity of urban culture and the urban public domain. The programme is a balanced mixture of a case study (new communities in Rotterdam), an international comparative survey of various new, transnational urban communities in Europe(Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, Berlin), a historical study of changing representations of urban identities (esp. from a gender-perspective) influenced by the development of various media, from 19th Century art, via film and photopgraphy to the newest digital(mass)media, and a critical philosophical comparison of the ways in which different scientific disciplines have dealt with the representation, imagination and transformation of modern urban culture by various (global) media of information and communication. By combining these different perspectives on one clearly defined problem this programme wants to develop a new, problem oriented and interdisciplinary, account of one of the most pressing and troubling issues of recent urban culture and of the urban public sphere: their crucial but contradictory role in the process of cultural globalization.