Living Together in the Mediatized City: The Figurations of Young People’s Urban Communities

Abstract

What does deep mediatization mean to young people in their daily urban sense of community? Posing this question, the chapter analyzes the mediatization of young people’s urban community building in two German cities: Bremen and Leipzig. In doing so, ‘urban sense of community’ is not treated as a given, but as communicatively constructed in an open process that can assume different empirical forms. The chapter demonstrates that for young urban dwellers—besides family, acquaintances and colleagues—it is their network of friends that remains the primary figuration of their experience of community construction. However, mediatization is not only of importance when it comes to the communicative networking of young people via different digital devices. In addition, the frequented locations that are of importance for an ‘urban sense of community’ are highly mediatized. This can be understood as the figurative quality of individual sites of community construction; that is, the way the mediatization of particular locations in the city lends them a particular quality of community construction. Such an analysis leads to the question concerning the extent to which the city can, for young people, be something like an imagined community.