Abstract

As screen technologies proliferate in everyday and quotidian urban contexts, studies of screens placed on façades of buildings have largely focused on understanding how these media can contribute to the formations of responsive, immersive, interactive, and open publics. With these considerations, this thesis historicizes so-called urban screens, public screens, media façades and media architectures as products that are shaped, on the one hand, by the politics of urban renewal and gentrification, and on the other hand, by discourses of architectural and urban preservation. Each chapter focuses on the history of a key site prominently characterized by the presence of screen technologies: Piccadilly Circus in London between 1960-1980 (Chapter 2), Times Square in New York City between 1980-1995 (Chapter 3), Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto between 1998-2018 (Chapter 4), and Quartier des Spectacles in Montréal between 2000-2018 (Chapter 5). Examining the histories of each site’s development, the thesis comparatively highlights the ways LED screens and digital projections become part of the material infrastructures and legal frameworks of each respective city. Under considerations are the conditions that bring about and the regulations that maintain the infrastructures of urban screen technologies and cultures. Particular focus is given to the ways the placement, size, brightness, cleanliness, spectatorial spaces, maintenance, and contents of urban screens have been both variably as well as similarly articulated. Certain commonalities in the governing and discourses surrounding the four sites — such as, the formation of public-private partnerships, the privatization of public spaces, and the roles that architectural and urban preservation play in contributing to the symbolic capital associated with each site — indicate the presence of key fundamental conditions that shape the geographies, economies, regulations, and cultures of urban screens. Instead of a proliferation of screens in public spaces, it is demonstrated that a rather systemic and uneven organization of screen technologies into select economically and culturally promising clusters in cities exists.