Dear colleagues,
I hope you've made it home safely from Cape Town, and that the conference is still settling productively in your thinking.
I'm writing on behalf of a group of urban communication scholars working to formally establish our subfield at ICA.
Urban communication has been a continuously active area of research within ICA and adjacent associations for nearly two decades. Building on this longer history, we have had a sustained ICA presence across recent years: a post-conference in Toronto in 2023, an off-site preconference titled "Intelligent Communication and City Networks" (organized by Fudan University and NUS in Singapore) and a Blue Sky Workshop in Gold Coast (both at ICA 2024), a full-day pre-conference in Denver in 2025, and our Blue Sky Workshop this June in Cape Town. The 2025 Denver pre-conference was co-sponsored by four ICA divisions (Mobile Communication, Health Communication, Popular Media & Culture, and Ethnicity and Race in Communication), reflecting how broadly urban communication scholarship touches existing ICA work.
A few days ago, in Cape Town, our Blue Sky Workshop brought together urban communication scholars from international institutions, across faculty and graduate student ranks, to discuss communication's role in addressing urban inequalities, infrastructures, and mobilities.
We are now taking the next step: submitting a formal Interest Group application this November, with an additional pre-conference proposal for ICA 2027 in Glasgow to follow. Our co-proposing team brings together colleagues from Rutgers University, the London School of Economics, the University of Michigan, the University of Denver, Yonsei University, Fudan University, and the University of Melbourne. We see urban communication as a subfield distinguished by its analytical commitment to the city as object of study, examining how communication, as process, practice, infrastructure, and institution, both shapes and is shaped by urban life.
The Interest Group we are proposing will offer, at ICA, a dedicated home for scholarship grounded in the communication environment of urban neighborhoods and cities, build connections with adjacent disciplines (urban sociology, geography, planning, public health, and architecture), and commit to a practice that no existing ICA division currently maintains: putting ICA in conversation with the cities that host its meetings, through site visits, dialogue with local practitioners, and off-site programming.
For example, in Cape Town, we screened the documentary "Mother City" (https://www.mothercitydocumentary.com/) at Bertha House, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Miki Redelinghuys and three activists featured in the film. The conversation deepened participants' understanding of affordable housing struggles and the legacies of spatial apartheid in Cape Town, and how communication research can contribute to addressing them. If you did not join us but are interested in the film, it is available at
https://kinema.com/films/mother-city-j6fhyq.
More information is available at the same link after logging in. If you'd like to get involved beyond signing, including in the organization of a pre-conference for 2027, please get in touch (see e-mail below).
A special note for student and early-career colleagues: urban communication research cuts across Communication subfields, and graduate students working in this space often find themselves without a clear mentoring home at ICA. Part of what an Interest Group makes possible is precisely this kind of mentoring support. If you are a student or early-career scholar with an interest in urban communication, we especially hope you will sign on and join us as we build the community.
Thank you for considering this.
Two-thirds of the world will live in cities by 2050.
Help build a home for urban communication research at ICA.
Matthew Matsaganis (Rutgers University),
On behalf of the co-proposing team: Matthew Bui (University of Michigan), Myria Georgiou (London School of Economics), Germaine Halegoua (University of Michigan), Yong-Chan Kim (Yonsei University), Jeffrey Lane (Rutgers University), Scott McQuire (The University of Melbourne), Pan Ji (Fudan University), Erika Polson (University of Denver)