Urban Communication| The Communicative City Redux

Abstract

The communicative city is a construct that can be used to measure and recognize urban municipalities that provide or facilitate the creation and maintenance of a healthy communicative environment. Utilizing the criteria established through a series of interdisciplinary meetings, the Urban Communication Foundation introduced the Communicative City Award, honoring cities with the vision and skill to enhance communication in the interest of creating a healthy and humane social environment. The aim of this initiative is to advance the goal of underscoring the need for cities to place or foreground communication needs in the public agenda. An international jury composed of communication scholars and design and environment behavior scholars and practitioners evaluate the city’s initiative with regard to criteria of communicative cities. These criteria are clustered into three major areas: places of interaction, infrastructure, and politics/civil society. Disqualifications have been articulated as part of the criteria as well. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to not only recognize and set a communication agenda for cities but directly benefit award-winning cities through communication research–based recommendations that address remaining challenges identified by municipal leaders.