Abstract
The prime research question of this special issue of the Journal of African Cinemes focusses
on the urban configuration of cities as media hubs. Placed within the broad research agenda
of developing “systematic analyses of trends [...] in South African ‘media cities’” (Tomaselli
2013), the issue offers case studies of selected Southern African cities as both home to media
production, distribution and exhibition as well as the subject of media imaginations. In line
with this, the overall focus of the study is on mapping urbanity in an African context by
analysing media environments and audiovisual configurations of cities from both textual and
contextual perspectives. This case study research design constructs the respective media cities
examined as single units while remaining attentive to how these developments relate to
similar cities outside the case studies under investigation.