The Interplay of Underground and the Media: Technology of Promotion and Domestication of the Local Subways Considering the Experience of Berlin, London and New York City

This paper is a result of an independent scientifical research project aimed to investigate the formation of the urban space image in the modern media world, which we have been conducting. We contemplate our survey in the general field of visual culture studies, which, in its turn, will be considered as an interface between sociology, visual anthropology, culturology and urban studies. We find this kind of ‘disregard’ of the underground area inequitable, and in this research paper we especially intend to rehabilitate or raise the scientific importance of this transit city’s space by focusing on studying its visual image and form in the context of human reception of the urban environment. Thus, by offering a unique combination of in-depth investigated areas of scientific knowledge, our research project may have pretensions to be scientifically innovative and practically applied, for instance, through possibilities like travel management and city development. In the context of our scientific hypothesis, we assume that one peculiar social and dimensional environment, which can be reflected in the media, forms an ingenious city’s visual appearance. By interplaying with a concrete urban space, people endow it with personal or subjective implications and experiences through their habitual residence. Consequently, we suggest that a visual space of one town, being a representative decorative element of the urban life, exerts an impact on forming a city’s authenticity in human mind.