From the streets of Los Angeles to the beaches of Rio, here’s our pick of the most memorable videos depicting urban life in cities around the wo

Music video by U2 performing Where The Streets Have No Name. (C) 1987 Universal-Island Records Ltd. SHOW MORE
Music video for Zeb and Haniya's latest song 'Dadra'. Directed by Umar Riaz

There are plenty of songs about cities and city life, but what about the role cities play in music videos? Sure, some just place the singer/band in a cool “urban” setting and that’s it – but others focus on the nature of city life, the peculiarities or the character of a certain city or neighbourhood.

U2 filming Where The Streets Have No Name atop the Republic Liquor store in downtown LA
U2 filming Where The Streets Have No Name atop the Republic Liquor store in downtown LA - The “rooftop video” is a genre in its own right (see Oasis’s Supersonic, opposite King’s Cross Station in London) but U2’s contribution sees the band seemingly grinding a city to a halt. Staged on the rooftop of the Republic Liquor store in downtown LA in 1987, the filmed performance became a city spectacle, attracting crowds as radio stations notified people of the event taking place – though as we hear in the video, some radio presenters warned fans not to go as it was “not one of those delightful neighbourhoods”.Go they did, though, and we see hoards of people and nervous LAPD officers as the authorities warn the production crew of the chaos the band are creating by pulling this stunt on a “major thoroughfare”. Of course, the band play anyway, and the police succeed in shutting it down – though the confrontation was apparently “overly dramatised” and the whole thing planned. Adam Clayton said “the object was to close down the streets. If there’s one thing people in LA hate, it’s streets closing down, and we’ve always felt bands should shake things up.” Here, then, the music video itself becomes a way of revealing the tensions of disrupting the rules and regulations of a city.