Software and networked devices are highly pervasive in the city, perhaps more than we tend to realise, and their consequences as urban media are becoming more apparent. The relatively sudden arrival of new, easy-to-use tools and streamlined interfaces sold under the broad banner of ‘AI’ may may be novel but serve as a sharp reminder of the more longstanding interdependencies of technologies in human life. Academic analyses already have several conceptual terms for these interdependencies: algorithmic cities; data-driven urbanism; and code spaces. Past episodes of this podcast have also already pointed to several specific forms of urban computational media, including surveillance systems, delivery apps, neighbourhood social media, locative infrastructures, digital out-of-home advertising, and digitally mediated street art. A question we haven’t yet broached is: what would it mean to say computationally mediated cities might be becoming ‘sentient’? And should we only connect this idea with novel digital technologies? In our first episode, we said we’d conceive of urban media across a much longer time horizon, of hundreds if not thousands of years. In this final episode, we stick with that plan, to both recognise the significance and novelty of computational forms of urban mediation and also question whether these forms are really such a break from the past or if, instead, they entail both continuities as well as profound challenges to the possibilities and power differentials for mediated urban life.

Thinkers discussed: Nigel Thrift and Shaun French (The Automatic Production of Space); Adrian Mackenzie (Cutting Code: Software and Sociality); David Berry (The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age); Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life); Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell (The Smartness Mandate); Federico Cugurullo, Federico Caprotti, Matthew Cook, Andrew Karvonen, Pauline McGuirk and Simon Marvin (The Rise of AI Urbanism in Post-Smart Cities: A Critical Perspective on Urban Artificial Intelligence); Murray Shanahan (Talking about Large Language Models); Matteo Pasquinelli ( The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence); Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI); Nigel Thrift (The ‘Sentient’ City and What it May Portend); Gillian Rose (Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention); Donna Haraway (The Cyborg Manifesto); Bernard Stiegler (Various); Katherine Hayles (How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis); Sylvia Wynter (Briefly); Myria Georgiou (Being Human in Digital Cities); Shannon Mattern (The City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

If you have been fortunate enough to travel to new cities, in countries other than your own, it is more than likely your travels in and through this new city was mediated. Not just in the myriad ways we’ve been discussing so far in this series, but increasingly through a specific kind of media form: ‘platforms’. Your accommodation and sightseeing arranged through Airbnb or TripAdvisor; your local travels negotiated with the help of Google Maps or Citymapper; rides hailed through Uber or Lyft; evening meal delivered via Grubhub or Just Eat. When you are in your own city or locale, you probably use some of these platforms, alongside many others. What exactly constitutes a platform, in general, and in relation to urban life specifically, is somewhat up for grabs. In this episode, we explore different perspectives on platforms as new forms of urban media, whether that be as a form of communication, a type of service, a business model, an infrastructure, or even an institution. The popularity of such platforms is clear, and it is not a stretch to say residents and visitors alike find such media useful for grappling with urban complexities. But platforms have disrupted cities too, whether that be their housing markets, transportation services or local businesses. And this disruption seems to brought forth a situation in which platforms are becoming indispensable infrastructures, and maybe even emerging institutions, of urban life.

Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Negotiating the Platform Pivot: From Participatory Digital Ecosystems to Infrastructures of Everyday Life / Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power); José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Emily West (Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly); Frank Pasquale (From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon); Jathan Sadowski (Who Owns the Future City? Phases of Technological Urbanism and Shifts in Sovereignty); Lizzie Richardson (Platforms, Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal); Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham (The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction); John Bull (Schrodinger’s Cab Firm: Uber’s Existential Crisis); Niels van Doorn (A New Institution on the Block: On Platform Urbanism and Airbnb Citizenship); Douglass C. North (Institutions); Benjamin Bratton (The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

It’s an entirely banal and simple act for many contemporary Londoners: to type, or even dictate, an address or location into a service such as Google Maps, or Citymapper, and be presented with a series of route options: walking, cycling, public transport, driving. And not just these options, but their predicted duration, based on for instance real-time traffic data, and also, perhaps, whether the intended destination will still be open at the predicted time of arrival. User of such services do not tend to reflect on how they are being delivered this information, and when do, they more likely think about the locative service or app. It us less likely they will be aware of the considerable organisational and technical complexities involved in pinpointing geographic location, or the other urban data which allows the city to appear digitally in these ways. In this episode, we explore the complexities involved in the networking of urban location, including but also beyond such simple acts of digitalised, mobile navigation. We will also think through how, experientially, we know urban locations or places via an increasingly digital and networked technological background, including for example search engines, neighbourhood social media, or the act of taking selfies. Such technologies are part of longstanding processes of technological change, through which we have learned and relearned to care for where we are, our place, in the city.

Thinkers discussed: William Gibson (Neuromancer); Mark Graham, Matthew Zook and Andrew Boulton (Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code); Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World); William Mitchell (E-topia: "Urban Life Jim - But Not as We Know It”); Matthew Wilson (Location-Based Services, Conspicuous Mobility, and the Location-Aware Future); Jordan Frith and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Jordan Frith (Smartphones as Locative Media); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Rowan Wilken (Communication Infrastructures and the Contest over Location Positioning); Gerard Goggin (Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life); Shaun Moores (Media, Place and Mobility / Digital Orientations: Non-Media-Centric Media Studies and Non-Representational Theories of Practice); Germaine Halegoua (The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)