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/)

As you move about myriad city spaces, you will probably recognise the regularity and intensity with which you are being exposed to a whole plethora of brands. Perhaps most noticeable will be all manner of advertising display. Ads plastered across roadside billboards or building walls, integrated into street furniture, consuming an entire section of a metro station, on – or even entirely covering – a bus or a tram, or spotted on private motor vehicles with no other apparent purpose but pulling around a hoarding boasting ad display. But brands appear in the city not only in advertising. Urban environments are increasingly understood as key venues of ‘brand building’ and ‘brand management’. These emerging techniques are often highly multisensory, involving the more general construction of brands through a combination of visuality, tactility, taste and smell. They are being applied to everything from large-scale urban events, to architectural design, to retail shops, to ordinary consumer objects. Altogether, the proliferation of brands raises questions about the highly commoditised nature of the cities we live in, not to mention how we might respond politically. In this episode, we explore different dimensions of what we will call ‘urban brandscapes’: how urban environments more generally are infused with branded character, feel and atmospheres.

Thinkers discussed: David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); Anne Cronin (Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban / Calculative Spaces: Cities, Market Relations and the Commercial Vitalism of the Outdoor Advertising Industry / Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms); Emma Arnold (Sexualised Advertising and the Production of Space in the City); Iain Borden (Hoardings); Kurt Iveson (Branded Cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape); Marc Gobé (Emotional Branding: A New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People); Liz Moor (The Rise of Brands); Van Troi Tran (Thirst in the Global Brandscape: Water, Milk and Coke at the Shanghai World Expo); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form); Scott Lash and Celia Lury (Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things)

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

Arriving into a large city by train, metro or subway, it's very likely that the concrete or brick sidings you see out the window are covered in graffiti. As you make your way off the train, into the streets you might see all manner of stylised inscriptions and names, written in black permanent marker on buildings and street furniture; or murals painted into their material location with a precision suggesting time, and even permission, being given to complete the work. You may value all these markings on urban surfaces, seeing them as part of the vibrant public culture of the city – or even just cool. Or you may distinguish the value of some markings from others. Perhaps those tags, made in permanent marker, don’t meet your criteria for art. Institutional authorities, such as the transport police, or the local government, will certainly have their own fine distinctions too, between who might mark, and what may be marked, on urban surfaces. Writing and drawing on walls is an ancient urban practice, but its status today remains ambiguous. For some, it represents criminal activity or simple vandalism; for others it is to be celebrated: as subversive art forms, often giving voice to those on the urban margins; but also, increasingly, as art associated with an emergent, gritty, hipster-esque urban aesthetic. In this episode, we explore the evolution of graffiti and street art as urban media that have travelled from the streets into galleries, circulating online images, merchandise, commercial graphic design and even advertising.

Thinkers discussed: Kurt Iveson (Publics and the City); Anthony Lee (Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco's Public Murals); Joe Austin (Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City / More to See Than a Canvas in a White Cube: For an Art in the Streets); Virág Molnár (Street Art and the Changing Urban Public Sphere); Luke Dickens (Pictures on Walls? Producing, Pricing and Collecting the Street Art Screen Print); Alison Young (Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination); Mark Halsey & Ben Pederick (The Game of Fame: Mural, Graffiti, Erasure)

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

If you live in a city which is changing rapidly, construction sites might begin to seem like processes of erasing, copying and pasting, remixing or remediating the city. And it also may be that the new buildings being put in place have more and more forms of media or communication, such as illumination or interactive screens, built directly into their exterior surfaces. The apparent embedding of media forms into architecture has become one of the most prominent themes in recent debates about the relationships of media and cities. While buildings have long been communicative, novel uses of illumination, screen interfaces and inventive building materials seem to be underscoring a new age where buildings are media. And yet, the interconnections of media and architecture run even deeper than this. Not only might we consider sites whose explicit function is some kind of communication – such as museums, art galleries or libraries – but also the buildings inhabited by media industries, sometimes known as 'media houses'. And then from there, we could observe that architecture more broadly is a discipline building spaces for communication in general, both domestic as well as of labour and organization. As a discipline, architecture itself is defined by mediation, from the age of print, to the computational practice it has increasingly become. In this episode, we explore just some of the numerous intersections of media and architecture, with a broad conception of architecture, both as practice and realised design, as both mediated and mediating.

Thinkers discussed: Friedrich Kittler (The City is a Medium); Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Scott McQuire (Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space); Zlatan Krajina (Negotiating the Mediated City: Everyday Encounters with Public Screens); Dave Colangelo (The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media / We Live Here: Media Architecture as Critical Spatial Practice); Adam Greenfield (Against the Smart City); Shannon Mattern (A City is Not a Computer); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Staffan Ericson and Kristina Riegert (Media Houses:  Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality); Staffan Ericson (The Interior of the Ubiquitous: Broadcasting House, London); Sven-Olav Wallenstein (Looping Ideology: The CCTV Center in Beijing); Reinhold Martin (The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space); Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler (Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office).

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

There is an old adage about cinema: that it may seem a principally visual medium; but in fact, its soundtrack and sound design are just as important. So it is with our more general encounter with the city. While it may seem that we are surrounded and even overwhelmed by an assemblage of visual inputs, our experience of the city is multi-sensory. And sound, in particular, is fundamental in constituting how we experience cities. People walking, standing and conversing; vehicles moving, stopping and reversing; pounding construction equipment; amplified music and announcements; pedestrian crossing beacons; the calls of birds and other animals; the reverberations of hallways and rooms. These and other audible effects and affects shape our urban experience, a fact not at all obscure for sight impaired urban travellers and explorers. In this episode, we consider the urban soundscape both generally, but also via personal sound devices, perhaps the most noted, and explicit kinds of sonic urban mediation. Such technologies have often been framed as a way to ‘manage’ the urban experience: to limit, cope or otherwise make more pleasant its noise, complexity, drudgery, dreariness, excitement and strangeness. Another perspective, however, is that such technologies are as much about urban engagement as disengagement; ways of re-modulating, remixing, reformatting or retuning our interface with urban life.

Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Sounds Different: Listening to the Proliferating Spaces of Technological Modernity in the City); Martin Heidegger (The age of the world picture); Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the World); Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction); Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Erving Goffman (Behavior in public places); Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman); Michael Bull (Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life / Sound moves: iPod culture and urban experience); Matthew Jordan (Becoming Quiet: On Mediation, Noise Cancellation, and Commodity Quietness); David Beer (Tune Out: Music, Soundscapes and the Urban Mise-en-scène); William Mitchell (Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City); Betsey Biggs (Like it was a Movie: Cinematic Listening as Public Art); Allan Watson and Dominiqua Drakeford-Allen (‘Tuning Out’ or ‘Tuning in’? Mobile Music Listening and Intensified Encounters with the City).

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

One way or another, you most likely watch television in some form. You might use a device explicitly called a ‘television’, sited in a room in which televisions tend to be, such as a lounge or family room. Or perhaps you use a remediated version of television: via a device such as a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or even projector. And the content you’re watching may itself be only loosely television: it may be live content (e.g. news, sports, or a a live-to-air programme); or perhaps your taking in programming via an on-demand streaming platform, or even just watching video clips. Regardless of these variations and contingencies, according to some scholars, this mediated situation has important technological and cultural connections with the suburb. Not just the suburb as a location, but as: a historically specific form of urban development; as an archetype for living; and above all, as an emergent configuration of mediation in the modern urbanising world. In this episode, we explore the ways this may have transpired, and may still endure today, from television in the postwar period, to its more recent and ambient urban appearances across urban spaces.

Thinkers discussed: Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form); Marylin Strathern (Future Kinship and the Study of Culture); Delores Hayden (Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Jürgen Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere); Anna McCarthy (Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space); Marc Augé (Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity); Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-Games: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Media Uses); Lynn Spigel (Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs); Roger Keil (Suburban Constellations); Francesco Cassetti (Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation).

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

If you’ve ridden public transport over a number of years, you might think printed material is declining. You may have once been surrounded by people immersed in newspapers and books, but more and more people seem to be cradling smart phones, tablets or laptops. Playing video games, watching downloaded on-demand programmes, listening to music, using their camera as a mirror, or catching up on work. But if you look a little harder, you will see the material traces of an enduring print urbanism: a panoply of banal or ambient texts such as signage, labels and messages; some people still carrying on reading books, magazines or commuter papers; and as for the others, using digital devices to read online news or an ebook, are they not undertaking a practice intimately connected with urban print culture? Even the act of riding public transport itself depends on a huge amount of published and printed information informing the operators, bureaucracy and expertise running the system. The relationships of print and the city run deep. In this episode, we take a long view, exploring how these relationships of print and the city can highlight the most elemental features of mediated urbanism today.

Thinkers discussed: Shannon Mattern (Code + Clay … Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man); Mario Carpo (Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism); David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); John Nerone (The Mythology of the Penny Press); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Carole O’Reilly (Journalism and the Changing Act of Observation: Writing about Cities in the British press 1880–1940); Scott Rodgers (The Architectures of Media Power: Editing, the Newsroom, and Urban Public Space); Walter Bagehot (Charles Dickens); Peter Fritzsche (Reading Berlin 1900); Rolf Linder (The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School); Robert Park (The Natural History of the Newspaper); Ursula Rao (News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions); Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development); Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media); Scott Rodgers (Digitizing Localism: Anticipating, Assembling and Animating a ‘Space’ for UK Hyperlocal Media Production).

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

When you move through the city, you move through mediation. This is because what we call media and what we call the city (or the urban) are in a nexus: they are intimately connected. On the one hand, the practices, the rhythms and the motilities of urban living compel certain uses, exposures and desires in relation to media technologies, forms and industries. On the other hand, these media forms, infrastructures, and industries inhabit – and are increasingly ‘built-into’ – urban environments. Many might quite reasonably point out that media represent the city and urban life, in film, television, literature, news, video games and apps. In this opening episode, however, we introduce a focus on the city itself is a mediating environment. We begin to think how, through the urban we can find new ways to think about media, and how, through media, we can find new ways to think about the city. The aim here is modest. Rather than presenting a general framework for understanding the mediated city in the past, now and forever more, we start with four points of reference. These will loosely guide how we’ll think about the mediated city in the episodes to come: surfaces, depths, fragments and publics.

Thinkers discussed: Simon Wreckert (Google Maps Hacks); Scott McQuire (An Archaeology of the Media City: Towards a Critical Cultural History of Mediated Urbanism); Shannon Mattern (Deep Mapping the Media City / Code + Clay … Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media); David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); Iain Borden (Hoardings); Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extension of Man); Friedrich Kittler (The City is a Medium); Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life); Erving Goffman (Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings); William Mitchell (E-topia: "Urban Life Jim - But Not as We Know It”) Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva ( Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World); Kurt Iveson (Publics and the City); Michael Warner (Publics and Counterpublics)

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers (https://soundcloud.com/rodgers_scott/the-mediated-city-theme). License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)