Publicly Sited

The Mediated City 07 (2025 Re-release): Urban Brandscapes

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/)

The Mediated City 06 (2025 Re-release): Street Arts

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/)

The Mediated City 05 (2025 Re-release): Media Architectures

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/)

The Mediated City 04 (2025 Re-release): Urban Soundtracks

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/)

The Mediated City 03 (2025 Re-release): Suburban Screens

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/)

The Mediated City 02 (2025 Re-release): Print Urbanism

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/)

The Mediated City 01 (2025 Re-release): Surfaces, Depths, Fragments, Publics

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/)

Publicly Sited Update: The Mediated City re-release with new Sentient Cities episode

In this short update, I'm announcing the re-release of The Mediated City podcast series, coming out today. And, on top of that, the new release of this series' missing its final, 10th episode on Sentient Cities. In that final episode I hope will we a timely contribution to all the talk, concern, and hype about AI, in which we’re seeing renewed debates about the many forms of computational agency that have become normal parts of urban living, not to mention questions about whether cities can think.

If you’ve not listened to The Mediated City before, maybe now is the time. If you have, perhaps you might have to a re-listen. Or at least, keep your eyes and ears open for the final new episode on Sentient Cities.

Media, Technology & Culture 10 (3rd Edition): Extractive Technologies

As we come to the end of this series, we seem to be circling around an important contemporary theme: the emergent scepticism about digital platforms. This scepticism is not only about the murky decision-making power of digital platforms’ technical systems, discussed in our last episode. It’s also that there is increasing awareness about their operation as private entities. Entities that do not exist for our own individual benefit. Entities which, even if they have some value as mediums of publicity, or have some public utility, are not publicly-owned. Put simply, whatever they say about their mission, digital services and platforms - ranging from Facebook to Google to Amazon to Airbnb to Uber to Open AI - are first and foremost about making money. Making money in a way that relies substantially on extracting data from and about us: what we do, when, where and how we do things, as well as our explicit signals about why. Often, this extraction also enables an approximation of who we might be. It is true that data mining can divulge intimate personal details about us. But what is principally happening in such processes is the construction of user models, a statistical profile which we match, often fairly precisely. A model of a situated user that can be targeted for advertising, or marketing, or triggered in various ways to remain faithful to the platform. And when users are faithful to these platforms, they generate yet more data for extraction. In this episode, we consider how these insights have inspired a revival of sorts amongst political economy and Marxist approaches to media, towards a new critique of digital or platform capitalism. But is this capitalism? Or is it, as suggested speculatively in a number of critical perspectives, something worse.

Thinkers Discussed: Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Tarleton Gillespie (The Politics of Platforms); Jose van Dijck (The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media); Fernando van der Vlist, Anne Helmond and Fabian Ferrari (Big AI: Cloud infrastructure Dependence and the Industrialisation of Artificial Intelligence); Jose van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Wall (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); McKenzie Wark (Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?); Jodi Dean (Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Forclosure of Politics / The Neofeudalising Tendency of Communicative Capitalism); Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism); Joel Kotkin (The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class); Evgeny Morozov (Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason); Maïa Pal and Neal Harris (Capital is Dead. Long Live Capital! A Political Marxist Analysis of Digital Capitalism and Infrastructure); Clive Barnett (The Consolations of ‘Neoliberalism’).

Media, Technology & Culture 09 (3rd Edition): Predictive Technologies

There is now widespread awareness of, suspicion about, and even opposition to the notion that computers seem to think. Or if not think, at least can learn things and then make decisions without our intervention, or indeed without us even knowing about it. Mysterious entities with names like ‘algorithms’, ‘bots’ and increasingly ‘AI’ seem to be making more and more decisions for us around welfare payment claims, the fastest travel route at a given moment, what shopping coupons are made available to you, or the neighbourhoods police patrol. These entities are also pervasive in media and communications. They help inform what movies you watch, the posts you see in your social media feeds, the way a matchmaking website pairs you with others, the overall summary you might draw from a search query, or what your music streaming over the past year reveals about cultural taste. Despite a more recent tendency to label these and other developments as ‘AI’, many scholars – not just in critical media studies, but fields like computer science – are keen to remind us that this is not intelligence, per se. Instead, we are seeing are mimicries of intelligence, which are in fact advanced forms of statistical prediction, based on enormous amounts of collected data, both personal and environmental. These reminders are helpful, though it still leaves murky how all of this happens. All this computational decision making, and its capacities at deep learning: it’s all so hidden; so obscure. In this episode, we think about the growing role of predictive technologies in shaping contemporary media cultures, from the early rise of apps and personalised ‘filter bubbles’ to the rather ordinary recommendation systems we rely on today. We also grapple with growing concerns for how deep structural biases around race, class, gender and sexuality are embedded into and reinforced by the way algorithms – such as those enabling facial recognition technologies – actually work. But we will also ask: is the adequate political response to just roll up our sleeves, pry these predictive black boxes open, reveal their internal biases, and perhaps correct them? Or it is that we instead need to better understand the problematic social and cultural conditions from which these predictive technologies sprout up, get nurtured and grow?

Thinkers Discussed: Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff (The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet); Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You); Murray Shanahan (Talking about Large Language Models); Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb (Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence); Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas (Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture); Raymond Williams (Keywords); Daniela Varela Martinez's and Anne Kaun (The Netflix Experience: A User-Focused Approach to the Netflix Recommendation Algorithm); Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism); Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code); Fabio Chiusi (Automating Society); Axel Bruns (Are Filter Bubbles Real?); Frank Pasquale (The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information); Taina Bucher (If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics); Donna Haraway (Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective); Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence).