The Mediated City 10 (2025 New Release): Sentient Cities

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/)