School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemBeyond the smart city: a communications-led agenda for twentyfirst century cities(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2023-06-27)Digital media technologies, from networked sensors to large video screens and mobile devices, have become pervasive urban infrastructure in the twentyfirst century. The dominant framework for understanding the integration of digital technology into urban space has been smart city discourse. In this article, I will argue that this framework, as it has so far been articulated, is inadequate to maximizing the social potential of digital urban infrastructure. Digital urban infrastructure not only changes how cities look, but how they function as social settings. I will propose the ‘communicative city’ as an alternative framework for thinking about digitally mediated cities. The communicative city offers an opportunity to consider networked urban space as a test case in which key problematics of contemporary globalized media are materially instantiated. It is the frontier zone at which everyday experiences of embodied media and new forms of communicative agency collide with powerful logics of tracing and tracking, and the widespread deployment of new forms of automation and machine learning as techniques of urban governance.
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ItemArchitecture, media and spaces of urban communication(Routledge, 2020)This chapter provides with buildings and material urban structures as symbolic resources that themselves “communicate” certain values, or about urban space as a “space of appearance” in which fundamental communicative processes of speaking and acting in public take place. The location of key buildings and their relation to each other gave material form to political hierarchy and social relations. The capacity for particular urban structures and material settings to endure over time has served to anchor social practices and political processes across generations, underpinning the assertion by architect Aldo Rossi that the built environment is a critical dimension of a society’s collective memory. The rise of urban planning as a profession, alongside the blunt force of developments in infrastructure engineering, transport and communication technologies, and, above all, the gravitational pull of profit-based urban development settings, all worked to reduce the capacity of architects to shape the modern city in practice.
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ItemSpaces of Communication(Routledge, 2020)This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. The book focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions, while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. The book focuses specifically on the communicative possibilities of a distinctive aspect of the contemporary media city, namely large video screens situated in urban public spaces. It also focuses more directly on the different ways that digital media platforms have become a new infrastructure shaping the contemporary communicative city.
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ItemCommunicative Cities and Urban Space(Routledge, 2021)Cities have long been recognized as key sites for fostering new communication practices. However, as contemporary cities experience major changes, how do diverse inhabitants encounter each other? How do cities remember? What is the role of the built environment in fostering sites for public communication in a digital era? Communicative Cities and Urban Space offers a critical analysis of contemporary changes in the relation between urban space and communication. This volume seeks to understand the situatedness of contemporary communication practices in diverse contexts of urban life, and to explore digitized urban space as a historically specific communicative environment. The essays in this book collectively propose that the concept of the ‘communicative city’ is a productive frame for rethinking the above questions in the context of 21st-century ‘media cities’. They challenge us to reconsider qualities such as openness, autonomy and diversity in contemporary urban communication practices, and to identify factors that might expand or constrict communicative possibilities. Students and scholars of communication studies and urban studies would benefit from this book.
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ItemAmbient culture: Making sense of everyday participation in open, public space(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020-09-25)Unlike art and performance within interior spaces like the museum or gallery, the experience of culture in an urban and networked public space presents new challenges for cultural interpretation and evaluation. In this chapter, we draw on research conducted at Melbourne’s Federation Square to discuss how the concept of ambience helps make sense of both the production and experience of public culture. The first section introduces the changing settings for culture: from an almost exclusively interior presentation to an increasingly mediated, networked and outdoor experience. The second section situates this exteriorization of culture in terms of a shifting urban environment that is increasingly interwoven with media networks. The third section describes different forms of engagement and problematizes traditional expectations of cultural experience. Finally, we conclude with a reflection on these findings and draw out implications for the theorization, cultural programming and evaluation of cultural participation in public space.
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ItemThe city without qualities: Inventing urban computing(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2022-11)Smart city approaches which seek to utilise large-scale flows of urban data have become an exemplar of contemporary geomedia. In this article, I trace the migration of systems analysis and computational modelling from the RAND Institute’s pioneering nuclear war scenarios in the 1950s to their application to a broader set of social and urban problems in the 1960s. Focusing on the influential New York City-RAND Institute established in 1969, I analyse the socio-political context of data-driven approaches to urbanism and urban planning. I argue that the data-driven decision-making enabled by urban computing constitutes a critical threshold in terms of who is able to speak with authority about the city. This provides a productive lens for articulating the early history of urban computation with contemporary debates about smart cities and the ‘platformization’ of urban digital infrastructure.
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ItemLight Art and the Aesthetics of Urban Appropriation(Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers, 2022-05-31)This book brings together a host of academics who seek to expand the notion of a "communicative city" by looking at the role that art and public culture play in the rapidly expanding global landscape.
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ItemUrban Digital Infrastructure, Smart Cityism, and Communication: Research Challenges for Urban E-Planning(IGI Global, 2021-07-01)This article takes stock of the smart city concept by locating it in relation to both a longer history of urban computing, as well as more recent projects exploring the vexed issues of participatory urbanism, data ethics and urban surveillance. The author argues for the need to decouple thinking regarding the potential of urban digital infrastructure from the narrow and often technocentric discourse of 'smart cityism'. Such a decoupling will require continued experimentation with both practical models and conceptual frameworks, but will offer the best opportunity for the ongoing digitization of cities to deliver on claims of 'empowering' urban inhabitants.
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ItemAmbient Images(The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2021)
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