Beyond the smart city: a communications-led agenda for twentyfirst century cities

Abstract

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 cit..