In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Myria Georgiou.

Myria is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been working for more than two decades on the mediation of identity and citizenship. Myria’s work has spanned interests in: the relationships of media and cities; how media are implicated in identity construction for diasporic populations and migrants; and how diversity and difference are represented in the media.

Our discussion centred on Myria’s recent book Being Human in Digital Cities. It is a book which explores the curious resurrection of a kind of ‘people centrism’ in discourses about digital cities, analysing the rise of competing claims to urban humanity by a range of different actors, from technology companies to local governments to ordinary urban citizens.

Our discussion provides a good overview of the book’s thematic attention to three varieties of digital humanism in cities: popular, demotic, and critical. We also touch on the where Myria sees her arguments in relation to broader contemporary debates about the ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’.

This interview, which was recorded on 7 May 2024, is Episode 6 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

In this episode, we speak with Rebecca Ross, director of the graphic communication design programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her writing and practice are both interdisciplinary, extending from graphic and communication design to media studies, urban studies, the history of technology and creative computing. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer, a publication which explores contemporary urbanism in the tradition of radical pamphleteering. Her work has also been seen in London’s public spaces, notably her 2015 digital billboard installation, London is Changing.

That installation is discussed in the podcast, but before we get there, we begin with a fascinating discussion of postcodes, as a form of spatial media. We dive into this with some detailed definitional and historical discussion initially, but then open out into a conversion about on the everyday life of postcodes, as a kind of social and cultural innovation, not to mention a shared spatial language between humans and machines.

Midway through our chat, we switched gears to talk about graphic design and communication as a practice and way of thinking, and the paradoxical distance that discipline oftentimes seems to have from academic media and cultural studies. This is unfortunate, since, as we discussed, the former provides ways of thinking about urban media in everyday life (for instance in the fine-grained ways typography shows up in urban environments), as well as how we come to know ‘the city’ as a larger entity (here Rebecca talks about the periodic London Plan, and in particular its public consultation processes).

We end by discussing Rebecca’s recent writing on how academic publishing could become more public, by working with media as much as writing about it.

This interview, which was recorded on 5 March 2024, is Episode 5 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Monica Degen and Gillian Rose.

Monica Degen is Professor of Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, in the UK. Her research focuses on the practices and politics of experiential urbanism. Largely through ethnographic approaches, Monica’s work explores how multi-sensory, temporal and emotional dimensions not only shape how we live in cities, but also, increasingly how planners, architects, place-branding professionals and others design them.

Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Gillian is well-known across humanities and the social sciences for her book Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, which published its fifth edition in 2022. She identifies first and foremost as a cultural geographer, and her multi-faceted work has centred on the techniques and politics of knowledge production about places. Most recently, she has devoted much of her attention to how digital visualising technologies are shifting urban life and its spatial and temporal organisation.

Our discussion centred on Monica and Gillian’s recent book The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change. It is a book which explores the coming together of new digital technologies and urban branding, and specifically how these are increasingly being geared toward new kinds of sensory, bodily experiences, in and across different urban sites and scales.

Not only do we discuss the central arguments of the book, or its fascinating cases studies. We also touch on the trajectories of work that brought them to write it in the first place, and where their work is heading next.

This interview, which was recorded on 1 November 2023, is Episode 4 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)