a journal of cities and culture
Mike Van Esler speaks with Helen Morgan Parmett about her new book Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States
Merrill Schleier and Paul Newland extend the conversation from their new edited collection Cinematic Starchitecture through a Q&A with select contributors.
AI has arrived in cities, but rarely as spectacle. This introduction to The Synthetic City dossier asks how agency gets attributed, what AI models learn and thereby settle in advance, and why the synthetic city may turn out to be more banal than dramatic.
What happens when municipal AI stops assisting decisions and starts making them? Drawing on scenario-based interviews with eleven Quebec city managers, Leandry Jieutsa traces a drift toward “self-operating governance”, where officials supervise algorithmic infrastructures rather than run them.
Decided, datafied without consent, and left out of debate: Luke Hespanhol, Michiel de Lange and Nanna Verhoeff identify a “triple actionability gap” in urban AI, and propose Civic Urban AI as a pedagogical counter-narrative.
NEOM promised a city with its own “digital air”. Mehdi Ghassemi and David Murakami Wood read the cognitive-city’s promotional artefacts to show how atmosphere, consent and the digital twin were settled before any resident arrived, and what persists now the that brand has receded.
Not HAL 9000, but an “icebox on wheels” delivering groceries. Miguel Valdez argues that utopian and dystopian imaginaries of superhuman AI do the same work, drawing attention from the narrowly intelligent robots already negotiating city streets, and from what it takes to make meaning with them.
If the night is barely seen, can it be understood by algorithms? Jess Reia argues that the opacities and refusals of nocturnal life expose the limits of machine learning, and makes the case for expanding what counts as data after dark.
What would a digital twin look like if it were designed to stay incomplete? Eric Gordon, Loretta Lees, Carolyn White and Chang Xiao imagine an AI agent-enabled twin of Boston’s Fenway neighbourhood, built from community conversation rather than sensor feeds.
Generative AI turns architectural history into style. Joel McKim traces how image models produce a “generic pastness” that suits luxury renders and reactionary city-building alike, and how some practitioners are pushing them somewhere else entirely.
The synthetic city has an orbital dimension. Fran Meissner follows the chain of AI mediations linking Earth-observing satellites to urban planning, arguing that what can be sensed from orbit increasingly determines what can be acted on below.
Wendy Wenxin Zhang, the 2026 recipient of the SCMS Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG’s annual Graduate Student Essay Award, deploys multifaceted research methods in a Deep Dive on the mediated and technological facets of fisheries in China.
In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Chris Lukinbeal.
[An audio version of this interview has been published simultaneously on the Mediapolis Now podcast.] Scott Rodgers: Chris, your book Cinematic Cartography brings together…
