What happens when cities become datasets for AI competitions? Sam Hind shows how machine learning’s scoreboards distance practitioners from the real-world impacts of their work.
Games and cities are shaped by protocols and procedures. Drawing on the concept of ‘Gamespace,’ Connor Cook discusses how gamic principles are applied to urban planning and how these might be playfully resisted in turn.
Bringing together artistic interventions and urban acts of resistance under the umbrella of ‘sensor games,’ Christoph Borbach and Max Kanderske explore playful practices that strategically engage with and expose surveillance infrastructures.
The artwork Too Rich City transforms China’s housing crisis into a virtual playground, where NFT properties and augmented reality offer young people alternative forms of urban belonging. Hsin Hsieh both embraces and critiques this artwork.
Play activates our imagination, but it can also fall short in fostering real change. Radmila Radojevic, Simeona Petkova and Núria Arbonés Aran reflect on this tension in relation to rapidly changing neighborhoods.
Are we playing … or are we being played? In this conceptual contribution, Conor Moloney maps the tensions between public and counterpublic, culture and counterculture, play and counterplay in relation to urban experience.
Seeing and knowing a city are not necessarily the same: based on an interactive workshop with international students in London, Photini Vrikki and Giota Alevizou position photographic practices as a critical part of urban play.
From playable to instagrammable: Paul O’Connor, Julian Mcallister Groves, Yingxin Du and Tina Sze Nga Ho trace the ‘colorful’ history of the Choi Hung Public housing estate, and what that might mean for its future.
A children’s menu, a play kitchen, a coloring book: Is that what makes a space #kidsproof? Laura Vermeeren explores how Instagram’s aestheticized content increasingly shapes what family leisure in the city should look like.
Focusing on Istanbul’s Etiler neighborhood, Aylin Kartal follows different waves of urban transformation from the 1950s onwards, connecting street play, urban planning and collective memory.
Reflecting on her experiences of skateboarding in Cairo, New York and other cities as a form of ‘rolling ethnography’, Alia ElKattan positions ‘seeing like a skater’ as a new way to approach urban landscapes.
Contrasting the visibility of playful art installations with a decline in funding for public infrastructures, @alisonstenning.bsky.social discusses how playability of ordinary urban environments is often ignored, devalued and undermined in urban planning.
For @mediapolis.bsky.social, I wrote a short article provoked in part by the jarring visions of play represented by art like this on the one hand and the Play Commission's All To Play For report and the everyday spaces of play that I engage with in my research on the other.
Anthony Albright and Frans Willem Korsten discuss the playful appropriation of a vacant building by a squatters’ group as part of an effort to recapture urban environments from the profit-oriented ‘game’ of waiting by investors.
In our latest Q&A, Erica Stein speaks to İpek Çelik Rappas about her new book Filming in European Cities. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/11/film...
The city is a playground. But is it really? In the intro to the Playable Cities dossier, @carobirdsall.bsky.social, @lindakopitz.bsky.social and Alex Gekker discuss how cities are built, how cities are navigated, and how cities are resisted with and through play.
Proud to present the Dossier „Lightscapes/Nightscapes“ I edited together with my friend and colleague Patricia Pia Bornus for @mediapolis.bsky.social - Full Issue here: www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/07/ligh... Lightscapes/Nightscapes – An Introduction – Mediapolis
Call for Papers: The Synthetic City
We’re putting together a special issue dossier for @mediapolis.bsky.social on 'urban AI' and seek short essays, provocations, creative-critical reflections on synthetic urbanism.
📅 Abstracts due: Nov 30
🔗 Details: mediacitytwg.wordpress.com/2025/10/16/c...
In the latest podcast, @baykurt.bsky.social discusses with @scott-rodgers.bsky.social her longstanding interests in Google as an increasingly influential agent in urban affairs, and her efforts to rethink ‘test-bed urbanism’ through the local.
www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/voic...
What happens when a Brutalist building becomes a screen? Drawing on the Concrete Cinema project in Coventry, Michael Pigott explores the affordances and potentials of outdoor moving image projection for the analysis and critique of architecture. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/conc...
How do residents respond to public art in gentrifying areas? Pauline Panetta investigates attitudes to activist projection art in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro neighborhood and its Lundtoftegade housing complex. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/acti...
Duncan Whitley and Mel Jordan discuss the film Phoenix City 2021 and the potential for site-based artworks to challenge placemaking narratives and the politics of the UK City of Culture.
www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/phoe...
The dossier continues ... Giorgia Rizzioli explores how posthumanist theory helps us to understand the potential for projection activism as a feminist spatial practice. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/proj...
From May 1968 to Black Lives Matter, visual and textual strategies have been central to protest movements. Giuseppe Previtali reflects on projection activism as a tool for bringing new political configurations into being. More to come in this dossier soon! www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/take...
Giorgia Rizzioli introduces the Projection Activism dossier with some reflections on urban projection as a means to assert the right to the city. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/urba...
Stanley Corkin discusses his latest book, Boston Mass-Mediated: Urban Space and Culture in the Digital Age, with Bruce Isaacs. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2025/04/cork...
there is still some time to submit an essay for the UGA SIG Graduate Student Award @scmsurbanism.bsky.social @scmstudies.bsky.social @mediapolis.bsky.social if you have students working on urbanism/geography/architecture topics, please do encourage to submit!
Ipek Celik Rappas and Noelle Griffis select some key texts on Gentrification & Screen Media in the latest addition to our Reading and Resource List section. mediapolisjournal.com/2024/12/gent...
And here's a text version of the interview with Caitlin Bruce. www.mediapolisjournal.com/2024/12/voic...
In the latest episode of our Voices podcast series, Caitlin Bruce discusses with Scott Rodgers her recent book exploring shifting judgments of graffiti culture in urban Mexico, and how the book has taken on new life as socially-engaged scholarship.
www.mediapolisjournal.com/2024/12/voic...
