Knowing urban environments in the digitally mediated age

Introduction

Urbanisation and knowledge production have long been co-constitutive processes. Cities do not merely host human, non-human, and other forms of material life; they are also epistemic environments – that is, spaces through which particular forms of knowing, sensing, and governing the world are produced, tested, and legitimised. Urban life has always been mediated by layers of information, inscription, and interpretation, even when those layers were not computational. As Mattern (2017) reminds us, the “ambient intelligences” of contemporary data-driven urbanism are not unprecedented innovations, but rather the latest iteration of a much older condition of knowledge making in cities. The city, in this sense, has always been an epistemic infrastructure that has been entangled with and enabling of other knowledge technologies.

In this issue, we present a set of contributions that challenge increasingly digitally mediated forms of urbanism by critically examining the epistemic infrastructures and processes that sustain them. Our starting point is acknowledging and understanding that the urban environments to be known and observed are very much the environments that shape our observation, epistemology, tools, and methods. In other words, “the urban environment” is understood as an epistemological lens itself whereby its mediation by sensing and/or data technologies are also generative of urban epistemologies. In this conceptualisation, we challenge an understanding of the urban environment in its “objective form” and instead consider the knowledge created as situated and/or embodied. The title of this Special Issue, “Knowing Urban Environments in a Digitally Mediated Age,” captures this duality whereby urban environments, which are increasingly enmeshed with digital technologies at varying scales, are both the object of knowledge and simultaneously the subject, as they are also doing the work of knowing.

Together with the emergence of smart city discourses around the world since late 2000s, data technologies have gained an undisputable and irresistible dominance in urban planning. While these initiatives were not unprecedented, within these new computational regimes – together with vectors of speed, volume, and automation – there comes an epistemological authority that is often undisputed. In this sense, the datafied city of the present is not merely a continuation or a rearticulation of older epistemic and political commitments. This can be extended for instance to the aesthetic forms that dominate the ways the datafied city is viewed and understood – consider the “tech blue” that runs through the visual discourse of smart city imaginaries (Rose and Willis, 2019), the web interfaces designed to maximise user experience for mapping and data management, or the general appification of mobile-data ecosystems that now form the basis for many interactions between us and the city.

This special issue is situated among this backdrop of our “digitally mediated age,” a condition recognised widely and not least by geographers who have urged us to consider the many ways that urban geographies are variously shaped from, of, and by digital media technologies (Ash et al., 2018). The contributions brought together here contest the assumed authority of how the city is known through technologies and practices, and in particular, help open up further questions and possibilities around how we might know the urban through situated and partial knowledges that are no less technological but rather follow different epistemological logics and traditions. In short, they challenge the methods, aesthetics, and dominant knowledge systems for how we know cities today.

The dominant epistemologies and aesthetics of urban knowledge making – rooted in the technocratic rationalities of objectivity and optimisation on the one hand, and the traditions of quantified data visualisation on the other – privilege certain forms of visibility while obscuring others. The contributions gathered here respond to this condition by asking how we might know cities otherwise, and who this might matter for. Each paper offers a creative and critical engagement with data and digital technologies as both material and method, exploring how alternative practices of measurement, mapping, and representation can unsettle the epistemic infrastructures of the technocratic city. In doing so, the articles also resist the allure that the digital present must follow a unified trajectory. Taken together, these contributions gesture towards a more reflexive and generative politics of knowledge – one that foregrounds uncertainty, unwieldiness, relationality, and imagination as necessary dimensions of urban understanding.

Although the smart city seems to be now an outdated term, as we are on the verge of “AI urbanism” (Cugurullo et al., 2023), the smartness mandate (Halpern and Mitchell, 2023) still prevails, whereby ubiquitous technologies are viewed as the most superior ways of knowing, planning, and managing the urban. This issue invites readers to resist these claims in order to think otherwise about the technological practices of the present. Each paper challenges what it means to be “technologically advanced” or “progressive” and asks readers to attend to the multiplicity of ways in which cities are sensed, narrated, and lived through and with technologies. Ultimately, the issue asks us to consider what becomes possible when we refuse to take digitally mediated knowledge of the city at face value.

Knowing urban environments

Against the epistemological claims of smart data technologies, treating knowing as complex and ambiguous opens up a set of intriguing questions: Why do we want to know? Who wants to know? Knowing what? Furthermore, when these questions are thought together alongside the likewise unsettled concept of the urban, the discussion becomes even more challenging as the co-constitutive relations between the urban and epistemology reveal. As Reinhold Martin (2016) argues via Foucault’s concept of the apparatus (dispositif), the “urban” is not simply a spatial or demographic condition, but a way of knowing the world – a performative truth produced through discursive and material networks. The urban apparatus is thus the ensemble of relations, infrastructures, and representations through which the urban becomes intelligible and functions as a political, economic, and spatial strategy. In this sense, the urban is not merely an object of knowledge but an epistemic condition in its own right – a “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 2003) that organises how and what can be known. Martin’s approach diverges from perspectives that frame the city as a distributed network of “actants” or as a “category of practice” (Wachsmuth, 2014). For him, such formulations overlook the hegemony of the urban as a mode of cognition – that is, a historically produced and materially constituted assemblage that brings the urban itself into being. The apparatus, then, is both the site and the product of knowing: it structures the epistemic terrain within which the city is rendered visible, governable, and meaningful. As such, how we understand and know the urban, as well as the tools we use to do so, is also what makes the urban become. The urban is a way of knowing, but it is also what we are trying to know.

The question of what it means to know – and what forms of knowledge are made possible or foreclosed by different epistemic frameworks – has long preoccupied designers, theorists, and urbanists. Busbea (2020) reminds us that many of the “smart” and “responsive” technologies of our present moment were already imagined in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet designers of that era were not simply focused on technical efficiency; they were asking more fundamental questions about the human condition in the face of emergent technological systems. For them, to know meant to participate, to be implicated within dynamic and changeable relations between the designer and the user, the producer and the consumer, the inhabitant and the environment. Participation and interactivity were conceived less as measurable outcomes than as sites of ongoing negotiation – processes through which the human and the technology continually redefined one another. Whereas in today’s data-driven urbanism, what it means to gather data and what to do with this data are an afterthought since amassing abundance of data produced by computational mechanisms is mostly the end, not the means. Welisch’s (2025) article in this issue, for example, brings back these questions of the reiterative and changeable relation between the designer and the user and works with the subjective and phenomenological aspects of urban life by foregrounding urban dwellers’ sensorial experiences while also using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered devices, “the Data Poets.” In so doing, he both critically discusses his design of the technical object, that is, the Data Poets (“knowing”), and looks into how the urban environments are known socio-ecologically.

This conception of knowledge resonates with the emergence of second-order cybernetics in the same period (1960s–70s). Developed as a critique of the positivist and militaristic assumptions of first-order cybernetics, those who adhered to the second order re-situated the observer within the system, rendering knowing a reflexive and performative act. Systems were understood as organisationally closed yet structurally open – capable of responding to external change through internal reconfiguration. In architectural and urban terms, this reorientation challenged deterministic, linear models of control, and instead proposed cities as complex, adaptive systems shaped by recursive relations between internal organisation and external conditions (Tavmen, 2023). Knowing, in this view, is never neutral: it is embodied, interpretive, and situated within the very processes it seeks to understand. Neither was knowledge the primary goal of the system, as some second-order cyberneticians went so far as to describe certain classes of complex systems as unknowable in principle (Bridle, 2022: 187). As such, the data-driven all-knowing “smart city” paradigm revives mainly the first-order logics of instrumental reason although second-order cybernetics offers a more critical and process-oriented epistemology – one that foregrounds reflexivity, contingency, and the political stakes of observation itself (c.f. Krivy, 2016).

Taken together, these genealogies – cybernetic and Foucauldian – illuminate distinct yet complementary understandings of knowing. The first emphasises relationality, reflexivity, and participation; the second, discursive power, materiality, and the politics of intelligibility. Both unsettle the epistemological authority claimed by contemporary smart technologies and challenge the assumption that knowing the city is a matter of ever-more-precise data or computation. Instead, they invite us to think of knowing as an entangled, situated, and contested process – one that produces as much as it perceives, and that is always already embedded in the social, material, and political life of the urban. This brings us to the final aspect of contesting the dominance of data-driven epistemologies: acknowledging that human knowledge is just one kind of knowledge and that there are multiple “ecologies of knowledge” which go beyond human knowledge or human’s validation and acknowledgement as forms of knowledge (Taboada and Turner, 2024). This way of understanding knowledge does not involve striving to integrate diverse forms of knowledge in order to construct all-knowing systems; rather, it entails cultivating humility in how we understand and classify knowledge. Griffith’s (2025) contribution to this Special Issue foregrounds this matter most clearly. Even when more-than-human actors were accounted for in the project design, their subjectivities manifested in unpredictable ways that disrupted the functioning of smart devices. For instance, sensors deployed in the field were subject to unforeseen encounters, such as becoming a nesting site for a cockroach or being damaged by a deer. Griffiths, therefore, conceptualises the complexity and entanglement of ecological systems through the notion of unwieldiness, a term that reflects epistemic humility by foregrounding their resistance to prediction and control.

In bringing these perspectives into conversation, this special issue asks how we might know cities otherwise – how creative, critical, and data-based practices can generate epistemologies that refuse closure and resist capture, foregrounding instead the ambiguities, frictions, and pluralities that constitute urban life. In addition to these epistemic questions, we also open up the concept of “environment” to debate.

Creative interventions

Knowing urban environments in a digitally mediated age need not be a utilitarian exercise of finding meaning through statistical and cartographic techniques, nor the practice of identifying knowledge-making glitches within these now digitalised systems (Leszczynski and Elwood, 2022). As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, knowledge can and does emerge from a creative praxis that is no less interesting, useful, or enriching, but nonetheless sits outside of the urban apparatus (Martin, 2016). Following the so-called “creative turn” in the social sciences (Kara, 2015), or the creative re(turn) in human geography and the geohumanities (Barbarossa et al., 2023; Hawkins, 2019; Von Benzon et al., 2021), each paper highlights how playful and experimental methods can deliver new knowledges, aesthetics, and perspectives, which are especially valuable for those involved in producing them. In particular, the papers respond in creative ways to the “new” questions of the urban (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Merrifield, 2014), that is, how global flows of people, technologies, and capital are transforming urban environments and offer a challenge to the kinds of city life to emerge from the datafication logics of platform urbanism (Barns, 2019).

Crucially, the Special Issue papers reclaim “creativity” from the absurdities of the creative economy (Mould, 2018) and offer alternatives to our techno-political moment that are both grounded in a radical politics of epistemological resistance and chime with the spirit of experimentation and speculative design. This is clearly evident in the “making,” “hacking,” and “tinkering” of the technologies and their applications discussed, in which ethics of care and political consideration has been made as to how and why to build something and whom (human and non-human) it might affect in its operation. In summary, they represent a praxis of creativity, creative both in thought and in practice.

Griffiths (2025), for instance, demonstrates how a DIY approach to light-sensing inspired by organic structures and processes can engage the public in ways that go beyond standard modes of data capture and visualisation. By creating sensing devices with 3D printers and resin casts that resemble fruits, eggs, and nests hanging from a tree and swirling data visualisations designed to replicate the biological rhythms of the lunar cycle, viewers are encouraged to participate with intrigue and allure inasmuch as scientific interest. Knowledge of the environment is thus produced through sensing technology – numerical datafication of light/dark cycles – and through how the public develops an imaginary relationship with scientific measurement. These experiments could be regarded as another example of citizen science in action, but we suggest they are more than that because they demand a different kind of attention that foregrounds more-than-human perspectives and mystique over community practices of quantification, which remains at the core of citizen science (Hecker et al., 2018). The desire to empathise with the more-than-human and create conditions for attunement with the environment is at the heart of these projects. Inspired by the 19th-century Romantic poet John Clare, Griffiths makes a deliberate effort in his designs to sense-with the more-than-human. What emerges through the three projects discussed is a political act of decentering the human. It is therefore not simply about replicating organic objects and processes for the purpose of data collection, something which is common in zoological sciences and documentary film-making, for example, where sensors are disguised as animals, plants, and rocks for the purposes of non-intrusive datafication.

Decentering human sensory perceptions is key to Emsley’s (2025) paper on the project Unheard City, which offers a creative methodology for understanding how urban traffic-sensing devices communicate with each other using sonic frequencies inaudible to the human ear. Following the conventions of “data walking” (Powell, 2021) and “sensor ethnography” (Nafus, 2018), whereby the datafication of everyday life can be revealed through walking practices that attune themselves to how personal devices send and receive data in situ, Emsley reports on the design of a mobile app that mapped the registered frequencies and silences that permeated a series of walks through a connected autonomous vehicle testbed in Coventry, United Kingdom. This approach makes visible the network of “innocuous boxes [as they] become points of reticulation with the computational that enable engagement with the idea of a city as a model and its uncertainties” (Emsley, 2025: 13). Here, the sensing and knowledge making is done beyond the registers of human sensory perception, creating a dynamic network of communication protocols with their own rhythms that reverberate in response to other connected technologies (i.e. autonomous vehicles). But going further, Emsley challenges us to think about the ways creative interventions can reveal cybernetic feedback loops, whereby digital knowledge networks operate in response to and in parallel with life on the street. Take, for example, how the sensed digital knowledge here has a capacity to resonate back into the sensory experiences of the human walking across a street where autonomous vehicles are being tested.

Similarly, Welisch (2025) shows what can be known and made visible if we meddle with a tool that is increasingly designed to systemically measure, record, and repeat with the application of AI technologies and bring human sensing in the equation. His Data Poets project, which draws from the emerging practice of “synthetic ethnography” (De Seta et al., 2024), puts brightly coloured and bespoke sensing devices loaded with image-to-text generative AI software in the hands of participants. Welisch invites them to take a dérive to capture sounds and sights of their urban locale through a built-in camera and microphone, which are then processed by the software to generate a poem that can be printed or displayed on the project website. ¹ What results is a psychogeographic praxis that utilises image-to-text generators to encourage reflection on the similarities and differences of how humans and machines “read” an urban environment. As Welisch notes, it demonstrates a data-collection practice that foregrounds playful, embodied experimentation inasmuch as scientific knowledge. The result is a valuable cultural knowledge of environments that brings together sensed data with sensory experience.

Hayles’ (2025) recent ideas about “cognitive assemblages” are worth considering here. The knowledge of the urban environment in Data Poets is produced through the coming together of a (non-conscious) cogniser – the AI – and a (conscious) cogniser – the human, among others, to produce meaningful knowledge for the participants. This reframes the dominant logic that urban AI reveals a more accurate and detailed understanding of the city and instead suggests that there could be new urban epistemologies developing from human-AI relations. Nevertheless, as Amoore (2020) rightly points out, we should not be blinded by the apparent novelty of what emerges from human-AI relations but instead take a critical look at what new ethico-political perspectives come from them. Welisch’s Data Poets goes some way to showing how these new epistemologies can emerge outside or in parallel (c.f. Fazi, 2021) of the prominent logics of AI datafication. In that sense, the project offers a politics of resistance and an example of creative socio-technical knowledge making.

Another element shared in Griffiths’ and Welisch’s work is the tactile qualities of the sensing devices being used. In both cases, the sensors are designed to be touched, explored, held, and viewed. This distinguishes them again from conventional scientific sensors, which tend to come boxed in plain plastic and metal housing and touched only by those with the authorisation to use them. These elements chime with the ethos of citizen science, which has long encouraged an enthusiastic public to get involved by getting their hands on the scientific method and apparatus (Hecker et al., 2018) but differ in what kind of participation they demand.

Jung and Hiebert’s (2025) playful engagement takes on a different, but no less significant, form, challenging us to think about what participation and citizenship are in the production of urban knowledge(s). Here, the notion of measured and rational data collection through surveillance technologies, which has been amplified through the “smart city” discourse, is upended with the idea that playful and pedagogical acts of collective human intelligence offer another, less intrusive, way to know urban citizens. “Smart City Photo Booths,” based in Seattle (USA), asked students to first make themselves the “sousveillant” among surveillance technologies. They were tasked with locating traffic cameras in the city and creating selfies with said cameras in the background, thus locating the source of surveillance but also foregrounding themselves as the human body being surveilled. In the second phase, posters with QR codes linking to publicly available live traffic camera feeds were placed around the city as an invitation for passersby to see for themselves how they are being watched. Although Jung and Hiebert point out this is not a radical project, it is nonetheless a creative intervention into the smart city discourse that encourages participants to think differently about citizenship and surveillance. Equally, it is a pedagogical approach that provides novel routes to learning for those involved. It is a reminder that pedagogical approaches based on raising awareness through a critical analysis alone are not sufficient if we seek material changes to our urban environments. Much like the other papers in the issue, the focus is on the doing, to make another world of knowledge possible and understood.

The doing in Wee’s (2026) paper is of an altogether different form to the other papers. Putting the making and tinkering of sensing devices aside, Wee uses creative writing to challenge us to think beyond a purely academic, and largely European and Anglo-American, analysis of datafication and digital society. In her essay, Wee plays the role of an “elemental healer” who offers a Daoist analysis of our current moment, which argues that the balance and harmony with the world and its inhabitants (human and non-human) have been disrupted by the rise of globally pervasive technologies that require intensive use of natural resources and continual expansion. Centring the inseparable relations between Dao – “the way” – and Qi – “the life force” – is essential in this conceptual reframing, which she argues is necessary if we are to think about technology beyond western notions of “technological progress” and into the realm of the cosmological. As Wee evokes in the performative elements of the essay, which are aimed specifically at redressing the socio-ecological damage caused by China’s Digital Silk Road techno-political strategy, it is only through a re-balancing of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) that we can prevent the socio-ecological damage caused by the data centre technologies that provide infrastructure for the project.

Wee’s approach is clearly distinct from the instrumentalism of the Western thought about technology. Equally, readers will recognise a divergence from standard academic practice in her writing. Both are key here. Beyond a simple account of how a Daoist approach challenges us to see the world differently, Wee makes a theoretical and methodological intervention here into pluralistic epistemologies and ontologies, which have become increasingly influential in thought about the digital (Escobar et al., 2026; Russo, 2024). Much of this work draws from knowledge systems (Indigenous, new materialist, and object-oriented) that sit outside of the Chinese traditions. Wee follows Yuk Hui’s (2016, 2019) analysis of cosmotechnics and Stenger’s (2010) cosmopolitics to move the popular academic conversation about emergence and relations between and among human and non-human life into thinking about what it takes to establish a balance of relations between humans and the world, or in Stenger’s words, to foreground other cosmopolitical stories. This, of course, has been foundational to many Indigenous knowledge systems around the world (see, e.g. discussions about what it means to live responsibly among relations with Country in Northern Australia, Country et al., 2014) and yet remains inadequately understood by the scholarship, which tends to stop at the point where the relationality of the world meets cultural and ecological knowledge. In doing so, Wee ultimately foregrounds a fundamental difference between world views on technology and shines a light on why western modernity still struggles to grasp China’s techno-political strategy.

Conclusion

This special issue highlights that urban environments are not merely objects of knowledge but active epistemic spaces that shape how knowing itself becomes possible in our present digitally mediated age. The contributions gathered here are part of a broader movement to challenge the historical and western dominance of technocratic rationalities and the aesthetic homogeneity of the datafied city. Rather than rejecting digital technologies outright, they intervene in their logics through creative, reflexive, and more-than-human practices of sensing and representation. In doing so, they foreground epistemic humility, uncertainty, and relationality as necessary dimensions of urban knowledge. Ultimately, they demonstrate that alternative epistemologies do not emerge solely through critique, but through experimentation and creative praxis: through making, walking, writing, hacking, and attuning differently to the environments in which we are embedded.

To conceptualise “knowing urban environments” is therefore to acknowledge a reciprocal relation: urban environments are both known and knowing, both constituted through epistemic practices and constitutive of them. Recognising this reciprocity unsettles the fantasy of total capture that underpins contemporary smart and AI urbanisms. Instead, it invites a plural, and sometimes cosmopolitical, orientation towards urban life – one that remains attentive to ambiguity, multiplicity, and the limits of human and machinic comprehension alike.