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 integration of digital technology into space has been smart city discourse. In this article, I will argue that framework, as it so far articulated, is inadequate maximizing social potential infrastructure. not only changes how cities look, but they function settings. propose ‘communicative city’ an alternative thinking about digitally mediated cities. communicative offers opportunity consider a test case which key problematics contemporary globalized are materially instantiated. It frontier zone at everyday experiences embodied new forms agency collide with powerful logics tracing tracking, widespread deployment automation machine learning techniques governance.