Edited By: Scott Rodgers, Helena Atteneder, Lou Therese Brandner, Marcos Dias, Diogo P. Henriques and Sara Trentham-Black

“AI” – as technology, technique, imaginary and debate – has clearly reached the city. Yet its arrival is more mundane than spectacle. Inspired by The Synthetic City Conference, this open-access Dossier in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, edited by the ECREA Media, Cities and Space Management Team, explores the implications of AI and related digital technologies for urban living. It offers new ways of thinking about different appearances and manifestations of AI, complementing and expanding existing debates around “urban AI.” 

The Dossier includes eight articles by different authors that analyse the current status of AI systems in urban space, moving away from overly dramatic and technocratic accounts of its agential power towards providing a grounded and critical perspective of its assemblages with urban infrastructure, human and non-human actors. Our introduction maps out how AI agency gets attributed, what AI models can learn about urban life, and the temporal politics of such learning, where what is claimable gets settled in advance. What does it mean if the synthetic city turns out to be banal, if not at all trivial? We argue that having an actionable and critical technical literacy of mundane AI systems, which recede from daily perception, is challenging. We hope this Dossier begins to provide some means of wayfinding around this issue. 

https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/dossiers/dossier-the-synthetic-city/