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Top1. Introduction
I’ve been involved with the International Journal of E-Planning Research (IJEPR) since its inception, a fact that immediately says something about the nature of the field this journal has sought to address. Institutionally, I’m not from urban planning, or a traditional urban discipline but a media and communications program. The fact that there is a significant overlap between my research—which has broadly concerned the problematic of ‘media and cities’—and the interests of the IJEPR is testament to the profound transformation that has swept across both fields in the last two decades. If the study of cities and of urban life has always been interdisciplinary to a greater or lesser extent, with disciplines such as architecture, planning and design counterpointed by those such as geography and urban sociology, the profound reconfiguration of cities set in train as networked digital technologies are deployed as pervasive urban infrastructure has brought new voices into the conversation. This includes researchers from previous outlier disciplines such as media and communication, as well as new sub-fields such as interaction design. From the other side of the picture, media and communications has evolved by closer contact with interdisciplinary fields such as technology studies, manifest in the emergence of new orientations including software studies, platform studies, media archaeology and critical data studies. At the same time, the mainstreaming of mobile media has driven more systematic connections to traditional spatial disciplines including geography and urban studies, as well as to the broader cluster of mobility studies.
Cities have always been meeting places, and this is borne out today by the variety of disciplines jostling to be heard regarding urban pasts, presents and futures. I use the term ‘jostle’ deliberately: while there are many good examples of genuinely interdisciplinary approaches and projects, there is arguably less— and less productive—crossover than desirable. Concerns, insights and approaches that are normal and normalized in one setting remain ignored or under-utilized in others. There is still much to learn from setting aside the presumptions of centrality that most disciplines carry as an integral part of their armature. While this kind of decentring is never easy, the need seems particularly acute when key trajectories associated with urban digital infrastructure — notably the capacity to automate the collection, storage, retrieval and processing of unprecedented volumes of data — cut across so many fields, changing fundamental aspects of social existence in the process. To take one example, which is perhaps not simply one among many: communication studies, like many disciplines, used to be organized around conceptual frameworks that relied on broadly dividing the realm of ‘face to face’ interaction from various forms of ‘mediated’ experience. The former was lived, the latter represented. While this binary relation was never watertight, it proved stable enough to authorise a whole era of research that can be traced across very diverse approaches from Goffman’s studies on social interactions in public to Debord’s theoretical elaborations on spectacle. However, this long assumed separation between ‘immediacy’ and ‘mediated’ social life no longer offers the same traction on experience and knowing in the 21st century. This shift is particularly acute in relation to cities, which have been the primary testing ground for emergent socio-technical regimes in which embodied interactions are everywhere tightly interwoven with new forms of technical mediation, generating novel, hybrid spatial and social forms.
This is the uncertain ground on which urban e-planning takes place. The fact that there has been ongoing debate over the orientation and demarcation of the e-planning paradigm (Silva 2010) is not surprising given that its underlying concern is formulating a relation to technology. Is e-planning a set of (digital) tools, a new urban planning paradigm enabled by ICTs, or does it require a more general reconsideration of the broader settings of urban life in which planning is now conducted? Whether you adopt a minimalist or more expansive position, posing such questions underlines the extent to which e-planning is implicated in ongoing debates about how to better recognize the complex and contingent interplay of technology with human and other agencies.