Keynote Lecture 2: Beyond Splintering Urbanism

Join us online for this second of two keynote lectures to celebrate the UI's 10 year anniversary -  Beyond Splintering Urbanism: Infrastructural Extensions, Techno-Social Life and Stretched Geographies. 

Register here for online attendance in the second of two keynote lectures to celebrate the UI's 10 year anniversary.

Professor Simon Marvin will give a keynote lecture drawing on his work on urban infrastructures and controlled environments in the context of the changing dynamics of urban inhabitation and the urban technical.

This talk reflects on three decades of research into urban infrastructure as we reach a quarter-century into the 21st century. Splintering Urbanism emphasised network fragmentation and uneven access; this paper argues that the modern urban condition is characterised by thick mediation, from climate-controlled interiors to cognitive health platforms, where technical systems actively constitute life itself. Drawing on recent research across media studies, cultural theory, fieldwork, and interviews, it identifies three key shifts in the contemporary urban condition. First, infrastructures now extend beyond traditional networks of provision to include systems of elements, care, climate control, cyber-symbiosis, and even cognition. Second, there is evidence of a shift from the socio-technical city, where humans and technologies co-construct urban life, to the techno-social city, where technology plays a primary role in shaping the urban condition. Third, these transformations are producing new spatial forms, including atmospheric environments, highly technified interiors and cognitively enabled milieu. The paper argues that today’s cities are defined by dense, pervasive layers of technical mediation, requiring new ways of understanding how urban life is shaped, governed, and imagined.