Originally titled The Mediated City, this module has evolved a fair bit since its inception. Though it may not run again until 2021 (thanks to Covid-19), when it does, it will have moved to a combined Level 6 (final year undergraduate) and Level 7 (masters level) module that explores the interconnections between media, digital culture and urban life. I hope it will also much more explicitly become a meeting point for students from different disciplines, offered on Birkbeck’s new MA/MSc Cities, as well as across a series of other other subject areas in the arts and social sciences.

As in the past, the module will begin with a media tour of London’s West End. It will encourage students, throughout the module, to re-examine media through the city, and the city through media.

City living compels us to use, desire and depend on a huge range of media content, devices and infrastructures. Meanwhile, media forms and digital technologies appear to us through everyday urban life, and are literally built into urban spaces: buildings, structures, walls, streetscapes and furniture, transport infrastructure, not to mention buried below ground. So this module has a twofold ethos: that the city provides a unique lens to critically study, understand and define media and the digital; and at the same time, that media and digital culture are crucial lenses to understand cities around the world, including London.

In time, I plan to use this sub-page to host a more detailed set of resources related to this module, for use by others researching and teaching around these topics.