Just out: a new article co-authored with Luke Hespanhol (University of Sydney) and Nanna Verhoeff (Utrecht University). This contribution is part of the special dossier in Mediapolis journal on The Synthetic City, edited by Scott Rodgers, Helena Atteneder, Lou Therese Brandner, Marcos Dias, Diogo P. Henriques and Sara Trentham-Black.
This contribution proposes the concept of Civic Urban AI as a lens to highlight “learning together” in situated entanglements of AI, urban and human agencies. Through this concept of Civic Urban AI we wish to counter dominant tech-centric discourses that exclusively locate agency within ‘smart’ AI-driven techno-urban systems. We suggest moving beyond the limited focus on ‘the synthetic’, that is, how linguistic modeling through LLMs produces synthetic but ultimately reductive urban knowledge, often at the expense of street-level civic agency. By way of critique, we identify three ‘actionability gaps’ in AI-human relationships. First, people are exploited by everyday datafication and AI processing. Second, they bear the brunt of data and AI-induced harms. Third, they lack a civic voice and sufficient agency in learning with, about, and even without AI, and in co-shaping desirable AI futures. As an alternative to the synthetic and its fetishization, we develop a counter-narrative where agency in today’s cities is considered as synthesis. The idea of synthesis prompts us to consider the interrelatedness between AI, humans, and (urban) environments as fundamentally situated and entangled. This distributed and entangled agency reinscribes agency within diverse urban actors and actants. For urban AI to become truly civic’, we argue, the synthesis of humans, cities and AI systems requires new ways of learning together in what we call a transformative pedagogy.
Read the full essay here:
Hespanhol, Luke, Michiel de Lange and Nanna Verhoeff. 2026. “Civic Urban AI: Fostering Transformative Pedagogies for Human-Urban-AI Entanglements” In: Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 11, No. 2. https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2026/09/civic-urban-ai/