In this episode Ross Beveridge, co-founder of our Podcast, and guests discuss the topic of digital cities and democracy.Digitalisation is transforming cities, urbanization and urban life – but how is it changing urban politics?
What issues of justice and democracy are at stake in the advance of digital technologies?
What are the power implications of the unending rise of corporate digital platforms, like Amazon?
How are social media platforms reconfiguring the ways we live in cities and the ways we conduct politics? And what does the future hold?
Guests:
Justus Uitermark
Justus Uitermark is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam. His research agenda revolves around the question how the proliferation of digital platforms is reshaping urban places and spaces. By combining computational with interpretive methods, he examines emerging fault lines in digital cities. His recent books include Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into Digital Modernity (Routledge, 2025, with Petter Tornberg) and On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (Oxford University Press, 2024, with John D. Boy).
Myria Georgiou
Myria Georgiou is a Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science – LSE. Professor Georgiou researches and teaches on migration and urbanisation in the context of intensified mediation. Adopting a comparative and critical humanist epistemology, she is committed to putting the human of the urban, transnationally connected world at the core of her research. Specifically, in research conducted across 6 countries over the last 25 years, she has been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity.Her latest book is Being Human in Digital Cities (Polity/Wiley 2024). She is also the author and editor of five other books, including Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference (2013, Polity Press) and The Digital Border (2022, NYU Press, with L.Chouliaraki).
Rob Kitchin
Rob Kitchin is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. His research examines the production of digital geographies and his present ERC-funded project (2022-27) is ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories About and With Planning and Property Data‘. Previous projects related to digital cities include ‘The Programmable City‘ (2013-18) and Building City Dashboards (2016-2020). He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 37 academic books and (co)author of over 250 articles and book chapters. He is an editor of Dialogues on Digital Society.
Yu-Shan Tseng
Yu-Shan Tseng is Anniversary Research Fellow in Human Geography at the University of Southampton. Her research sits at the intersection of urban studies, political theory and digital geographies.
She has examined and compared how democratic politics is reshaped by the fluid and contingent conditions in digital cities such as Taipei, Madrid and Helsinki.
She is the author of Liquid Democracy: a comparative study of digital urban democracy (The Antipode Book Series, Wiley, 2025).
Host:
Ross Beveridge
Ross is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow working in the field of urban politics and governance. His most recent book is How Cities Can Transform Democracy, co-authored with Philippe Koch (ZHAW Zurich) and published with Polity Press in 2022. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Geography Compass and is co-founder and editor of the Urban Political Podcast. In addition, he is co-editor of the book “How Cities Can Transform Democracy”.