Knowing urban environments in the digitally mediated age

In this editorial, we present our special issue that explores the relationship between urbanisation and knowledge production, positioning cities as epistemic environments that shape how they are known, sensed, and governed in our digitally mediated age. Challenging the idea that “the city” is an object or a set of processes to be observed and known, we advance an understanding that knowledge of urban environments is always situated and embodied. The papers draw from creative and theoretical projects to collectively propose alternative ways of knowing the city through participatory, sensory, and more-than-human approaches. By unsettling dominant methods of measurement, mapping, and representation, we argue that they foreground reflexivity, relationality, and epistemic humility. Despite being increasingly mediated by digital and data-driven technologies, which purport ideas of objectivity, we call for a critical examination of how we might maintain a healthy scepticism of objectivity in digital systems while simultaneously implementing technologies into our modes of enquiry about the city. Ultimately, the issue opens up possibilities for more plural and critical forms of urban knowledge in a digitally mediated age. But this is about more than cities; the issue contributes to wider fields of study that question dominant knowledge systems and pose the question of how we might think and act otherwise for a better future with technology.