Going beyond current scholarship on the “media city” and the“smart city,” Shannon Mattern argues that our global cities have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. Deep Mapping the Media City advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities. Mattern explores the material assemblages and infrastructures that have shaped the media city by taking archaeology literally—using
techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in time.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in blog space, social media, conference plenaries, and articles. We think of it as gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation happen in scholarship.

$10.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-9851-6
70 pages, 28 b&w photos, 5 x 7, 2015