Antennas

Today, more than half of the global population lives in cities. Our century is urban, but often we forget that cities in the 21st century are also digital. 

Digital technologies have become part of the urban environment and of how we experience our cities. Traffic and surveillance cameras are installed along roads, LED sensors light up as we walk over a zebra crossing, and we can use our smartphones to rent one of the many e-scooters that are parked on our sidewalks.

And yet, digital, or digitalised, cities do not look the same everywhere. Digital technologies have been placed in very different, and very material, urban environments. 

So how do digitalised cities look like around the globe? How different are digital cities in the Global North and in the Global South? And how has our personal experience of our own cities and neighbourhoods changed because of new technologies? 

This podcast explores the diversity of digitalised cities in our urban century, and interrogates the tension between the material and intangible aspects of technologies in cities.

This is Antennas, an original podcast with the voices of some of the students of the master track “Urban Digital Transformation and Innovation” offered at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

Their voices will tell us their personal stories and experiences of how digital technologies have changed their cities, and what we might have gained or lost along the digital transformation of our cities.

Welcome to Antennas!