Contemporary Urban Narratives: Digital Platforms and Urban Perception, the case of London's South Bank

Public spaces are an integral part of cities, produced at the intersection of physical, technological, and social infrastructures, experienced and perceived through embodied movement and the production of the urban image. In recent decades, however, digital urban services, GPS, and social media have increasingly mediated this spatial experience and perception by both enabling the production of a pre-image in advance, as well as guiding movements and interactions in the environment in real time. In this network of screens and spatial media, a contemporary urban space is best understood as a hybrid entity in which the digital continually augments the physical environment. This thesis is about how digital media and the consequent mediation are transforming the ways in which cities are experienced and perceived. It argues that mass-used digital platforms provide new means to 'represent' the urban environment and subsequently complicate the notion of urban image. Instant and global sharing, enabled by the ubiquity of smartphones and digital services, amplifies certain voices while marginalising others through algorithmic, visual, and economic curation. This raises questions about whose representations become visible and what places rise to prominence as a result. While current digital-urban scholarship continues to amplify the digital-physical dualism, the phenomenon of digital mediatisation and mediation renews interest in hybrid practices that produce social space. Accordingly, drawing upon Lefebvre's (2013) notion of perceived, conceived and lived space and integrating it with Lynch's (1960) urban image, Castells' (2011) space of flows and Seamon's (1979) lifeworld, this thesis foregrounds qualitative social insights over quantitative big data. Specifically, it offers a twofold result. First, it contributes to the contemporary discourse on digital-urban sociology, offering a nuanced media-based insight into this complex phenomenon. Second it proposes a research framework combining archival research, spatial analysis, visual ethnography, direct observation and go-along semi-structured interviews to capture the multiplicity of 'urban image'. The research does not claim a direct cause-and-effect relationship between digital tools and urban perception. Instead, it presents a social narrative regarding the phenomenon by integrating multiple perspectives. Using the case of London's South Bank, the thesis highlights three key findings. First, it demonstrates how the urban environment is selectively staged and framed through the collective agency of individuals and digital platforms. Second, it uncovers the practices of pre-mediating expectations and pre-imaging the environment. Finally, it identifies the indispensable dependency on digital platforms to navigate the urban space, shifting the domain of spatial knowledge from urban legibility to access to mobile digital technologies. Relevant for densely populated globalised cities where the flow of information between physical, digital, and social environments is pronounced, the research makes a broader contribution to bridging the gap between theory and practice by producing a replicable and scalable research framework, extending the scope of urban planning and design to include digital narratives. Ultimately, the thesis aims to guide future policy and scholarly research on inclusive digital-urban strategies for smart cities, emphasising the social reasoning and lived experiences that give context and meaning to quantitative spatial data.