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A Learnt City: The Mediated, Affective, and Experiential Layers of London

Alevizou, Giota; Vrikki, Photini; (2025) A Learnt City: The Mediated, Affective, and Experiential Layers of London. Societies , 15 (9) , Article 253. 10.3390/soc15090253. Green open access

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Abstract

This article reconceptualises London as a learnt city, a dynamic learning ecosystem co-produced through digital mediation, affective experience, and embodied practice. Focusing on international university students in London, a transient, hyper-digital city, we employ a participatory reflective-mapping methodology to examine how urban learning unfolds across mediated, affective, and experiential layers of city life. The mediated city describes students’ imaginaries shaped by digital media and mapping apps. The affective city captures emotional registers, such as nostalgia, autonomy, and (dis)orientation, that emerge during urban adaptation. The experiential city foregrounds embodied engagements: movement, infrastructure use, routine navigation, and elective belonging. These three dimensions interweave to form an “urban collage,” revealing how students continuously remake both their identities and the city itself through integrated online and offline practices. The article advances critical urban and communication studies by contesting technocratic and neoliberal framings of urban learning. It positions learning as inherently spatial, affective, and relational—a sense-making process enacted in everyday urban experiences. By framing the city as a contested site of knowledge production and identity formation, this article contributes to debates in digital urbanism and critical digital pedagogy. The learnt city concept offers a novel lens for understanding how global cities—characterised by frictions of belonging and mobility—are lived, known, and shaped by those negotiating their multiple mediated, affective, and material dimensions.

Type: Article
Title: A Learnt City: The Mediated, Affective, and Experiential Layers of London
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/soc15090253
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15090253
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: learnt city; place-making; digital cities; global cities; digital media; digital urbanism; critical urban pedagogies; affect; belonging
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10213562
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