Our second album, The Papers, was released on the 24th of September across all streaming platforms, or to purchase via the usual stores. Simply search for Digital Urban or The Papers on your platform of choice.
Place and Space, the first album, was themed around Cities in the Metaverse. This one goes through the archive of key themed papers, from the impact of Augmented Reality on the City, through to NFC Tagging, Neuroscience and the understanding of our cities and onwards to a look at the future of the planning system with the introduction of AI. Each track takes a paper, building it into an album of eight songs.
The Track List
1. The Phygital City 4:32
Spatial Computing and the Phygital City: Towards Digital Habitation, Urban Planning, 2026
The paper sets out three stages of urban digital transition. The smart city, with its sensors and dashboards, is well documented. Digital habitation, where physical geography stops being the primary frame of reference, gets the headlines. The stage in between, where physical and digital are experienced together and inseparably in the street, is the one planning has never named, and is arguably the one we are already living in.
Living in the City
Its shops and its bars
Feet in reality
Head in the stars
The future - its physical
The future - its digital
We call it Phygital
Full words
Loading - Heave Away
Entering the scene - Haul away
Three
Two
One
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Creating a new kind of place and space
In our minds
Haul away
Its a phase transition
A digital and physical joint rendition
Heave Away
Three
Two
One
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Creating a new kind of place and space
In our minds
Haul Away
Heave Away
In our minds
Loading
Living in the City
Its shops and its bars
Feet in reality
Head in the stars
Heave Away
Three
Two
One
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Beaming the space into our minds
You never know what place you may find
Haul Away
Welcome to the Ultimate Display
Take me to a place far away
Sail the digital seven seas
Meet up in the metaverse,
You and me
Heave Away
Haul Away
Three
Two
One
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Beaming the space into our minds
You never know what place you may find
Haul Away
In our minds
Travel beyond the worlds and the stars
Grounded in reality
Living in my cubicle
Travelling afar
Heave away
Haul away
Put the headset on
Digital Habitation Suite Activated
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Beaming the space into our minds
You never know what place you may find
The future - its physical
The future - its digital
We call it Phygital
Loading
Three
Two
One
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Beaming the space into our minds
You never know what place you may find
Into our minds
Loading
Its like living in a city
but the space is in our minds
Welcome to the Ultimate Display
Take me to a place far away
Sail the digital seven seas
Meet up in the metaverse, you and me
Heave Away
Three
Two
One
A new reality—here we come
Two worlds merging into one
Digital, physical, intertwined
Beaming the space into our minds
You never know what place you may find
Heave Away
Haul Away
Into our minds
2. Welcome to the Simulation 4:04
The Future's Not What It Used To Be: Urban Wormholes, Simulation, Participation, and Planning in the Metaverse, Urban Planning, 2022
Written as the editorial for a thematic issue on gaming, simulation and public participation, the argument is that planning has been slow to pick up each new media technology, and that the metaverse is the next one arriving. Games have spent years pushing at what virtual environments can be, yet the profession's reluctance to use them has less to do with what the tools can technically do and more with how planning understands what a tool is for. The conclusion is that planning should be leading the way into these environments rather than following them in.
Jean Baudrillard, ninety ninety four
A world within a world, if your looking for a metaphor
The FIRST order was representation
The SECOND order was consumerization
The third order is about you and me
and what we see
Is it rendered?
Can you tell what is reality?
Full words
Take me down the rabbit hole
Are we real
Or are we code
Its about the places we see
Are they real
or simply rendered for
You and me
Welcome to the simulation
Its the ultimate destination
Of Us
Of Us
Jean Baudrillard, ninety ninety four
A world within a world, if your looking for a metaphor
The FIRST order was representation
The SECOND order was consumerization
The third order is about you and me
and what we see
Is it rendered?
Can you tell what is reality?
Welcome to the simulation
Its the ultimate destination
Of Us
Of Us
C
O
D
E
Are we real, you and me?
Welcome to the simulation
Its the ultimate destination
Of Us
Of Us
Living in a world within worlds
First
Second
Third
Its about you and me
and what we see
Is it rendered
Can you tell what is reality?
Welcome to the simulation
Its the ultimate destination
Of Us
Of Us
It was meant to be space in the machine
the digital future
Living the electronic dream
Looking closely at rendering technologies
I'm not sure all is what it seems
C
O
D
E
Are we real, you and me?
A simulation of a simulation - Jean Baudrillard, ninety ninety four
A world within a world, if your looking for a metaphor
Put on the headset
Enter the simulation
The ultimate destination
Its about you and me
and what we see
Is it rendered
Can you tell what is reality?
First
Second
Third
Its about you and me
and what we see
Is it rendered
Can you tell what is reality?
Enter the simulation
Is the ultimate destination
Of Us
Of Us
Take me down the rabbit hole
Are we real
Or are we code
3. La Provenance 3:22
An Internet of Old Things as an Augmented Memory System, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2013, from the Tales of Things project
Tales of Things was a tagging system built on QR codes and RFID that let an object carry its own story, readable and writable by whoever held it. Used as a technology probe with community groups, it turned out that almost any object could anchor a story worth telling and open onto what the paper calls a network of meaning. The catch is that those networks usually live with one owner alone, and are lost when that person is, which is the problem an augmented memory system is trying to solve.
La provenance
Tell me the history of the world
Let me converse with its things
La provenance
Scan a code
Conversations unfold
Things come to life
Talk to them about their world
Full words
Let me talk to the trees, park benches and bees
Let me track the bats
Realtime logging of birds and their tracks
We are Living in a connected world
Where 75 billion things unfurl
All these things to now talk to
Where they've been and history walked through
A history stored for conversation
Talking to things
Its a revolation
La provenance
Tell me the history of the world
Let me converse with its things
La provenance
Scan a code
Conversations unfold
Things come to life
Talk to them about their world
We are Living in a connected world
Where 75 billion things unfurl
All these things to now talk to
Where they've been and history walked through
La provenance
Tell me the history of the world
Let me converse with its things
La provenance
The trees they speak
of time and space
climate change
seasons they have braced
We are Living in a connected world
Where 75 billion things unfurl
All these things to now talk to
Where they've been and history walked through
We are Living in a connected world
Where 75 billion things unfurl
All these things to now talk to
Where they've been and history walked through
La provenance
La provenance
4. Electroencephalogram (also known as EEG) 3:38
Ecological Brain: Reframing the Study of Human Behaviour and Cognition, Royal Society Open Science, 2024
A case for doing neuroscience and cognitive science outside the laboratory. The paper sets out a framework that cycles between bringing the lab to the real world, recording behaviour and neural activity in actual streets and buildings, and bringing the real world back to the lab, where the environment can be manipulated and the findings tested. It is interdisciplinary by design, pulling in the sciences concerned with the natural, built and virtual environment, and it is the theoretical ground under the older work of walking the city wearing an EEG headset.
Put on the headset
Wire up the nodes
Walk around the city
Data encodes
Tell me how i feel from Soho to Trafalgar Square
Across to Covent Garden
How did I get there
Full words
Can i have an electroencephalogram?
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Place electrodes on my scalp,
Record electrical signals that come out
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Put on the headset
Wire up the nodes
Walk around the city
Data encodes
Tell me how i feel from Soho to Trafalgar Square
Across to Covent Garden
How did I get there
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Logging my neural processes
Tracking my every move
Assessing my spatial perception
Over time the data will improve
Take me to the city
Read my mind
Help us understand this space
Gathering the data direct from brain about this place
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Street
Places to shop
Places to meet
Data streams directly from my brain
To be linked to the city
Outputs to train
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
Places electrodes on my scalp,
Record electrical signals that come out
Also known as EEG
A way to read what it means to be you and me
5. Tagging and Tracking 2:55
Tracking, Tagging and Scanning the City, Architectural Design, 2014
Written as social media and building information modelling were piling up data faster than anyone knew what to do with it, all of it trackable, taggable and scannable. The argument is that buildings and cities had quietly become portals for information, and that wherever we go we are increasingly watched, logged, tracked and tagged.
Tagging and tracking
Monitoring and watching
Tell me, what do you see?
Bluetooth
GPS
Cell tower trianglation
Its a 24 hour operation
Full words
Heading into the City
Can you see?
Are you watching me?
On your CCTV
Data streaming from my phone
Everytime i leave my home
Heading into the City
Can you see?
Are you watching me?
On your CCTV
Heading into the City
S
M
A
R
T
Tell me are you watching me, in the City?
Tagging and tracking
Monitoring and watching
Tell me, what do you see?
Tagging and tracking
Monitoring and watching
Are you watching me?
S
M
A
R
T
In the City?
Tell me, what do you see?
Bluetooth
GPS
Cell tower trianglation
Its a 24 hour operation
Tell me, what do you see?
In the City
Are you watching me?
S
M
A
R
T
Data streaming from my phone
Everytime i leave my home
Can you see me?
On your CCTV
In the City?
Tell me, what do you see?
Tagging and tracking
Monitoring and watching
Are you watching me?
In the City?
6. Design Fiction 2:44
Design Fiction: How to Build a Voight Kampff Machine, CHI, 2016
Design fiction sits inside the wider family of speculative design approaches, and what marks it out is world building. The paper asks whether there is value in constructing a fictional research world as a way of thinking about future interactions, then builds one in which algorithms for detecting empathy have become a major part of how people communicate. Blade Runner supplies the starting point, the question being what a plausible world would have to look like for building a Voight-Kampff machine to be a sensible thing to do.
Welcome to the future
A fiction of design
Building new devices
Devices in the mind
Show how you feel
to prove you are real
Pupil dilation
Leads to revelations
Full words
Let me show you the future
Step inside my mind
It's about Design Fiction
You never know what you might find
Is this to be an empathy test?
Capillary dilation is what i do the best
We call it Voight-Kampff for short
Welcome to the future
A fiction of design
Building new devices
Devices in the mind
Show how you feel
to prove you are real
Pupil dilation
Leads to revelations
Welcome to the future
A fiction of design
Building new devices
Devices in the mind
Show how you feel
to prove you are real
Pupil dilation
Leads to revelations
We call it Voight-Kampff for short
Let me show you the future
Step inside my mind
Its about Design Fiction
You never know what you might find
We call it Voight-Kampff for short.
Let me show you the future
Step inside my mind
Its about Design Fiction
You never know what you might find
Show how you feel
to prove you are real
Show how you feel
to prove you are real
Empathy and Pupil Dilation
They can see
If you are real
We call it Voight-Kampff for short.
Welcome to the future
A fiction of design
Building new devices
Devices in the mind
Let me show you the future
Step inside my mind
You never know what you might find
Pupil dilation
Leads to revelations
We call it Voight-Kampff for short
Pupil dilation
Leads to revelations
7. Teleporting 3:22
30 Days in ActiveWorlds: Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World, in The Social Life of Avatars, Springer, 2002
A world was opened on a Windows 95 machine in the corner of the office and left without rules, with every object placed and every word spoken logged for thirty days. What followed was a community, a building competition, a police force voted in after a user dropped 85,000 objects overnight to crash the server, threats from someone calling himself the High Commander of the AW Terrorist Group, and carols sung around a virtual Christmas tree. By Day 30 the world held 27,699 objects built by 49 registered users. Then everyone left, and it became a ghost town.
We were the architects of a new world
Builders of the dream
Opening up a new frontier
A Utopia
or so it seemed
Full words
Welcome to the year 2000
Teleporting, loading at Ground Zero
A place for the brave and the bold
On the screen a new universe unfolds
A Cartesian grid where lives are lived
and stories are told
The worlds stretches on and on
It was made of digital noughts and ones
We were the architects of a new world
Builders of the dream
Opening up a new frontier
A Utopia
or so it seemed
People were living in the machine
Occupying the digital dreams
It was beyond MUDS and MOOS
A new life with options to choose
We were the architects of a new world
Builders of the dream
Opening up a new frontier
A Utopia
or so it seemed
Meet me in metropolis
256 north 256 west
Out on the star
The physical shape of the world
Viewable from afar
We were the architects of a new world
Builders of the dream
Opening up a new frontier
A Utopia
or so it seemed
Avatars all around
The future it seemed had no bounds
Suddenly the worlds went quiet
Abandoned buildings, no people, no sounds
Loading at Ground Zero
It was empty, no one around
We were the architects of a new world
Builders of the dream
Opening up a new frontier
A Utopia
or so it seemed
Teleporting
Teleporting
8. The Garden City of the Future 4:22
Digital Cities of Tomorrow — Planning in the Digital Age, Palgrave Macmillan, available 2027
Cities are no longer simply planned and built. They are sensed, simulated and increasingly co-produced by the digital systems running through them. The book charts that shift, from the analogue traditions of twentieth century planning, through the smart city era, to a present in which data, analytics and artificial intelligence shape how urban futures are imagined and decided, treating digital planning not as a technical upgrade but as a reordering of how cities are understood and governed.
Ebenezer Howard,
Eighteen Ninety Eight
The Garden City
Thats how it could be
Bring me the magnets
of the Town and Country
RTPI: Whats the planners role in a world of A I?
Full words
Its the 19th century
the air is thick and grey
overcrowded and polluted
for the city there needs to be
a better way
The Garden City
Thats how it could be
Bring me the magnets
of the Town and Country
Ebenezer Howard,
Eighteen Ninety Eight
Fast Forward
The Smart City
Its the 21st Century
Self Monitoring and Recording Technologies
A city sensing and watching
Everything we do and see
Gathering data on you and me
Is this the urban utopia that Howard thought it would be?
R
T
P
I
RTPI: Whats the planners role in a world of A I?
R
T
P
I
A place to live, in the 21st century
Planning, drawing, and visualising,
Analysing people and optimising,
Social and physical and the in-between,
Shaping the city through the data machine.
Fast Forward
Into A I a new kind of city
the computer living side by side with you and me
designed and laid out by machine
is the computer the planner ?
what does that even mean?
Planning by machine
Ebenezer Howard,
Eighteen Ninety Eight
The Garden City
Thats how it could be
Bring me the magnets
of the Town and Country
R
T
P
I
RTPI: Whats the planners role in a world of A I?
R
T
P
I
The A I City
Thats how it will be
Designed by computers
For you and Me
Is this the urban utopia that Howard thought it would be?
R
T
P
I
RTPI: Whats the planners role in a world of A I?
R
T
P
I
Its a tricky question, I'm not going to lie
Ebenezer Howard, Eighteen Ninety Eight
The Garden City
Thats how it could be
Bring me the magnets
of the Town and Country
R
T
P
I
RTPI: Whats the planners role in a world of A I?
R
T
P
I
Designed by computers
For you and Me
Optimise
They say its about efficiency
Surely it should be about you and me?
Ebenezer Howard, Eighteen Ninety Eight
The Garden City
Thats how it could be
Bring me the magnets
of the Town and Country
R
T
P
I
Its a tricky question, I'm not going to lie
R
T
P
I
Is this the urban utopia that Howard thought it would be?
R
T
P
I
RTPI: Whats the planners role in a world of A I?
Grab a beverage of choice, read the papers and listen to the tracks. If you like these papers then the full publication list is over on the about page.
Andy