Success or failure of social integration is negotiated in the everyday life. Particularly in urban areas, groups with different economic, social and cultural status come together. The urban space and the urban public are therefore of particular importance for social integration. At the same time, an ongoing penetration of urban space with digital media technologies can be observed, so that the integration of cameras, sensors, WLAN networks and equipment for collecting data in the urban environment has become the norm (Kitchin 2014). Through buzzwords such as Smart City or Internet of Things, the digitalization of cities has found its way into public discourse, but is also increasingly being explored in various scientific disciplines such as human geography (Ash et al. 2018, Cardullo et al. 2019, Kitchin et al. 2018) or critical urban research (Bauriedl & Stüver 2018, Townsend, 2013). In communication studies, a systematic study of the digital city is still pending. Although there is work on the specifics of the urban public sphere or the city as a place of media communalization, the interweaving of cities and media technologies has not yet found its place on the research agenda. The proposed paper takes off at this point and aims at developing a framework that is able to theorize the relationship between the city, digitalization and the public sphere.
We will first explain the relevance of our research and introduce the concept of georeferential digital media, which is important to understand the digitalization of cities. Subsequently, we will review literature from communication studies and other disciplines (critical sociology, human geography, critical data studies). We show that media are traditionally understood in communication studies as being constitutive for the public sphere and the public sphere, in turn as a necessary condition for social integration, through the provision and processing of topics. In addition to this explicit focus on topics, many theories of the public sphere also have a - mostly implicit - geographical reference to space. If the city is considered as an object of research, this implicit spatial reference becomes explicit. We will systematically compare different concepts of media and theories of public spheres with regard to their statements on the relationship between media, locality and integration. We will also show how current phenomena such as the penetration of cities by media technologies makes it necessary to extend the traditional concept of (mass) media traditionally used in theories of the public sphere.