Narmeen MarjiReturn to the house

Original theory · Doctoral research

Polyspatial Urbanism

Polyspatial Urbanism is my theoretical framework for the city in the age of spatial computing. It holds that material structures, computation, virtual content and lived experience do not sit in layers. Together they make one urban reality.

Beyond digital dualism

Most frameworks for digital cities keep the digital and the physical apart. Smart city thinking treats technology as a tool that optimises an unchanged city. Hybrid space theory recognises blending, but still describes two domains being mixed. Platform urbanism studies how one domain reshapes the other.

Polyspatial Urbanism moves past this. The prefix “poly” does not mean many separate spaces. It names the many registers (material, computational, virtual and cognitive) of a single, heterogeneous spatial reality that cannot be meaningfully pulled apart.

Foundations

The framework extends Henri Lefebvre’s social production of space: if algorithms, AI systems, platforms and sensors now help produce space, they produce new kinds of space. It draws on Kitchin and Dodge’s code/space, Latour’s distributed agency, Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, Hayles’s technogenesis, and Jurgenson’s critique of digital dualism.

Five principles

  1. 01

    The converged spatial continuum

    Urban space is one continuum across material, computational, virtual and cognitive dimensions. A public plaza is at once a physical place, a geotagged entity, a field of AR content, a node in platforms and a lived experience, and these are not stacked layers.

  2. 02

    Social and algorithmic co-production of space

    Algorithms now act across all three moments of Lefebvre’s triad: navigation apps shape movement, digital twins shape planning, and AR art and location-based games shape symbolic life. Human practice and computation shape each other in a continuous dialectic.

  3. 03

    Multi-presence and distributed identity

    People inhabit several spatialities at once: a street, a conversation, anchored virtual content. This is not divided attention but an expanded way of being in place, and identity extends across bodies, avatars, data and platforms.

  4. 04

    Dynamic, AI-augmented environments

    A street that senses, responds and anticipates is not an old street made smart. It is a different kind of spatial entity, operating across time scales from microseconds of computation to decades of infrastructure.

  5. 05

    The digital right to the city

    The one explicitly normative principle. If space is co-produced by human and algorithmic agents, then access to digital systems, transparency of the algorithms that shape space, and participation in governing them are spatial rights, not adjacent civil liberties.

Evidence

The framework is grounded in converging evidence: analysis of the urban imaginary in fiction and speculation, participatory speculative design workshops across Nordic cities in which participants consistently imagined fusion rather than layering, and technical implementations of persistent XR content in urban spaces, where virtual work became part of how a place is experienced. Digital twins in Singapore and Helsinki, the Pokémon GO phenomenon and Barcelona’s superblocks with digital participation platforms illustrate the same condition.

For design and XR

For XR research, the framework reframes extended reality as a force that helps produce urban space, not only a way to visualise it. It suggests four design principles: integrated physical and digital design from the earliest stage; content that responds to its physical and cultural context; treating persistent virtual work as place-making; and valuing perceptual coherence for the person on site over abstract positional accuracy.

A critical framework

Polyspatial Urbanism is not a celebration of technology. It names new risks: polyspatial redlining, where some neighbourhoods are richly augmented and others left computationally poor; surveillance in the sentient city; and platform power over how residents see and move through space. Its answer is polyspatial governance: participatory data governance, community ownership of digital infrastructure, democratic oversight of algorithms, and public interest standards for XR content in public space.

The evidence so far comes mainly from Nordic contexts, and the framework is offered as open: it needs cross-cultural research, attention to the environmental costs of computation, and practical governance experiments.

This overview is based on my manuscript “Polyspatial Urbanism: Toward an Ontology of Digital-Physical Urban Space in the Age of Spatial Computing”, developed through my doctoral research at Tampere University.

Related publications

All publications on ORCID