We float above a sprawling yet strangely cramped metropolis. A dense collection of city blocks, factories, and leisure facilities stop suddenly at the edges of endless green fields, while a beautiful blue ocean runs along one side. Each of the buildings of this city has a specific, delineated function, which we can reveal by clicking on them. The residential skyscrapers – named things like ‘Wilkins Plaza’ and ‘Gomez Lofts’ – come with a caption and an emoji indicating how happy (or not) their occupants are. The population of ‘Pitts Place’ are displeased with their proximity to a factory (‘A factory near my home! Why!?’ they exclaim), and this is pulling down the overall satisfaction rating of the city. As unelected but all-powerful mayor, we resolve to do something about this, selecting the offending factory and dragging it several blocks away from the Pitts. Dropped into this new spot, it immediately resumes production of ‘seeds’ and ‘chemicals’, both of which will be ready in a couple of minutes. Pitts Place seems mollified, but to make our general populace even chirpier, we open up a menu of possible parks that can be built, dragging and dropping what is listed as a ‘Row of Trees’ into the gap vacated by the factory. Doing so temporarily turns the city into a mass of 3D vertical bars, each one visually telling us the level of satisfaction felt by every city block. Once dropped into position, the trees do their job, boosting all the adjacent happiness bars towards the sky, and adding to the overall contentment that the fictional populace feel about our mayoralty.

Just another day in Flexiville, the city I have created using the mobile videogame SimCity: BuildIt (2014). This game is just one of a host of cities that can be accessed using a GUI, but the malleability of its represented urban space is in many ways indicative of the kinds of newly flexible urban environments that can be imagined in the age of the desktop interface. Today's cities overlap with screens in many ways. Cities are sites of screen production, dissemination, reception and infrastructure. Images of their skylines and neighbourhoods circulate widely on screens in the form of films, television programs, videogames, apps, websites, and more.