Frequently, efforts to establish the city’s significance for the public sphere frame the city in opposition to the media. The city is imagined as a space of unmediated and co‐present publicness, while the media is imagined as a space of mediated and distantiated publicness. This essay argues against such an opposition. In place of it, the essay outlines an approach to the urban dimensions of public address which emphasizes the interaction of urban and media spaces and the mobility of public address. This approach is illustrated through a brief consideration of contestation over the governance of urban space in Sydney during the 2007 APEC Meeting.