DigitalXPlace

Abstract

Digital placemaking is a term given to a range of evolving practices that combine emerging digital technologies and placemaking initiatives. Even over the past 5 years its meaning has significantly shifted, especially as a result of the proliferation of smartphones as mobile technological platforms and the ubiquity of social media. This chapter aims to move beyond the current fashionability of both the ‘digital’ and ‘placemaking’ discourses to provide a critical consideration of various ways in which technology is shaping social-spatial design, research, and practices, and vice versa. It considers a number of diverse cases in which urban situations and digital technologies have intersected to allow for the gathering of data, the testing of scenarios, or the dissemination of ideas about spaces and places in ways that extend beyond the methods of traditional ‘placemaking’. At the same time, it recognises that as these technologies are being increasingly normalised and assimilated into everyday life, they can no longer be conceived of as new, special, or separate. Ultimately, the techno-social matrix through which we currently perceive and understand the city is already deeply suffused with digital media and tools, raising a question as to what the adjectival modifier ‘digital’ actually illuminates, and instead requires us to refocus our attention back towards the making of places with the most effective tools available, which will inevitably involve a mix of the analogue and the digital.