Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the territory and arguments that The Digital City explores. In recent work on digital and mobile media technologies, scholarly perspectives have broadened to recognize positive associations between digital media and experiences of place. Humans and machines are no longer readily perceived as mutually exclusive categories, nor are they treated as separate considerations for designers of everyday experience. People work with technologies to move through and experience places. This book aims to illustrate and analyze the ways actors are actually using digital technologies and practices to re-embed themselves within urban space and to create a sense of place for themselves and others. Although there are copious cautionary tales around the potential for digital media to dissociate or liberate us from the confines of physical locations, we’ve lacked careful attention to the ways people actually use digital media to become placemakers. Creating and controlling a sense of place is still the primary way that we connect with our environments, interact with others, and express our identities. The Digital City offers a new theoretical framework for thinking about our relationship to digital media by reconceptualizing common, everyday interactions with digital media as placemaking activities.

The Creative City

The case study in chapter 5 investigates practices related to re-placeing the city from the perspective of those who professionally program and fund placemaking activities in the United States and of the locals who receive this funding and support. The chapter explores the role and potential of digital technologies and practices in creative placemaking efforts. Through an investigation of organizations, artists, and cities that have undertaken creative placemaking projects, the author evaluates the ways in which digital technologies and practices are imagined and implemented in order to “animate public and private spaces, rejuvenate structures and streetscapes, improve local business and public safety, and bring diverse people together to celebrate and inspire.” In addition, the chapter offers reasons that digital technologies and practices are not being associated with and incorporated into creative placemaking endeavors.

The Familiar City

Through questionnaires administered to 210 users of navigation technologies (e.g., GPS, digital maps, and mobile navigation systems) and interviews with ten navigation technology users, chapter 3 identifies the ways that users understand their own spatial relations, conditions of and tactics for mobility, and embeddedness within urban space. One of the most common engagements with GPS is through online mapping tools and mobile navigation technologies, yet we know very little about how these technologies are incorporated into everyday life—how they shape spatial relations, influence cognitive mappings of urban space, and contribute to the formation of a sense of place. Many scholars and critics have understood digital navigation technologies as alienating, abstracting, and distancing the digital media user from place. In contrast to popular assumptions about the distracted perception of space and place encouraged by digital navigation technologies, this chapter analyzes the ways in which the exact opposite processes are observable: navigation technology users are developing wayfinding strategies that reframe their image of the city, alter perceptions and practices of mobility, and re-embed them within urban environments.

The Social City

Chapter 4 examines how digital traces produced through locative media and geo-location technologies can be read as performative rather than precise and highlights some of the ways that cultural studies and humanities scholars can add value and insight to discussions of locative and location-based social media. Several of the projects discussed in this chapter surface personal, and/or collective memories and ontologies, and incorporate digital stories and situated knowledges into the practice of moving through the city. These examples evidence re-placeing the city by urban residents or travelers at the scale of the street. The chapter begins with a brief examination of the ways in which people utilized early (and now defunct) locative media projects and continues with an analysis of more recent incarnations of location-based social media to examine shifts in digital storytelling and performances of place evident in these projects. Check-in and location-announcement services such as Foursquare and photographic social media such as Instagram are analyzed through participatory observation and textual and discourse analysis to understand how people imagine and express their sense of place through these services.

The Connected City

Chapter 2 analyzes debates about re-placeing at the municipal scale. A key focus of this analysis is how different models of infrastructure deployment create visible geographies of digital inclusion and exclusion. The author investigates the practice of re-placeing the city from the perspective of those who plan and implement digital infrastructure projects, the municipal officials who oversee them, the people who benefit from them, and those who “opt out” of or are excluded from these efforts. Employing the example of Google’s Fiber for Communities project in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, the author illustrates how processes of digital infrastructure implementation reveal polysemic experiences of the city as a place. Through interviews and participant observation of Google Fiber deployment and digital inclusion efforts in Kansas and Missouri, the chapter offers an analysis of how infrastructure installation as urban renewal re-places the city and reveals conflicting affective experiences of infrastructure and how digital connection is perceived as relevant among populations with differential mobilities, socioeconomic statuses, and distinct experiences and attachments to the city in which they live.

Conclusion

More frequently than ever before, collective and individual placemaking involve routine engagement with digital media texts and practices. As the amount of accessible information about place proliferates, so, too, does the desire to “know one’s place” within space and society. The notion of “spatial reality” has become more personalized, customized, and shareable and at the same time more cartographic, quantifiable, and legible. Noted in several of the case studies presented in this book, digital technologies and practices are, in fact, key elements employed in humanizing the environment of urban spaces. The return to place, urban embodiment and embeddedness are activated and maintained through mediated, symbolic, and networked technologies and practices. This book encourages readers to think of digitally mediated placemaking not as a paradox but as something that populations across the globe habitually and strategically do in their performances of place. Throughout this book, the author calls attention to place and placemaking as integral to analyses of digital media use and relationships between media, bodies, and urban environments.

The Smart City

Chapter 1 engages the process of re-placeing on a global scale, examining how top-down imaginations of the built environment are coupled with digital media to express particular paradigms and plans for urban forms and urban experiences. The chapter identifies and analyzes a global trend of planning, designing, and constructing “smart-from-the-start” cities. In this particular smart-city model, digital media technologies and infrastructures are planned even before the buildings, roads, and other municipal services that will compose the urban environment are implemented. As a result, professionals are charged with the burden of having to construct these cities as “places” from scratch as well.