Abstract
Digital placemaking is a term given to a range of evolving practices that combine emerging digital technologies and placemaking initiatives. Over the past five years, its meaning has significantly shifted 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. Ultimately, however, we argue that the techno-social matrix through which we currently perceive and understand the city is now already deeply suffused with digital media and tools, raising a question as to what the adjectival modifier ‘digital’ actually illuminates. This 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.
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Notes
- 1.
It must be recognised from the outset that our commentary is focussed on issues of digital placemaking in the Global North. Both placemaking practices and the use of digital technologies are extensively deployed in the Global South (e.g., see Padawangi & Douglass, 2015), but are outside the scope of this paper.
- 2.
A striking further example of this can be found in Chapter 4 of this volume, where architecture students worked with Indigenous knowledge-holders to re-establish the traditional ‘songlines’ of a place using digital 3D-printed clay interventions.
- 3.
A 2018 New Yorker piece mocked the trend with an acerbic list of parody collabs, culminating with ‘Consumer Capitalism x Human Weakness’: Tuck, Jake. 2018. “Hot New Fashion and Design Collabs,” New Yorker, September 25, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/hot-new-fashion-and-design-collabs.
- 4.
Pound Lane Concern group Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poundlanecg/.
- 5.
- 6.
Facebook page for Always at the edge of things and between places exhibition: https://www.facebook.com/alwaysathedge.
- 7.
The game can only be played on a smartphone in the Central and Western District of Hong Kong Island. See https://quest.stairculture.com/ for info and to sign into the game using Facebook.
- 8.
Always at the edge of things and between places, webpage: https://stairculture.com/archive/exhibition/.
- 9.
Share an Idea won ‘unanimous overall winner’ of the Netherlands-based Co-creation Association’s Co-creation Award in 2011, and the resulting plan developed by Gehl Architects from these responses won a major prize in Sweden’s Virserum Art Museum’s Triennal Architecture of Necessity Awards in 2013.
- 10.
The contributions to FESTA directed by the present author include Cumulonimbus (2016); and Makkanika (2018). Project blogs reflecting on the processes and outcomes are https://festa2016adl.wordpress.com/ and https://festa2018adl.wordpress.com/, respectively.
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Toland, A., Christ, M.C., Worrall, J. (2020). DigitalXPlace. In: Hes, D., Hernandez-Santin, C. (eds) Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9624-4_12
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