Digital Placemaking and Soft City Sensing Research Network

Thriving cities rely on residents engaging with - and investing meaning in - their spaces. Placemaking practices are one of the bedrocks of subjectivity, human meaning, and social relations (Cresswell, 2004). Urban placemaking practices are evolving due to the increasing influx of social media, location-based services, and algorithms in people’s lives (Halegoua, 2020; Bui, forthcoming). Recommendation systems like Google Maps guide navigation and shape city narratives (Lardinois, 2018). Citizens use social media to define norms and boundaries of cherished places (Birkbak, 2016), with more than half the Danish population using platforms like Facebook for community-building (Analyse & Tal, 2022). Image-based platforms like Instagram and Tik-Tok impact how adolescents imagine and internalize social expectations (Sarmiento et al., 2020), and urban publics is using generative AI to manipulate urban representations and imagine urban futures (Jang et al., 2023).

While new media has historically shaped urban connections (Mattern, 2017), this shift necessitates reevaluating how we understand the place and social infrastructure in contemporary cities (Halegoua & Polson, 2021). While previous research has focused on housing, neighborhood effects, and negative tech impacts in public spaces (Cowen et al., 2020; Shapiro, 2020; Wilken and Goggin, 2012), limited research exists on how digital placemaking affects identity, connections, and community-building in urban areas. In the context of rising social segregation in global urbanization, this is a crucial gap to fill.

The network will bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of researchers to a) explore how digitization influences place-assemblies and b) suggest new methods for studying it. The participants span ethnography, architecture, media studies and data science and have all made significant contributions to the study of digitization, placemaking, and urban social infrastructure. Also, they all approach placemaking as an ongoing process, involving the assembly of social, material, and historical elements (Massey, 2005). Instead of conceiving urban attachments as uncovering the authenticity of a place and adapting to it, the network sees place identities as continuously enacted through the gathering of things, people, and memories (Casey, 1996).