DigitalXPlace

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.