Special Issue: Digital Placemaking

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Exploring New Media Technologies
2021, Vol. 27(3) 573–578
‘digital placemaking’ ª The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13548565211014828
journals.sagepub.com/home/con

Germaine Halegoua
University of Kansas, USA

Erika Polson
University of Denver, USA

Abstract
This brief essay introduces the special issue on the topic of ‘digital placemaking’ – a concept
describing the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others. As a broad
framework that encompasses a variety of practices used to create emotional attachments to place
through digital media use, digital placemaking can be examined across a variety of domains. The
concept acknowledges that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place is understood
as primary to how social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how
communities organize to build more meaningful and connected spaces. This idea runs through the
articles in the issue, exploring the many ways people use digital media, under varied conditions, to
negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers – practices that may expose or amplify
preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that certain populations experience
digital media in place and placemaking.

Keywords
Digital placemaking, domestic space, geomedia, migration, mobility, participatory design, social
media, tourism

In recent years, amid the ongoing convergence of digital and physical environments – with each
increasingly producing the norms and parameters of the other – questions about ‘place’ have been
raised by scholars across multiple fields (e.g. Fast et al., 2018; Hjorth, 2008; Kitchin and Dodge,
2011; Moores, 2012; Wilken and Goggin, 2012). As we began the process of inviting contributions
to consider how digital placemaking might be examined in a variety of domains, we were cog-
nizant that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place has remained primary to how

Corresponding author:
Erika Polson, Department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies, University of Denver, 2490 S. Gaylord Street, Denver, CO
80210, USA.
Email: epolson@du.edu
574 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27(3)

social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how communities organize to
build more meaningful and connected spaces. Underlying this project was the basic principle that,
instead of depleting a sense of place, the ability to forge attachments to digital media environments
and through digital practices enables people to emplace themselves and others.
This special issue is devoted to an exploration of ‘digital placemaking’, a concept that we, as
coeditors of this issue, have investigated in our own work. Germaine Halegoua’s book, The Digital
City: Media and the Social Production of Place (2020), analyzes how people with assorted
relations of power and privilege harness digital media technologies, practices, and infrastructures
to understand embeddedness within urban places and to foster a unique sense of place within
rapidly changing urban environments. Through routine assessments and engagements with digital
media affordances, people reproduce seemingly abstract or complex urban environments as rooted,
humanized places where someone could potentially belong – turning the spaces in which we find
ourselves into the spaces in which we dwell. This connection between belonging and the socio-
technical production of the city as familiar or knowable reverberates throughout Erika Polson’s
book, Privileged Mobilities: Professional Migration, Geo-Social Media, and a New Global Middle
Class (2016). In that work, a mobile sense of place is created across global cities as expats use
interactive online platforms to organize, locate, and participate in in-person events that produce an
ambient continuity across diverse geographical locations.
Drawing on these works, we propose that at its core ‘digital placemaking’ describes the use of
digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others – to embrace digital media
affordances in order to cultivate or maintain a sense of attachment to place. However, as Halegoua
(2020) argues, digital placemaking (or efforts to ‘re-place’ the city) do not always work to augment
social value or community pride in place in the attachments they create. Digital placemaking
practices may expose or amplify preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that
certain populations experience digital media in place and placemaking. Although not a series of
exhaustive accounts, the articles selected for this issue illustrate the range of efforts and experi-
ences that can be classified as forms of digital placemaking from the streaming of the intimate
contours of one’s bedroom to the documentation of forced mobilities of refugees.
The diversity of examples in this special issue provides one level of exploration of the concept
of digital placemaking; the context in which the issue was compiled provides another. This project
was well into development when the deadly COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered how places
could be inhabited, and by whom. Up to that point, much of the world was experiencing an
increasing mobility of people, goods and services, information, and capital, which had contributed
to impressions of a world in flux where the ‘space of flows’ dominated the ‘space of places’
(Castells, 2010). At the more personal scale, multiplying public and private uses of digital media
had produced varied discourses on the potential for these practices to dissociate or liberate users
from copresent environments. The implication of these perspectives was that our collective sense
of place had been disrupted, leaving people unsure of their belonging within conditions and
boundaries that seemed increasingly fluid. However, while it is imperative to attend to the shifting
social, economic, and political conditions that give rise to such concerns, it is also necessary to
recognize the many ways people actually use digital media to negotiate differential mobilities and
become placemakers. This became clear recently, as stay-at-home orders and public safety mea-
sures in response to the global pandemic exposed the ways in which those who were already
embedded in digital environments had more advantages – technologically, socially, economi-
cally – to survive the pandemic’s externalities. As Cresswell (2020) notes, these efforts to
Halegoua and Polson 575

reconfigure movement have inspired, or should inspire, reinvigorated investigations of the

meaning and practice of mobility and sense of place.
The articles in this issue explore the many ways people use digital media, under varied con-
ditions, to become placemakers. The issue introduces and critically examines the concept of
‘digital placemaking’ as practices that create emotional attachments to place through digital media
use. As populations and the texts they produce have become increasingly mobile, such practices
are proliferating, and a striking array of applications and uses have emerged which exploit the
affordances of mobile media to foster an ability to navigate, understand, connect to, and gain a
sense of belonging and familiarity in place.
Through the process of reviewing and editing this special issue, we have encountered the work
of scholars across the globe and in a variety of fields who are producing scholarship and creative
research that speaks to our interpretation of digital placemaking. Our call for papers elicited
abstracts from scholars and artists working with concepts of digital placemaking as related to
gaming, fandom, museum and cultural heritage sites, storytelling, urban development and tactical
urbanism, activism, mapping, migration and travel, citizenship, domestic and work spaces,
mobility and immobility, identity performance, and community engagement. Furthermore,
multiple conferences (e.g. GeoMedia, Digital Crossroads, Media Architecture Biennale), research
networks (e.g. PriMob, Pan-American Mobilities Network, Global Mobilities Network, Cosmo-
bilities), and labs (e.g. Locating Media, Local Data Design Lab, mCenter) are bringing together
scholars and resources to explore the topic broadly and within specific practices and communities.
We see this special issue as an effort to connect these ongoing conversations and important
research under the theme of ‘digital placemaking’ and to encourage scholars and artists to explore
the ways in which their research and practice intersect with our definition of the concept.
The articles selected for this issue address digital placemaking through a range of theoretical
and methodological perspectives – including ethnography, discourse and textual analysis, and
participatory design – to investigate the lived experiences of diverse communities with disparate
social and economic power. With contributions from scholars working in media, communication,
anthropology, and information studies, we demonstrate how digital media can facilitate social and
geographic boundary crossing while encouraging new ways of placing ourselves – symbolically,
virtually, or through colocated presence.
The diversity of approaches and methods our authors implement in their studies speak to the
range and applicability of the concept of digital placemaking. Key questions addressed by the
authors in this issue include the following: How do people employ digital media to create and
negotiate a new sense of place within rapidly changing media landscapes and socio-spatial
exchanges? How are boundary crossing and place transgressions implicated in tensions related
to tourism, migration, self-presentation, and emerging media? How can scholars investigate and
design digital placemaking experiences and technologies to reflect nuances of interrelated online
and offline experiences? By addressing such questions, the articles outline key characteristics and
configurations of digital placemaking and exemplify how the concept can be employed as an
innovative approach to studying digital media technologies and practices. However, there are
many more questions and approaches to digital placemaking, and we encourage researchers to
reflect on this special issue as a provocation and invitation for further research rather than
exhaustive coverage of a concept or theme.
The special issue demonstrates how digital media constitute new methods for experiencing
physical locations, expressing differential mobilities, and how users participate in narrating a sense
of place into being. Two articles directly address placemaking in terms of how digital media
576 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27(3)

participants interact with specific platforms and location data to experience physical places.
Adopting a theoretical approach to the analysis of digital media, in ‘Placemaking Through the
Mobile Social Media Platform Snapchat’, Rowan Wilken and Lee Humphreys interrogate theories
of place as applied to the mobile media platform Snapchat. They investigate the ways in which
place is produced and commodified through the social media platform’s use, design, and business
model. Didem Ozkul’s ‘The Algorithmic Fix: Location Intelligence, Placemaking and Predictable
Futures’ discusses select ways in which algorithmic practices related to machine learning and
location awareness ‘get a fix on’ our whereabouts, who we are, and what we might become in order
to sort and classify both people and places. These articles set the foundation for the remainder of
the special issue by exploring the ways that place, what it means, and our relationship to it are
continually enacted and negotiated across multiple levels of digital media engagement.
Placemaking practices and experiences of place have shifted during the global COVID-19
pandemic with more people and services increasingly relying on digital technologies and digital
environments for personal mobility and connection. In ‘Placemaking “Experiences” During
Covid-19’, Roger Norum and Erika Polson explore strategies employed by Airbnb ‘Experiences’
hosts to effectively move place-based experiences online during the first months of the pandemic
lockdowns. The authors locate the embodied role of the local ‘host’ as key to connecting people to
digital, and geographic, places. Jess Hardley and Ingrid Richardson also investigate the use of
digital technologies during the first few months of the pandemic. In their ethnographic study of
mobile phone use in two Australian cities, they analyze how people utilized mobile phones for
digital placemaking while at home. ‘Digital Placemaking and Networked Corporeality: Embodied
Mobile Media Practices in Domestic Space During Covid-19’ investigates new understandings and
the recalibration of mediated relationships between the body and place, digital intimacy, and
shifting boundaries of privacy within domestic space.
Several contributions focus on distinctive engagements with digital media in relation to
expressions of differential mobilities among marginalized or underrepresented populations. Saskia
Witteborn’s ‘Digital Placemaking and the Datafication of Forced Migrants’, Miguel Fernandez-
Rodriguez Labayen and Irene Gutierrez Torres’ ‘Digital Placemaking and the Control Over Space:
Sub-Saharan Migrants’ Videos at the Moroccan-Spanish Border’, and Germaine Halegoua and
Ghiyong Patrick Moon’s ‘Korean Foreign Travel Selfies as Contested Placemaking Practices’
place movement and mobility at the center of their explorations of digital placemaking. Engaging
with ‘digital migration studies’ (Leurs and Smets, 2018), Witteborn’s and Labayen and Torres’
accounts focus on refugees and migration, while Halegoua and Moon investigate leisure travel.
Witteborn explores the tension between migrant agency in placemaking and the datafication of the
migrant and migration processes. Practices like biometric registration and visual tracing on social
media locate the migrant in physical, social, and legal place. Databases, social media profiles, and
computational analytics create narratives that arrest ‘mobility’ as a geospatial certainty through the
logics of identification and location. Labayen and Torres analyze mobile videos made by young
Cameroonian males as they prepare to jump a fence separating the Moroccan-Spanish border. They
interpret these videos to be spatial rituals and mobile counter-discourses against the state control of
borders, bodies, and space. In a very different example of renegotiating belonging in place through
mobile media, Halegoua and Moon argue that when read as digital placemaking practices, Korean
foreign travel selfies become salient to producers and audiences as political expressions of one’s
place in the world. The article reexamines the selfie as an empowering, mobile means for pro-
ducing locational capital among Korean females traveling alone abroad despite misogynistic
reactions to these young females’ experiences of mobility and globalization.
Halegoua and Polson 577

Many abstracts we received for this special issue highlighted an array of intersections between
digital placemaking and participatory cultures. In this issue, Bo Ruberg and Daniel Lark call
readers’ attention to the prevalence of the bedroom in both gaming and non-gaming livestreams
hosted on the streaming platform, Twitch. ‘Video Games in the Bedroom: Performing Intimacy
Through Domestic Space on Twitch’ identifies and analyzes the presence and absence of the
bedroom as related to genre, gender, and performances of intimacy and affective labor in video
streams. Similar to Hardley and Richardson’s contribution, Ruberg and Lark examine placemaking
within domestic spaces and the performance of domestic space online, which presents an important
contrast to the primary focus on mobilities and public spaces within digital placemaking research.
Finally, two articles interrogate digital placemaking by addressing mobile experiences of
locations through digital storytelling and community-oriented design as artistic, oppositional, and
pedagogical practice. In ‘Building Participatory Counternarratives: Pedagogical Interventions
Through Digital Placemaking’, Jordan Frith and Jacob Richter recount and analyze how students
utilize the locative media app, GeoTourist, to encourage others to experience their campus through
‘participatory counternarratives’: the ability to use locative media for new forms of digital pla-
cemaking that counter dominant histories and dominant stories told about a place. In another
example of creative production, Benjamin Stokes, François Barr, Karl Baumann, Ben Caldwell,
and Andrew Schrock explore how ‘urban furniture’ can sustain social capacity for digital place-
making. The article analyzes three installations of their community-hacked payphone, Sankofa
Red, across Los Angeles where this Afrofuturist, digital-physical hybrid helped to initiate and
propel placemaking as a social process that prioritized local needs and cultures.
The unique yet interrelated conditions of mobility addressed within this special issue focus on
the matrix of mobile technologies, mobile texts, and processes of large-scale as well as personal
movements. By focusing on issues surrounding mobile rights and risks associated with migration,
creative tactics within the social and mobile media of travelers, and contested mobilities based on
social power and access to digital infrastructures, we illustrate the breadth and depth of the the-
oretical contributions of our digital placemaking framework. Drawing from a diversity of
approaches and methods, each article illustrates how utilizing digital placemaking to research
global and local experiences of place uncovers novel socio-cultural-technical tactics and forces
that coordinate, govern, and express mobilities and sense of place within digital infrastructures and
imaginaries.

ORCID iDs
Germaine Halegoua https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0800-8042
Erika Polson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1056-7428

References
Castells M (2010) The Rise of Network Society, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cresswell T (2020) Valuing mobility in a post COVID-19 world. Mobilities. Available at: https://rsa.tandfon
line.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17450101.2020.1863550 (accessed 17 March 2021).
Fast K, Jansson A, Lindell J, et al. (2018) Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds.
London: Routledge.
Halegoua GR (2020) The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place. New York, NY: NYU
Press.
Hjorth L (2008) Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile. New York, NY:
Routledge.
578 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27(3)

Kitchin R and Dodge M (2011) Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leurs K and Smets K (2018) Five questions for digital migration studies: Learning from digital connectivity
and forced migration in(to) Europe. Social Media þ Society 4(1): 1–16.
Moores S (2012) Media, Place and Mobility. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Polson E (2016) Privileged Mobilities: Professional Migration, Geo-Social Media, and a New Global Middle
Class. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Wilken R and Goggin G (2012) Mobile Technology and Place. New York, NY: Routledge.

Author biographies
Germaine Halegoua is an associate professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at the University of
Kansas. Her research and writing focus on digital media and place, urban and community informatics, and
cultural geographies of digital media. She is the author of The Digital City: Media and the Social Production
of Place (NYU Press, 2020), Smart Cities (MIT Press, 2020), and co-editor of the anthology, Locating
Emerging Media (Routledge, 2016).
Erika Polson is an associate professor in the department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies at the
University of Denver, USA. Her research involves critical cultural studies of digital media and mobility in
global contexts, and specifically of new way that status is accrued or projected through mobilities. She is
author of Privileged Mobilities: Professional Migration, Geo-social Media, and a New Global Middle Class
(2016) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Media and Class(2020).