The Digital City

Shows how digital media connects people to their lived environments

Every day, millions of people turn to small handheld screens to search for their destinations and to seek recommendations for places to visit. They may share texts or images of themselves and these places en route or after their journey is complete. We don’t consciously reflect on these activities and probably don’t associate these practices with constructing a sense of place. Critics have argued that digital media alienates users from space and place, but this book argues that the exact opposite is true: that we habitually use digital technologies to re-embed ourselves within urban environments.

The Digital City advocates for the need to rethink our everyday interactions with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Drawing on five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placeing,” Germaine R. Halegoua shows how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to turn urban spaces into places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through timely narratives of everyday urban life, Halegoua argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media.

Germaine R. Halegoua is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the co-editor of Locating Emerging Media.

It is easy to criticize technology for diluting true life experiences when one is connected to it… Halegoua argues that the relationship between people and digital technology need not be disruptive.

Heidi Rae Cooley, author of Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era:
Tracking the relationship of bodies, digital media, and the urban landscape, Germaine Halegoua raises important questions about how smart technologies mediate our assumptions about the everyday. She argues that these values, though, are not simply imposed from above, but are negotiated through the very practices of 'smart' users. A timely read that invites us to consider the city, its people, and its digital cartographies as a new ecosystem that hangs in the balances of access and technological literacy.