The Risk Of Privately Owned Public Digital Place

Urban Planning Principles Should Be Applied to the Digital Realm.

As a Master in Urban Planning student at the GSD I frequently wonder why our discipline pays so little attention to digital space. What occurs in digital space is rapidly changing the layout of cities, management capacity, how people organize, movement within it and how urban dwellers interact and socialize with one another. Users of applications, search engines, and social media platforms create digital data trails which have capacity, especially when spatialized to inform us in the decision-making process about how these people move around, what spaces are frequently visited — what is or is not working. In terms of infrastructure, should we as planners advocate that people have access to the same opportunities to exist in digital spaces? I argue that digital space should benefit from some planning, zoning, and place-based policy initiatives in both the physical and digital public realms.

Digital space could benefit from the guiding principles of planning as a discipline. Digital space and the UX design practices that create it use many of the same principles of navigability that have been essentially standardized within the field. Many planners utilize urban sociology methodologies and theories to justify their proposals. In…