Re-thinking placemaking in the digital era
By Anijo Mathew
Founder and Chief Experience Officer/Vamonde + Academic Director of the Ed Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship/IllinoisTech Chicago
“Placemaking” is a term that architects, planners, and city organisations use to describe the process of creating urban spaces that attract people because they are pleasurable or interesting. Project for Public Spaces defines placemaking as a process that fosters the creation of vital public destinations: the kind of places where people feel a strong stake in their communities and a commitment to making things better. Most placemaking initiatives focus on atomic scale experiences, things that can be heard, seen, touched or felt by a human being through urban infrastructure such as streets, furniture, signage, guideposts etc. The prevailing thought is that if you build a seat…someone will sit on it.
Evolved city organisations have started to understand however that placemaking is more than just street furniture and signage — you really must build a whole system of initiatives to make a place pleasurable or interesting. In Chicago, neighborhood organisations such as Chicago Loop Alliance and Lakeview Chamber of Commerce are heavily investing in bringing in new experiences to urban spaces. For example, the Chicago Loop Alliance aligned with Chicago DCASE to host a Halloween parade called Arts in the Dark where local arts organisations showed off their scary side to the public.
Another example of this is when Lakeview Chamber of Commerce hosted a Taco Fest in September of this year. And no Taco Fest is complete without taco trucks, art and culture events, and a Lucha Libre (often known as Mexican Wrestling). Clearly, these organisations get it. Physical infrastructure by itself is not enough — one has to create compelling, embedded experiences for the user to truly engage with place.
However, even the most evolved organisations still struggle with digital placemaking. This is a problem because in recent times we have seen significant changes in people’s sensibilities and expectations, especially with the coming of mobile, locative, and ubiquitous technologies that dominate every aspect of our lived experiences. Recent studies show that new tools of social media create unprecedented opportunities to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action. Digitally savvy tourists and locals are demanding more from the city in the form of digital urban experiences .
Digital tools are also changing the balance of participation and spectatorship. Placemaking can no longer be the creation of mute spatial arrangements but technology mediated enablers of social connectivity. Dan Hill in his essay, The Street as a Platform suggests once we recognize that information systems are starting to play a major role in the construction of our daily experiences, invisible parts of the street (patterns of data in the streets, systems that enable and carry them, quality of these connections, their various levels of openness or privacy) will all affect the way the street feels, as much or more than, street furniture or road signs.
Cities have tried digital before and continue to do so. Link NYC in collaboration with Intersection and Sidewalk Labs built out a series of digitally connected interfaces throughout NYC. The problem is that very often these interventions are merely digital equivalents of the physical infrastructure that existed before. It’s a super cool idea, beautifully designed…but boring!
So, what can organisations do? Here is a five-step approach that organisations could employ as they start thinking of digital placemaking initiatives:
1. In this digitally savvy world, physical interventions should work in tandem with digital. City and cultural organisations must consider digital interventions as equal devices in a systemic placemaking approach. They cannot be relegated to the side either — the power comes from both of them being at the same level when seen by the user.
2. Use physical infrastructure for broad macro-information, and use the user’s devices to communicate more specific or targeted narratives, or information that changes frequently. No digital intervention from the organisation can keep up with the pace at which users change their computational capability — any smart device that users carry can do a lot more than any digital display on the street.
3. Use physical interventions as pieces in a larger experience than singular units of experience. Imagine a sign in a public space. By itself it is furniture. But connected to many different sign in the area, it can be a piece of a larger puzzle…encouraging users to discover other pieces of the puzzle and thereby engaging with place. Digital can be used to discover the game or additional layers of new experience hidden (through AR, maybe?) within the physical.
4. Use the character of the place to your advantage. When you are standing in front of a building is when you are most awed by it. Use this opportunity to tell people a story — it is a much better opportunity than doing it when they are in front of a computer at home or at work.
5. Use digital to build active engagement. Digital should catalyse human interaction not stymie it. Think of enabling call-to-actions within your digital engagements that persuade people to find something, talk to someone, buy something, or engage with a physical space in a specific way.
Just as traditional placemaking initiatives moved beyond the physical, digital placemaking will evolve into digital place experiences. As long as people have occupied space, place narratives and experiences have been a part of our lives. We call them stories. Our stories are an external representation of our experiences and memories. When people engage with place, the first thing they seek is the narrative of the place: Who has been here? What happened here? Why does this place look this? Organisations must not only enable this connection but also empower users to seek them out. We must also consider a new social order in which people are no longer restricted to the role of the spectator. With modern technology, they can (and often do) participate in the construction, mutation, and sharing of place narratives. This leads to the idea of infinite place where participants in space can take a single (their own or someone else’s) place narrative and watch it change over time as they or others add to the narrative. If city and cultural organisations do not map this behaviour into their placemaking interventions, initiatives could appear dated and old-fashioned even in a span of months.
Originally published at medium.com on October 27, 2017.
