Reassembling Digital Placemaking: Participation and Politics

This book presents digital placemaking as a new testing ground for urban democracy. It explores the participatory practices of digital placemaking and their implications on blurring formal and informal boundaries of decision-making and urban politics.

Drawing on examples from Australia, China and Taiwan, the book examines how contemporary cities are witnessing an era when digitality becomes a mode of placemaking and participation becomes an urban condition. Such developments manifest as urban activism, creative branding, tech placemaking and digital governance that trigger changes in urban engagement and politics. This book views digital placemaking through an assemblage lens to demonstrate how it can be a relational site of contentions and collaborations among civil society, industries and governments without observance of strict boundaries. Contrary to an often binary and zero-sum reading of urban politics, this book advocates for a tripartite assemblage model of urban politics that is neither hierarchical nor deterministic. This book proposes an ouroboros model as a systematic approach that conceptually anchors digital placemaking studies to the nexus of urban institutions and digital technologies. It reconceptualises urban politics as a relational process of nuances, contingency and complexity in the flux of cosmopolitan power movements and inquiries. Ultimately, the book develops the notion of socio-technical natality to counter the myth of tech inevitability and instil a thesis of hope and change.

This book will interest researchers, policymakers and professionals in urban studies, media studies, cultural studies, urban communication, creative placemaking, community engagement, urban advocacy and urban governance.

Isabel Fangyi Lu is a Senior Project Adviser at the Department of Education, Victoria, Australia. She is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Having obtained her PhD from the University of Melbourne, she pursues interdisciplinary research and public projects at the intersection of technology, arts and built-environments.