We’re happy to announce the publication of Germaine Halegoua’s new book from NYU Press, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Urban Place. (You can read an excerpt published by Flaunt Magazine, or an interview with Germaine about the book.)

Five case studies from global and mid-sized cities around the world illustrate the concept of “re-placeing” by showing how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation practices, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to re-produce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments.

“Maybe it’s not that the nature of place is changing, but what place means now within the digital era is changing… Part of the way that it’s changing is because place is not necessarily about static pause, or even an exact location, but it’s more of an event. It’s more of a performance. So place itself is becoming a little bit more mutable, more changeable, more fluid in the sense that its meaning is becoming more changeable, mutable and fluid through the use of digital technologies.”

Halegoua argues that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media while highlighting our own awareness of the places where we find ourselves and where our technologies find and place us. This book expands practical and theoretical understandings of how urban planners envision and plan connected cities, the role of urban communities in shaping and interpreting digital architectures, and the tales of the city produced through mobile and web-based platforms. Digital connectivity is reshaping the city as well as the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments is what this book addresses.