Abstract:As a growing number of social media platforms now include location information from their users, researchers are confronted with new online representations of individuals, social networks and the places they inhabit. To better understand these representations and their implications, we introduce the concept of the "spatial self": a theoretical framework encapsulating the process of online self-presentation based on the display of offline physical activities. Building on previous studies in social science, humanities, computer and information science, we analyze the ways offline experiences are harnessed and performed online. We first provide an encompassing interdisciplinary survey of research that investigates the relationships between location, information technology, and identity performance. Then we identify and characterize the spatial self as well as examine its occurrences through three case studies of popular social media sites: Instagram, Facebook, and Foursquare. Finally, we offer possible research directions and methodological considerations for the analysis of geocoded social media data.

Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach to urban problems. Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to smart cities, presenting key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts, along with discussions of both the drawbacks and the benefits of this approach to urban life. After reviewing current terminology and justifications employed by technology designers, journalists, and researchers, the book describes three models for smart city development—smart-from-the-start cities, retrofitted cities, and social cities—and offers examples of each. It covers technologies and methods, including sensors, public wi-fi, big data, and smartphone apps, and discusses how developers conceive of interactions among the built environment, technological and urban infrastructures, citizens, and citizen engagement. Throughout, the author—who has studied smart cities around the world—argues that smart city developers should work more closely with local communities, recognizing their preexisting relationship to urban place and realizing the limits of technological fixes. Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.

This brief essay introduces the special issue on the topic of ‘digital placemaking’ – a concept describing the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others. As a broad framework that encompasses a variety of practices used to create emotional attachments to place through digital media use, digital placemaking can be examined across a variety of domains. The concept acknowledges that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place is understood as primary to how social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how communities organize to build more meaningful and connected spaces. This idea runs through the articles in the issue, exploring the many ways people use digital media, under varied conditions, to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers – practices that may expose or amplify preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that certain populations experience digital media in place and placemaking.

Many studies have focused on new media's role in connecting interest-based communities across vast geographic distances; fewer studies have examined how viable social media is as a communication tool within the neighborhood context. This study investigates the ways in which established modes of place-based neighborhood association, connection, and communication coincide or conflict with the perceived affordances of connection and association available in social networking sites. As a case study, we identified a neighborhood association that had seen its participation rates dwindle. The association's steering committee decided to turn to popular social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) to revitalize. After the initial launch, they garnered only five "likes," three Twitter followers, and two members for the e-mail listserv out of a possible 550 households. A survey of neighborhood residents showed some potential for social media use but also significant mismatches between the perceived affordances of social media and residents' understanding of the place-based context and condition of the neighborhood. We found three main categories where perceptions and expectations of neighborhood communication did not mesh with social media affordances: perceived intimacy within the neighborhood; desired attributes of neighborhood communication; and expectations of digital and physical space and place.

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the success of social media as a community engagement tool at the neighborhood level and, thus, expand on existing theories and practices in regards to social media and place-based communities. We found a neighborhood association that was considering dismantling after 38 years due to low participation rates. In a last effort to rebuild, they were willing to try social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. After the initial launch and promotion of the online tools, they gained no comments, responses, or retweets, and only 5 "likes", 3 Twitter followers, and 2 people for the email listserv out of a possible 550 households. We conducted a survey with neighborhood residents in order to understand why members of the neighborhood did not join these social media networks and why they were not engaged with the neighborhood association in general.Our findings indicate that previous research recommending multiple types of communication to reach everyone in a neighborhood is valid but neighborhood organizations should also target their communication to maximize often limited resources. In our case study, the neighbors who said social media were good ways to communicate with the neighborhood were also the ones who said they wanted a neighborhood association. This was not the case for those choosing email or mail options. We also found a mismatch between "neighborly" ties and the more intimate ties associated with "friends" on social media, desires for inclusive communication, and expectations regarding face-to-face communication within a neighborhood setting. These results show the different roles of neighborhood organizations (sociability versus political representation or a mix of both) and how social media fits with these different roles. Based on the survey results, advice for using social media to revive a neighborhood organization is offered.3

The design and deployment of urban broadband infrastructures inscribe particular imaginations of Internet access onto city streets. The different manifestations and locations of these networks, their uses, and access points often expose material excesses of urban broadband networks, as well as failures of Internet service providers, urban planners, and public officials to imagine the diverse ways that people incorporate Internet connection into their everyday lives. We approach the study of urban broadband networks through the juxtaposition of invisible networks that are buried under the streets and have always been "turned off" (dark fiber) versus hypervisible that are "turned on" and prominently displayed on city streets (LinkNYC). In our analysis of these two case studies, we critique themes of visibility and invisibility as indexes of power and access. Our findings are meant to provide a critical analysis of urban technology policy as well as theories of infrastructure, visibility, and access.

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The Digital City focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the role that digital media play in placemaking endeavors. Critics have understood digital media as forces that alienate and disembed users from space and place. This book argues that the exact opposite processes are observable: many different actors are consciously and habitually using digital technologies to re-embed themselves within urban space. Five case studies from 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 technologies, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to reproduce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through clear and accessible language and timely narratives of everyday urban life, the author 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. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis of everyday digital media practices and technologies, this book expands practical and theoretical understandings of the ways 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 and the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments are what this book addresses.