[Air-L] New book: The Digital City (NYU Press)

[Germaine R Halegoua]

I’m very happy to announce the publication of my new book from NYU Press, *The
Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Urban Place*

https://nyupress.org/9781479882199/the-digital-city/



*The Digital City* focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the
role that digital media plays in place-making 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: that many different actors are consciously and habitually using
digital technologies to re-embed themselves within urban space.



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.



Through clear and accessible language and timely narratives of everyday
urban life, 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.


-- 
Germaine R. Halegoua
Associate Professor
Dept. of Film and Media Studies
University of Kansas
grhalegoua at ku.edu