The digital mundane and the experiential production of public space

Abstract

The role that our engagements with digital technology play in producing urban public space are often and easily taken for granted. Seeking to remedy this, there has been a groundswell of scholarship in digital geography that explores how various digital technologies are experienced as part of everyday life in public space. In this article I extend this scholarship by arguing that digital technology is not only an important experiential phenomenon, but that, through our mundane engagements, it also configures together with the urban bodies, mass, and matter to produce public space. To account for the spatially productive role of digital technology I develop an understanding of public space as contingent and dynamic, and show how this allows us to understand space as becoming public when it is experienced as such, by locating the everyday material and affective engagements with digital technology that contribute to those experiences. This orientation towards everyday life offers an important counterpoint to narratives that relate the production of public space to top-down engagements with digital technologies, as in smart and platform cities. It also contributes to the critical evaluation of public space by showing how digital technology is part of the ongoing configuration of that space, through the everyday life that takes place there. • Develops an experiential understanding of public space. • Locates digital technology as part of the lived experience of public space. • Illustrates this relationship ethnographically.

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