Alessandro Aurigi

Since the advent of new digital media, the design of real-world places has been depicted as interactive digital content in digital gaming platforms and virtual reality applications. Digital 3D models have been used to simulate complex real-world environments to present place-making ideas in architectural studies. However, typical 3D models often lack the constitution that gives a place its unique essence and meaning. Through a narrative review of relevant literature, this paper aims to investigate the constructs of virtual place experience from the perspective of a sense of place in both physical and virtual places. The overall learning experience could be significantly improved by revolutionising how traditional information is transmitted through the current digital medium and pervasive technologies.

This paper focuses on the importance of framing and conceiving smart urban initiatives and schemes in a highly context-sensitive way, and argues that place-based approaches are essential for enhancing the social sustainability of smart cities. It does so by highlighting how such a perspective is often ignored by discourses and visions that favor generalized and socially skewed ways of framing the “city” as well as the citizens who are expected to become “smart” and benefit from high technologies. These, the paper argues, leave out the important nuances and social and spatial interstices that make places unique, and by doing so weaken the ability of smart to be inclusive and afford a rich landscape of technological appropriation making cities more resilient.

Historical context is that there are a range of different theoretical approaches to understanding what the digital city is and how associated urban changes are constituted. This chapter looks at relatively recent perspectives and paradigms as some of the main originators of the digital, and smart, city discourses and practices. It focuses on the convenience, around the beginning of the 1990s, the period when the interne started to be popularised. The complexity of the development of both cities and technologies means that looking at digital urbanism is a much more nuanced matter than simply charting the straightforward 'impacts' of a new piece of software or hardware on the city, and on urban life in general. The chapter presents a case study about wired cities, cyberspace and smart urbanism. The technology designers in these studies coped with developing new community information utilities by viewing the projects as analogous to existing exemplar technologies with which they were familiar.

In this paper we seek to reflect on the way in which 'digital cities' later re-emerge as 'smart cities' (both in terms of the approaches and also the actual cities) and what lessons can be learned about the role of ICTs in how they shape urban space. We will focus on looking at how the lack of understanding of the city as a 'place' is often a common factor in the lack of longevity in 'digital city' initiatives and discuss the corresponding implications for the emergence of 'smart cities'. We draw on a study of the city of Bristol, UK in order to look at the variety of initiatives that took Bristol from a 1990's digital city to the current 'smart' projects. We conclude by reflecting on what can be learnt from the lessons of the failed Digital City projects of 1990's and discuss the role that placemaking could play in the development of socially and spatially sustainable smart cities.