Envisioning the #FutureCity: The Influence of Digital Platforms on the Imagined Futures of Temporary Placemaking

Keywords: platform urbanism, placemaking, temporary urbanism, Instagram
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 9

Abstract

Temporary placemaking projects that utilize digital platforms (such as Instagram, etc.) may encounter limits specifically intended by the digital platform to direct the imagined futures of placemakers. This tension, between imagined utility and actual functionality, is a characteristic of digital placemaking projects, generally. In this paper, I examine this in the specific placemaking project of the BLINK light art festival in Cincinnati, Ohio, 2017 to 2019. Through the use of light and projection mapping art, the BLINK festival presented a vision for the #FutureCity of Cincinnati, Ohio where art and culture are central to the city’s place in the world. I suggest that BLINK’s reliance on Instagram’s ability to reconfigure time and space actually shaped the festival’s spatial imagination of the #FutureCity and subsequently influenced efforts by festival organizers to physically and digitally direct and curate the audience’s digital mediation of the festival. Temporary placemaking projects like BLINK provide the public with an opportunity to see what is possible in a space, give them immediate access to that imagined future, and solidify that vision of the future by building public and political support. These projects rely on the digital mediation created by their audiences via digital platforms to disrupt their inherent ephemerality and to create a sharable and searchable archive of the event. This reliance on digital platforms directs and limits the placemaker’s visions for the future to those that conform to the spatial imaginaries of the platform itself.