Reflections towards an agenda for urban-designing the digital city

This article deals with the increasingly digital augmentation of urban space and looks at how so far initiatives in this sense have been deployed in a way that is disconnected from urban design knowledge and practice. The aim here is to contribute to a reflection on how urban design perspectives can – and should – play an important role in informing such developments. It promotes, through a series of observations on tensions between digital and physical dimensions of space, the need to design ‘augmented’ space as a whole, mobilising the ‘digital’ to positively reinforcing place. This, the article argues, can be achieved through attention to a series of principles, which can be part of an urban design agenda for digitally enhanced places. URBAN DESIGN International (2013) 18, 131–144. doi:10.1057/udi.2012.32; published online 5 December 2012