Making older urban neighborhoods smart: Digital placemaking of everyday life

This article investigates the making of place-led smart neighborhoods. Based on a multimethod research design that combines narrative city walks, participant observations, secondary research, and in-depth interviews, this study takes two older neighborhoods in the Northwest New Territories of Hong Kong as case sites to examine, elaborate on, and envisage the idea of constructing smart neighborhoods through digital placemaking. It finds that neighborhood residents are potentially the most significant actors and hosts of smart spatial attributes. The mechanism emerges through people's diverse and technologically mediated interactions. At the neighborhood scale, the everyday urban smart neighborhood is produced via individuals' socializing and the sharing of information about events. Smart neighborhoods are facilitated and sustained by relatively practical and simple technologies, and their making is more an approach for improving the quality of urban life than a designated goal to achieve. This research concludes that residents' digital placemaking plays a significant role in developing lived smart cities. Three main implementation directions are proposed.