From Pixels to Pavements: ‘Device Paradigm’ to Lived Engagement in the Post-digital City

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70917/fce-2025-008

Keywords:

Walking in Cities, Everyday Urbanism, Post-digital Wayfinding Methods, Lived City Experience, Recombinant and Situated actions, Global-local Territories

Abstract

Cities and urban navigation have grown increasingly complex and technologically driven in recent decades. In this evolving landscape, the emerging discourse of 'post-digital' can potentially redirect contemporary urban discussions toward human concerns and digital affordances. Despite this shift, city/urban planning, theory, and practice have largely overlooked the transformative digital-physical impact on city navigation, missing opportunities for grounded, user-driven methodologies that post-digital studies open up.

Drawing on empirically grounded case study narrative, this article investigates the forefront of urban navigation and the impact of digital technology on wayfinding practices. The research centers on post-digital navigational experiences in the New York City neighbourhoods of Flushing and Cobble Hill. The study examines personalized and innovative urban wayfinding using an experimental multi-modal framework based on recombinant spatial methods, situated actions, and conceptualizations like embodied digitality and reconfigured sociability (via blogs and vlogs). It validates that the post-digital era is shifting toward a more interactive, self-organizing, interconnected planning paradigm. This necessitates re-examining approaches to perceiving legible and navigable urban places and reworking the concept of urban narratives to better embrace today's urban navigators' context-aware linked experiences and viewpoints. We distill four key aspects essential for experiencing post-digital city territories: user agency, recombinant methods, hybrid wayfinding and dynamic cognitive mapping.

Author Biographies

  • Mamun Rashid, Department of Architectural Engineering, University of Sharjah

    Mamun Rashid is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architectural Engineering at the University of Sharjah. He received his doctorate from the UNSW, Australia (recipient of New South Global Scholarship). His passion is for technological advancements in Architecture and construction. Additionally, he researches digital tools in education (CAD and BIM), urban liveability, sustainable design, planning, urban house form, and construction. Mamun is also a licensed architect in Bangladesh since 1995. He has authored numerous articles for prestigious journals, e.g., Building in Hot and Humid Regions (book chapter), Journal of Architectural Engineering, Urban Design, Buildings, Built Environment Project and Asset Management, City Territory and Architecture.

  • Dilshad Rahat Ara, Independent Researcher

    Dilshad Ara is currently an independent researcher. She previously taught Architectural History and Design at a university in the UAE from 2008 to 2016. She holds a PhD degree in architecture from the University of Melbourne. Dilshad has also taught at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia and the University of Asia Pacific in Bangladesh. Her recent publications (2022-2023) include articles in City Territory Architecture, the Journal of Architectural Engineering, and the Journal of Planning History. With extensive experience as an architect, her interests encompass everyday user-led urbanism, architecture and anthropology, post-digital culture, planning and history, and narrative documentation methods. Dilshad has also been a licensed architect in Bangladesh since 1995.

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From Pixels to Pavements: ‘Device Paradigm’ to Lived Engagement in the Post-digital City. (2026). Future Cities and Environment, 11. https://doi.org/10.70917/fce-2025-008 (Original work published 2025)