Connected and sociable places: making the post-digital city

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Public places have always been known as centres of urban social and cultural life. And yet in contemporary cafes, libraries and coworking spaces, this promise of sociability often fails to match reality. How can we better connect with each other in our cities, permeated with digital technologies but providing little space for unmediated, face-to-face encounter? While some placemakers enforce a strict no-wifi policy and ban the use of gadgets, other initiatives, for instance, board game cafes, promote nostalgic, pre-digital forms of interaction. Russian blogger and social activist Ivan Mitin went even further and introduced a new form of public place -multifunctional venues, charging customers by the minute and providing them with free wifi, refreshments, and access to kitchen facilities. The first establishment of this kind, Ziferblat, founded in 2011 in Moscow, quickly developed into a global franchise with 18 branches, five of which are located in the UK, and inspired thousands of other entrepreneurs around the world. Although media were quick to label such spaces as 'pay-per-minute cafes', the idea behind Ziferblat was much more ambitious. A digital native and precarious creative worker, engaged in the gig economy of freelancing and remote work, Mitin envisioned Ziferblat as a physical embodiment of the unbounded sociability, participatory ethos and open-endedness of Web 2.0, or, as he put it, 'a social media in real life'. Not only did Ziferblat do away with the social contract of the cafe, forcing customers to purchase a drink or meal whenever they need a temporary home-from-home or workspace, but it also let them be their own baristas, cooks and event organisers. Unlike libraries or coworking spaces, Ziferblat mixed different activities under one roof, so that a group of friends celebrating a baby shower would share space with a couple of techies building a new app, an aspiring musician playing the piano, and a city commuter having a pit stop on the way home. But most importantly, Ziferblat was designed as a space that accommodates all sorts of online activities but at the same time encourages offline interactions between strangers through spatial design, the work of hosts, and the programme of events. The proposed project, building on and developing my PhD research on Ziferblat, will contribute to an emerging interdisciplinary field of urban media studies (Graham 2004; Ridell and Zeller 2013; Tosoni and Ridell 2016; Aiello et al. 2017). This scholarship, exploring the impact of media technologies on urban space and social life in the city, becomes increasingly focused on the intricate relationships between the physical and the digital, the real and the virtual, the offline and the online. However, little attempt has been made to revisit the outdated concepts of the 1990s-early 2000s, mourning or celebrating the arrival of the 'virtual city', taking people away from traditional public places, and work out a new paradigm of thinking and making the city. Drawing on the case study of Ziferblat, in my thesis I coined the concept of the 'post-digital city' - a new approach to placemaking that seeks to find the best balance between the advances of Web 2.0 and mobile technologies and the value of unmediated, face-to-face social interaction. Over the course of this fellowship, I will explore this phenomenon further through mapping post-digital initiatives around the world and extending my PhD research with three new case studies. This project will outline the variety of ways in which such initiatives negotiate the physical/digital, real/virtual, and online/offline dialectics and examine how the post-digital culture is produced and consumed.