Our sense of place is increasingly shaped by digital platforms and the algorithms that curate our urban experiences. We rely on online ratings to choose restaurants, share events in local Facebook groups, and use Instagram to envision neighborhoods before visiting. This era of digital placemaking redistributes the power to narrate urban life, giving global tech companies an influential role in how cities are imagined and planned. At the same time, urban publics now manifest in new empirical formats—not just through surveys or town hall meetings but through digital traces such as texts, images, and likes left on proprietary platforms. A type of unstructured urban data that can be analyzed using various computational tools. Beyond the sensor-based tracking of physical objects that we associate with the "smart city," we can now engage in a form of soft city sensing, leveraging digital data to gain new insights into urban sensemaking. 

This panel brings together four researchers to explore the potentials and pitfalls in this intersection of digital placemaking and computational methods. Across their empirical case studies they examine how GPS tracking apps shape perceptions of outdoor spaces, how local debates on transport and sustainability unfold across social media, and how digital practices—ranging from fashion discourse to craft beer reviews—both root places in local culture and connect them to global networks. Looking across these cases, the four panelists will explore how computational urban studies:

• a) expand the methodological toolkit for measuring and mapping the city
• b) supplement traditional methods such as surveys and interviews
• c) introduce unique challenges related to bias and transparency.

The panel is sponsored by DFF and MASSHINE