Radical Placemaking: Digitally Situated Community Narratives as Inclusive Citymaking Practice

City architecture, urban spaces and monuments, such as the colonial statues toppled in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, UK and Australia, are physical representations of the epistemic violence that favors the narrative of privileged white groups over the ethnoracially marginalized in placemaking processes. Radical Placemaking counters these narratives by enabling communities who experience intersectional marginalization to leave their traces in the form of digital media in urban environments. These traces help toward representation and presence of marginalized histories in place. This chapter presents the Chatty Bench Project (CBP) – a case of Radical Placemaking deployed in Brisbane, Australia. The project’s neighborhood, Kelvin Grove Urban Village, is a master-planned community visioned as a cohesive, diverse and vibrant community. However, community members experience social isolation, which intensified during COVID-19. This community engagement project brought local community members together to co-create place-based digital narratives using low-tech augmented reality. The chapter analyses the accounts of those who created the stories and those who played them to assess the impact of Radical Placemaking. Radical Placemaking promises to provide voice and representation to those excluded from placemaking through an alternative spatial practice that utilizes place, digitally situated experiences and embodiment