Street art in the <i>Insta</i> -city: Mobile audiences and urban placemaking

Street art murals (along with festivals and art districts) have proliferated in the past decade, becoming the “face” of creative cities through post-industrial urban regeneration strategies, and these efforts have been connected to gentrification in cities around the world. In this article, I consider how mobile audiences interact with street art through Instagram and propose that the “ Insta -city”—a coproduction involving art, photography, location, the Instagram platform, and its users—is a site for “digital placemaking,” where new claims over neighborhood identities are made and contested. The article synthesizes the literature on mobile audiences and the city, street art as a tool for urban renewal, and Instagram as a culturally dominant visual and geo-coded social medium to create the Insta -city as an analytical lens for reimagining the active audience in the context of urban communication.