Visually imagining place : museum visitors, Instagram, and the city

While the city as a place has been examined to a certain extent through the lens of social media platforms such as Instagram, the connection between museum visitors posting to Instagram and placemaking is an under-explored area. Yet as more of the world’s population now lives in cities and placemaking has become an urgent part of city development, new knowledge is needed to understand how these components contribute to a sense of place. Drawing on data from two case studies, this article argues that museum visitor posts to Instagram are creative and productive acts that generate a dynamic evolving ecology of the city as place.