City as Canvas: Situating Digital Layers Across Urban Spaces

As the hype around the metaverse fades, with declining public interest and industry investment, this moment should not be seen as a missed opportunity. Instead, it offers a chance to rethink the metaverse not as a fully immersive virtual destination, but as digital overlays woven into the environments we already inhabit. These digital layers include multiple forms of digital traces, from social media posts to sensor networks and institutional datasets, which often remain detached from their spatial origins. Reframing the city as a canvas for data-driven and context-dependent experiences highlights how handheld devices, ambient displays, and augmented reality frameworks can make digital information increasingly accessible in situ. As urban space becomes a hybrid environment where physical infrastructures and digital overlays coexist, situated visualisation offers a way to reconnect digital materials with the urban contexts that produce them. This article asks how such reconnection can support more place-based, participatory, and context-aware engagements with urban data. Two workshops conducted in London’s Royal Docks and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park are used as exploratory case studies, illustrating how situated visualisation can be developed from co-creation activities. The cases also reveal ongoing challenges, including access, representation, reliance on remote infrastructures, and the governance and reliability of supporting systems. The article positions the city as a canvas not as a neutral surface for technical overlays, but as a social, spatial, and infrastructural environment in which data, memory, and urban experience are co-produced and curated.