‘Meeting differently’: Indian Independence Day celebrations in the digital diaspora

Abstract

Highly programmed, digitally-enabled outdoor public spaces for social gathering and cultural performance are now common features of urban environments. These spaces are popular because of their low barriers to entry, and because they facilitate casual, serendipitous encounters between a range of different publics. Entering one of these spaces is to inhabit an ‘ambient’ participatory mode: multi-centred, mobile and multi-sensory, conforming neither to the formal viewing experience of ‘the audience’, nor to the casual, distracted disposition of ‘the street’. Their success in terms of widening public engagement and stimulating urban vitality has informed major policy shifts in creativity-led ur..