ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Hidden Cities within the wider context of locative media and public history. It explores the potential of this relatively new field of practice to introduce historical narrative and analysis into public spaces, and thus to interrogate and expand what is understood as heritage. By looking at a range of locative AR projects tackling fifteenth-century to the twentieth-century topics, the chapter sets out the ways in which historians have sought to engage diverse publics with everyday social and material histories of place. It addresses the rewards and pitfalls of some of the techniques used to achieve this, such as the dramatisation of historical voices and gamification, and argues that the embodied experience of place via locative AR can stimulate a critical dialogue between past and present.
