Urban wayfinding has undergone a fundamental transformation over the last three decades. Driven by digital tools, platforms, and AI, this shift has recast both spatial perception and legibility. Yet recent research fails to address the complexity of the postdigital as a cultural condition, which unfolds across intersecting technological, embodied, and social registers. Moreover, prior scholarship often isolates the digital from the physical, treats platforms as discrete ‘smart’ systems or reifies digital augmentation without engaging the relational, distributed agency of postdigital urban navigation. Consequently, while discourse on digital-physical hybridity has advanced, a gap remains in investigative frameworks equipped to unpack the recombinant dynamics of navigation at the digital-physical interface. Drawing on grounded experiences in Flushing (Queens) and Cobble Hill (Brooklyn), this paper develops a framework for postdigital wayfinding. We structure the study around three system processes: Pre - emptive , In-situ, and Retrospective . This is applied across and within three core modalities: social, physical, and digital information. We ask: What becomes of wandering in an age of algorithmic suggestion? How is spatial legibility reassembled? Is sight still primary, or what happens to embodied sensing in postdigital wayfinding. We find that urban experience is increasingly recombinatorial. Its hybrid spatiality forms through feedback loops of pre-scripted anticipation, real-time encounters, and retrospective memories along a non-binary digital-physical spectrum. This intersection involves various platforms, protocols, bodies, and atmospheres. Based on our findings, we direct urban geography, design and planning to pivot from an optimization logic to one of reflexive city navigation. We further advocate policies and tools that recognize the postdigital context, destabilized classical spatial cartographies, and recombinant modalities as essential to the urban spatial ecology. • Contributes a recombinant post-digital account of wayfinding grounded in recursive digital, embodied, and social interactions. • Offers a system-based analytical framework spanning pre-emptive, in-situ, and retrospective navigational phases. • Recasts flânerie as tactical practice negotiated between algorithmic and embodied negotiation. • Repositions spatial legibility and landmarks as emergent, seamful nodes rather than fixed icons. • Extends sensory cartography by foregrounding synaesthetic, embodied sensing within platform-mediated movement.
Rashid et al. (2026) studied this question.