(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Urban practices in the era of social media find us increasingly designing things to subvert the things we design. This is a practice that not only impacts the design process and the conception of the built environment, it is perpetrated by it. Early social media subverted and replaced the social function of public spaces of the city. Simultaneously, everywhere becomes plaza as plazas everywhere begin to vanish. This is seemingly the pinnacle of ex-urban phenomena. Then platforms such as snapchat and Instagram develop a new imperative for social media users; they must be places and substantiate their presence with photographic evidence. This is subverting and replacing their predecessors rapidly. The correlation between increased social media activity and increased urbanization of our populace coincides with forces that homogenize urban cultures. This underscores an opportunity for emergent design practices that respond to the duality of physical and virtual urban spaces. Is it possible that social media platforms that challenge users to travel, selfie, and “check-off” storied places might inform urban design thinking? Or, do these practices exacerbate existing problems of eroding cultures of place? This paper addresses studio pedagogy that considers the immaterial as well as the material qualities of urban spaces and how architecture might contribute to both. It reconciles those ideas with observations of social-media based behaviors in current cities toward developing a design studio pedagogy integrating material and immaterial considerations for urban space. This proposal speculates upon the potential to resurrect the cultural value of public spaces using social media mechanisms that have so far usurped their roles in our lives by design.