Social Media and the Contemporary City

Eric Sauda, Ginette Wessel, Alireza Karduni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000477672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

The widespread adoption of smartphones has led to an explosion of mobile social media data, more than a billion messages per day that continuously track location, content, and time. Social Media in the Contemporary City focuses on the effects of social media on local communities and urban space in a variety of political and economic settings related to social activism, informal economic activity, public art, and global extremism.

The book covers events ranging from Banksy art installations, mobile food trucks, and underground restaurants, to a Black Lives Matter protest, the Christchurch mosque shootings, and the Pulse nightclub shooting. The interplay between urban space, local community, and social media in each case study requires diverse methodologies that are both computational (i.e. machine learning, social network analysis, and natural language processing) and ethnographic (i.e. semi-structured interviews, thematic analysis, and site analysis). The book views social media not as a replacement for the local community or urban space but rather as a translation of the uses and meanings of all three realms.

The book will be of interest to students, researchers, and instructors in a number of disciplines including urban design/planning, media studies, geography, and communications.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003026068-1

The rise of smartphones, beginning in 2006, altered the way humans engage with and encounter cities. Today, smartphones are essential components of our daily apparel (see Illustration 1.1) that collect information about our location, our activities, and our time. Social media applications gather much of this information. In 2013, nearly 500 million messages were sent on Twitter and 80% of them on mobile devices.¹ Similar usage is true for WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and other mobile social media platforms. While social media predates smartphones, its use and ubiquity have greatly expanded. The simultaneous growth of mobile smartphones and social media applications has led to a rich new source of data about the contemporary city.

ILLUSTRATION 1.1 Social media in the city.

Although there is widespread interest in the effects of information and communication technology on the city (often filled with either enthusiasm or apprehension), there is no detailed framework for understanding how technology may alter the social and spatial structure of the cities and the meaning and use of urban space. Such a framework would need to include both a theory to guide methodology and a means of processing the vast amounts of empirical data inevitable to conduct such a study. A framework would also need to situate itself within the range of existing, normative methodologies as either an alternative or a complement.

Mobile social media has already made a considerable impact on our everyday lives, transforming the way events occur in cities. Urban events in this discourse are specific activities that take place in particular types of urban spaces at specific times. The concept of events formalizes the way mobile social media alters our relationships with urban space by affecting the types of activities that take place and the temporal rhythm of when urban space is occupied. An event requires three overlapping methods: a spatial analysis of urban development, an ethnographic study of the meaning of social space, and an analysis of the flow of mobile social media data in the city. This book explores examples of such changes through advanced methods of data analysis, ethnographic research, and the development of a theoretical framework.

Mobile social media, for example, has become an instrumental part of urban protests. The rapid rate of information propagation allowed activists to plan protests during the Arab spring, “occupy” movements located in cities across the world and protest in other countries including Iran, Spain, and Ireland. Many of these protests were planned and organized in prominent symbolic spaces, but they occurred more spontaneously due to the combination of communication on social media, as well as participation by local activists. There are also many examples of spontaneous protests happening in urban spaces without significant planning.

England-based street artist Banksy has been disrupting urban spaces since the 1990s by creating his art in unknown, marginal urban spaces with an announcement on social media. In 2018, his work gained attention, with a single Instagram post speculating about his stencil art Season’s Greetings mural on a garage in Port Talbot, Wales. In less than two days, the work was confirmed as Banksy’s, and interested individuals from around the world started an online discussion. The unfamiliar location instantly became globally popular to visit. Mobile social media has increased the impact and audiences of Banksy’s work. In this case, mobile social media has transformed the garage into a digitally-mediated social space, placing an uncommon activity in an unfamiliar space, that is documented and distributed over social media. The meaning of this urban space is changed from marginal to significantly critical within the art community.

The authors share expertise and research within the fields of architecture, urban design, and planning with additional interest and expertise in computer science, geography, and media studies. This book is intended for all these disciplines.

The introduction frames two important parallel discourses that are relevant to the recent growth of digitally driven activities in cities, albeit in very different ways. The first, digital urbanism, includes urban space that is increasingly experienced, accessed, and represented via information technology. Digital urbanism includes an array of analyses, from virtual environments such as chat rooms and smart wayfinding to urban visualization of real-time cell phone data. Opposition to digital urbanism denies that anything important has changed in the contemporary city, believing that the role of digital media is secondary to the creation of urban space. Digital media scholars concerned with cities debate the significance of space in the future but often stray from social questions or concerns.

A second discourse that frames this book includes social aspects of the built environment and is based on ethnography to uncover the meaning and motivations for using urban space from the bottom up. Opposed to deterministic views that either neglect or seek to predict social life, bottom-up urbanism (also related to tactical, opportunistic, everyday, temporary, or spontaneous urbanism) offers a critical lens to investigate new forms of urban life that are experimental, spontaneous, or unpredictable, and driven by citizens opposed to special interests. This social viewpoint of urban life highlights the critical role of citizens as autonomous agents capable of reinventing new forms of social urban life.

Digital Urbanism

The arrival of widespread digital media and engagement is true in the most intimate sense. At the level of the body, Hans Moravic² has argued that the human body is an outdated system. After comparing robots and humans, he proposes the replacement of the biological by the electronic and the migration of thought into “…the immensities of cyberspace…teeming with unhuman superminds” that he looks forward to without flinching.

Within architecture and urban design, the proliferation of new digital technologies has been an active area of theory and research for at least the last quarter-century. The trilogy of books by William Mitchell (City of Bits, eTopia, Me++)³ marks a convenient beginning to the contemporary investigation of these issues at scales ranging from personal to urban. He announces the death of the city, claiming that the “…city – as understood by urban theorists from Plato and Aristotle to Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs – can no longer hang together and function as it could in earlier times…long live the new, network-mediated metropolis…”⁴ Mitchell’s writing pulls together a wide range of sources and insights, sketching at a very high level the distinctions he sees between traditional spatially defined urbanism and an emerging vision of digitally mediated environments. These distinctions define a general area of investigation but contain very little about methods that might bridge the divide. He is left to suggest examples of neighborhoods in the city that provide extreme high-speed access for digital devices.

The Smart Cities⁵ movement emerged as a loosely defined attempt to integrate new forms of digital information and control into the city. “Smart city” covers a wide range of definitions, but three foci have emerged: smart technology, smart places, and smart systems. Smart technology focuses on the proliferation of sensing technologies that have emerged in the last ten years; this approach is often promoted by hardware manufacturers such as Cisco. Combined with analytic software, it typically aims to solve specific problems such as traffic congestion or water quality through the use of sensors specifically tailored to the problem. Smart places are described as neighborhoods within a larger city that through network access, advanced research facilities, and human capital are likely to lead to advanced thinking and collaboration. The prototypical smart place is the tech square near MIT, but there are now examples throughout the United States and the world. Smart systems refer to cities that are designed or redesigned from the beginning as coordinated across a wide range of digitally controlled systems. Examples include Songdo (South Korea) and PlanIT Valley (Portugal).

Whatever the focus, smart cities are suffused by a faith in top-down systems, assuming a defined set of problems and a carefully orchestrated set of solutions. There are certainly advantages to be gained within specific settings by this approach (traffic may run more smoothly, stream water quality can be monitored continuously, etc.). But the spread of “smart” in the city is just as often more diffuse and less inherently focused than this framework imagines. For example, the identification of a crisis in the city is discovered quicker by Twitter than by custom-built systems.⁶ Bottom-up systems such as social media can reveal activities within the city despite their heterogeneous and unstructured content.

Carlo Ratti’s The City of Tomorrow⁷ broadly surveys and synthesizes contemporary approaches to technologically influenced urban design. He proposes a design science approach with a set of proposals for how emerging technologies might be imagined to optimize urban development. To describe this approach, he coined the term futurecraft. This is an updated appeal to Alan Kay’s maxim at the Palo Alto Research Center, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. The strength of The City of Tomorrow is its focus on disruptive technologies, suggesting ways in which normative urban understanding and objects might be extended.

Social Urban Space

The absence of social concerns in digital theory scholarship demands a framework that integrates the ways that people and politics shape urban space. While digital theorists prioritize current and future transformations of urban systems, ethnographers and urban sociologists conceptualize space created through a series of actions by groups of people, often at the margins of power. Bottom-up processes that illustrate human agency and allow for unplanned and unregulated activities to occur in urban space are prioritized, opposed to top-down strategies such as regulatory zoning measures or large-scale neoliberal development that situates human activity as subordinate. Urban space in this context changes as the needs and abilities of local residents or participants change over time.

Ideas about the production of social space can be traced to the work of the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre in 1947 with Critique of Everyday Life – Volume 1: Introduction⁸ and culminating with The Production of Space in 1974.⁹ The core premise of his work suggests that space gains its meaning not from abstract Cartesian quantities (what Lefebvre calls absolute space) but from its reproduction of the social order of the inhabitants (what he calls social space). There is considerable variation in the use of the terms, “place” and “space”; Lefebvre uses the term social space in the manner that others (particularly those from anthropology) use “place”.

Lefebvre’s article “The Right to the City”, originally published in Le Droit á la ville in 1968, expressed his deep concerns with the expansion of capitalism and the decline of the oeuvre.¹⁰ Oeuvre, a term suggestive of a performance, refers to the “information, symbolism, the imagery and play” in daily life (63:147). As such, “the right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation, are implied in the right to the city” (63:174). In this work, Lefebvre demands a renewed right to urban life where “the working class can become the agent, the social carrier or support of this realization” (63:158). Lefebvre’s concern for the erosion of social life in the city due to the powerful forces of capitalism marked a critical realization that agency is unequal.

In 1974, Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space became well known for its careful analysis of social space. At a basic level, Lefebvre recognized that modes of thinking about space are physical, mental, and social and that they should be seen simultaneously as real and imagined, concrete and abstract, material and metaphorical. This initial insight led him to his thematic trialect of space. He argued social space constitutes a spatial practice (i.e. perceived space), representations of space (i.e. conceived space), and spaces of representation (i.e. lived space...