The new Public Space?

by Stefan Lazarevski

If you Google the phrase “public space”, most likely you will hit the Wikipedia’s definition of public space as “an area or place that is open and accessible to all citizens”.
Architects and urban planners prefer to think of it as a static and materialistic space, fertile for experimenting with different tools which stimulate social interactions, accommodate public functions and provide common ground for debates. The followers of the Situationists, one of the last avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, envisioned the public space as a space for action. They thought that “every step taken in public creates a situation that changes space”. (Scymczak, 2007) Each intervention in public space, according to them, was nothing but strategy that immanently provokes publicity, because public space structures society and at the same time, it is socially produced. The projects and the participants within these public spaces should become part of the history of a place.

On the other hand, the expansion of the social networking sites has shed totally new light over the definition of public space. Reflecting on the identity construction, the social networks and the speed of the information interchange, Edwin Gardner identifies the virtual social space as the new public space. “No need for Architecture, we’ve got Facebook now”, he says. This, new social space abandons the actual, built environment in favor of an imagined, virtual one. There is no need for physical architecture anymore to enable social practice. Further on, he explains that the rise of social networking is some sort of remedy for the alienation and anonymity that inherently comes with the metropolitan life. Some of the loneliest people often live in the big Metropolitan cities, where work-life relationship is very fragile. These people have little or no time for face-to-face social interaction which ultimately could result in no interaction at all. Internet, on the other hand, has effectively changed the perception of boundaries and distances of the World, making it one global village. Here, argues Gardner, no one can comfortably disappear in the crowd, and this, in a bizarre way provides the people with psychiatric treatment against social amnesia that comes with a disconnected life. Creation of an image of ourselves, in this virtual space, anticipates deeper psychological process of how we picture ourselves. The perfect avatar, types of social networks that we are involved or even the status updates in limited characters, speak of a very sophisticated and profound identity construction. The second life provided by the virtual public space, not only doesn’t relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness, but in fact it magnifies it.

One of the biggest advantages of the social networks is the possibility of social interaction literally anywhere, making architecture’s social function redundant. However, this by no means, should be translated as goodbye to the old town squares, streets or any physical evidence of public space. On contrary, virtual social space should be understood more as “an augmentation of existing social practices. Virtual social space and the social networking as such should facilitate further development and upgrade of the traditional public space.
One of the oldest forms of virtual social networks is the Chinese Guanxi. This is translated into networks or connections and is based on individuals' having something in common. The essence of Guanxi is that each relationship carries with it a set of expectations and obligations for each participant. What was once pervasive relational business network today is one of the most common forms of online organization. However in either of the cases the conventional public space was never underutilized or abandoned, but in fact it provided physical accommodation of abstract and yet necessary organizational system.

Whichever side we choose to lean on: the traditional or the virtual public space, it is undeniably that the social media is changing how we relate to ourselves and space. Edwin Gardner underlines: “Tomorrow the invisible dimension floating over everyday life that is social media will descend and touch down; it will become omnipresent in the everyday. When the internet becomes truly mobile and computing ubiquitous, when the virtual mixes with the real and when the interface merges with the face-to-face, than we will be in a new place all together.” (2009)


Reference:
― Gardner, Edwin, 2009, Essay: No need for Architecture, we’ve got Facebook now, Volume 19
― http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/, 03.05.2009