Selfie-fying the Landscape. Space Awareness through Social Media

Ever since William Whyte’s The social life of small urban spaces (1980) we have become preoccupied with analyzing, understanding and predicting how users are going to react, behave or interact with their surroundings. We’ve noticed patterns, we’ve come up with formulas, we’ve written about space consumption, about design and public space becoming goods or products. What experience and sensible research have shown is that in fact we are able to impact our environment just as much as it impacts us. Once you add social media to the mix you get the new urban citizen: the prosumer. He interacts with the city and his peers in a new way; within a slightly virtual, slightly surreal environment, he adapts design to his needs, he has the freedom to express himself with little regard to the (initial) intent of his surroundings. He is the Millennial. The undeniable force that is the power of the Millennials to see things differently, to experiment tirelessly, to brake rules without thinking about it has in fact changed the urban perception and social guidelines. Thus we observe a new trend, one that has developed organically throughout the last decade: the Space SELFIEfication. The concept derives from the already well-established habitude of the space consumer, to take self-pictures with the surrounding landscape – natural or built landmarks. The study is an open-paper, continuing the preoccupation expressed in a previous research regarding the Landscape Consumerism and Social Sustainability, aiming to improve the relation between society and its surrounding landscape.