I stole this wonderful title from an article by Edwin Gardner where explains how the social space leaves the built environment in favor of an imagined one, the virtual. It insists that we do not need the physical architecture to promote contact between citizens, and in some ways the appearance of these networks can be the alternative for the alienation and anonymity of urban life. In a later paragraph clarifies that this does not mean people do not socialize in the physical space, the point is people doing increasingly however the relationships do not start in the physical environment. He puts the example of the Couch Surfing, a network that helps people to find a couch to sleep in any city around the world.
Public space is in motion, even a few years ago we talked about the movement from traditional squares to shopping malls as places for social interaction. One year ago, Federico Soriano defined good architecture in Planeta Beta with the following idea. He said something like that the public space, on the understanding that it is the place where people interact and regardless of whether if we talk about housing, squares or office spaces; is what makes architecture relevant. So, whither is the architecture going if the social space abandons the built environment?
In relation with this issue I am reading a very interesting book by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gómez and Arnau Fuentes called “From nations to networks.” This is the summary that explains a similar change on a larger scale:
“…the passage of an economic society and decentralized communication -the world of nations- into a world of distributed networks, son of Internet and globalization, makes it increasingly difficult for people to identify themselves in national terms. For that reason, there are new identities and new values that in the long term will end up overcoming and subsuming the national and statist vision of the world. The identity comes from the need to materialize or at least to imagine the community where develops and produces our life. The nation appeared and extended precisely because the old local collective identities related to religion and craft and agricultural production were no longer represented in a satisfactory manner to the social network that produced the main part of economic, social and political activity which determined the environment of the people.”
“Similarly, for a growing number of people, the national market expresses every time less the set of social relations that form their daily lives. Neither the products which they consume are national, nor the contexts of the news that determine the main collective vital courses,… The national identity is getting very small and very large at the same time, it is becoming strange.”
[1] The future is another country. The Economist.
[2] No need for architecture, we’ve got facebook now. Edwin Gardner.
[3] De las naciones a las redes. David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gómez y Arnau Fuentes.
[4] Filés: democracia económica en el siglo de las redes. David de Ugarte.
