Planning research about Instagram came first and this group includes all those studies handling a large volume of data of the city as a whole. Those who study flows, frequencies and densities of geographically tagged images aim at giving an overall map of the city based on the presence of images taken by Instagram database.
The one referring to social science domain, is utterly detached from urbanism and architectural disciplines. It is focused on a smaller scale and it handles smaller volumes of data. Among the studied factors, there are the framing of images, the ways of representing certain current cultural practices, or the behavior of users within the application.
Beside the more consolidated positions of Facebook and Twitter, Instagram has become, since its founding in 2010, one of the most used social networking in the world. Instagram has quickly become one of the most widely used social networking platforms in the world. In mid-2016, it was reported that over 500 million active users per month shared millions of pictures per day.
In the context of a technical and pro- cedural evolution of planning tools and methods, Instagram and social media in general, represent an interesting research field, especially in relation to the attempt to describe the socio-spatial patterns of the city or the impacts of urban transformation projects in the users’ perception, as showed in the case study described above.
The research potentials opened up by social networking platforms such as Instagram do not only determine an enrichment of the planner’s traditional tools for urban and territorial analysis, but they could give a fundamental contribution to the project construction.
The use of Instagram as a tactic emer- ges as part of a progressive afirmation of the open-source urban planning and of the construction of new scenarios where the virtual space tends gradually to in uence, if not to determine, the ways in which physical spaces are lived by people.
At the level of the planning research, although still representing a scarcely used tool, Instagram could o er the chance to capture that perceptual polysemy, changing in time and space, characterizing the contemporary city and that set of residual and interstitial spaces connoting its uncer- tain status.
If we consider Instagram images as the small fragments recalled by Tuan, we can interpret them both as representations of a specific perceptive moment, and as ephemeral images overlapping in space and time, and mutually shaping the description of a physical and virtual reality.
The study of Instagram has founded a nontraditional way of reading the reality that aims at measuring the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms through the representation of the potential inte- ractions in the processes of interpretation of urban spaces shared by common people.
Over the past two decades, the use of new technologies has profoundly changed the vision we have of the urban space. In this context, also the tools and methods employed by planning and urban studies have been changing: interactive maps, virtual platforms, networking, databases are claiming a representation of the urban reality of a different rank than the one we were used to deal with in the past.
Among the most recently used data sources made available for research purposes, Social Media data represent a challenging ground both for their wide di usion among people and for the in uence that virtual relations have on the use of city’s physical space.
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Birret, C. López Baeza, J. Starzer, M. Weinzinger, A. (2015) Childen’s perception of confort zones in public space. In Knierbein, S (2015) My Place, their Place, our Place. Urban Culture, Public Space and Knowledge – Education and Difference. Vienna. Stadtteilplanung Flächennutzung. ISBN 978-3-903003-01-9
López Baeza, J. (2015) Percepción. En A. Nolasco Cirugeda; L. Serrano Estrada; P. Martí Ciriquián; (2016) La Ciudad desde las Redes Sociales. Departamento de Edificación y Urbanismo. Universidad de Alicante. ISBN 978-84-16393-48-0
López Baeza, J. (2016) Percepción. En A. Nolasco Cirugeda; L. Serrano Estrada; P. Martí Ciriquián; (2016) La Ciudad Virtual. Departamento de Edificación y Urbanismo. Universidad de Alicante. ISBN 978-84-16393-69-5
Lazzarini, L. López Baeza, J. (2017) The Mushrooms’ Lesson: Instagram as a tool to evaluate users’ perception of urban transformations. / Urbanistica Vol. 57 Previsto para Marzo
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