Territory as media and social media as territory

How can planners find within social media new spontaneous ways through which people imagine, represent and socially produce a territory? This is what I have investigated in a peripheric neighbourhood of Rome, Italy, trying to highlight how, through the acknowledgement of digital habitat embedded in a territory, it is possible to understand citizens’ narration and hopes for their territory, as well as to find new ways to enhance participatory processes. Conducting a three-year-long ethnographic research inside several Facebook groups related to that territory, I investigate how the habitat developed through a daily and routine use of mobile technologies of communication, internet and the social media could make emerge new action spaces. Within these spaces, I have identified insurgent democratic practices and new ways of citizens’ engagement with their own city political issues, given a recurring distrust regarding official and established politics. Focusing on immigration policies and the consequent production of identity, I observed how citizens, through continuous and conflictual micro-narrations of their neighbourhood life, produce stereotyped representations of the “other”. At the same time, these micro-narrations have led citizens to reflect on both their attachment to the territory and transformative actions capable of producing a different one. Hence, since physical territory is a media of a diverse range of social, cultural and emotional relationships, also social media have become a portion of that territory where people can develop debates and conflicts regarding “major” themes and the image they would like to build for their territory. If researchers and planner accept that these contradictory and emotional digital places are in fact new portions of territory, alternative imaginations of space can be identified, that could be an important stimulus for a variety of social claims, generating new forms of collective appropriation of urban space.