Media Technologies: From Transcending Space to Socio-formative Spheres

Urban experience has become complex with simultaneous and alternate choices, and experiences are created by the dynamic flows of people, fluidity of material/immaterial entities, goods, information, etc. Drawing discussions from various disciplines, which share similar interests in exploring the consequences of media technology on place-understanding, this chapter explores an architectural approach adopting multiple perspectives, as a way of surveying over and above, and from within. Here, two main sets of understandings are provided, first, mobile media technologies as tools that change the understanding of place by moving from and seeing over and above the physical limitations, thus allowing our understanding to go beyond the barriers of physical borders. Then, by zooming in and seeing things from within (not from above or what we refer to in architecture as the human eye view) we propose technologies as Socio-Formative spheres that could reconstruct our place relationships from within the social and cultural threads. One objective of this is to provide a framework for understanding theories and literatures of place after the advent of media technologies, through approaching from “over and above” to view “from within”. Building on the literature that studies aspects of place-understanding in relation to media technologies and juxtaposing existing materials, our approach offers insight into a relational understanding of place that is also contingent on frames of observation.