Urban Digital Memory

Abstract

This study seeks to examine the capabilities of citizens’ lived experiences shared on social media platforms as digital memories to value the spatial features of public squares in Tehran. The evaluation is based on emotions expressed by social media users about the public space, whether they have positive, negative, neutral, or mixed impacts. The data will be collected as text strings from X (formerly Twitter) using the Apify scraping app. The collected text data went through topic modeling and sentiment analysis to extract emotions in the form of negative, positive and neutral values. The classified emotions were associated with the spatial features addressed by tweet descriptions through a cognitive approach to spatial perception and the expert’s interpretation. The valued associations shaped restrictive, reconsidered, or no-action mitigations. At the end, a design framework was proposed and applied to the case study. The project brought the concept of right to the city, not only as a physical or mental entity, but also as a digital memory, based on the fact that public space is validated by people in digital spaces, which grants them the right to the memory as well. The other aspect of the study would be the passive public information on design provided through digital inputs, giving an initial overview to designers, planners, and decision makers of an urban space.