New media sociofugal spaces

• Main Author: Andrea Mubi Brighenti
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: professionaldreamers 2014-09-01
• Series: lo Squaderno
• Subjects: Crowded Spaces; lo Squaderno No. 33
• Online Access: http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/losquaderno33.pdf#page=45

In a classic piece, Sommer (1967: 654) once defined sociofugal space as ‘a place where people typically try to avoid one another’. And the point is that – because of environmental spatial characteristics – people cannot successfully avoid each other, or can do so only to a limited extent. Typically, we are dealing with open public places, where the first come cannot prevent others from arriving afterwards. Under these conditions, space is often unwillingly shared. Consequently, every new arrival raises the thorny issue of the ‘critical distance’ between two or more co-specific socii (members of the same species), together with the question of how each socius is going to make space for himself or herself inside the shifting geometry that each new socius introduces in a context of inter-visibility (or, more precisely, in the element of visible).