Experiencing urban spaces and social meanings through social Media:Unravelling the relationships between Instagram city-related use, Sense of Place, and Sense of Community

Abstract

This study addresses the role that social media community-related practices can have in modifying how citizens experience their cities as local places and relational entities. Specifically, it deepens Instagram use to look for photos about social places and gatherings in users' cities and its potential role in enhancing their Sense of Community and Sense of Place towards them, through raising their awareness about local places and social opportunities and bringing their attention back on their social dimensions. To deepen these paths, data were collected through an online self-report questionnaire, administered to 525 Italian Instagram users; a multiple sequential mediation model was tested using Structural Equation Modeling. The results suggest that social media community-related practices can change citizens' experience of their local community through fostering new representations and ways of experience urban spaces and sociability, which at last enhance their ties to both the community and its places. The potentialities rising from framing social media community-related practices as catalysts for the recovery and strengthening of local social dimensions and ties suggest that they could represent a reliable path to overcome local communities’ social and spatial constraints and promote bottom-up processes of re-appropriation and re-opening of urban spaces and sociability.