In May 2019, Nike released Nike Fit Digital Foot Measurement, an app that creates hyper-accurate sizing for its shoes by scanning the user’s feet through the camera of a smartphone. The reactions to this novel idea felt like another blow to a struggling typology, the shopping mall. People clamored for more augmented reality tools in the fashion industry that would limit the need for visiting physical shopping malls, for more neoteric features in digital spaces for online shopping, and for comfort in the absence of tangible architecture. With an evolving digital space that includes social media, virtual reality platforms, gaming worlds, online shopping platforms, and many others, public spaces have lost the title of being anchor social spaces while digital spaces are slowly becoming traditional ways of interacting in public life. In the quest for better cities, digital spaces might be a friend or foe to architecture, but as the pandemic forced cities to go on breaks, it’s a reflection point for urbanism and what it learns from these online spaces.

The past year has changed the way we interact with cities, it confined us within the few spaces of our homes and made us adapt the urban experiences we yearn for within such a small typology. The home had to adapt to all the typologies we miss from the city, from the workspaces at our desks, gym spaces at the corner of our rooms, public spaces on our social media platforms, and the city park on our green balconies. Digital spaces enabled these experiences as we do not attach our physical bodies to their spatial realities. It broke the barriers of localities and urban boundaries as more people engaged in remote work, social media challenges involved people across continents, virtual galleries brought art to our doorstep, and digital media became the bedrock of socio-political movements around the world.

Digital spaces are open and continuous liminal spaces where people can easily plugin, form social groups and disseminate. In their different forms, from social media to video conferencing, they include users in part of the design process by giving them the power to always define social boundaries in these spaces. They are inclusive spaces where the minorities in our cities have not only found a voice but also amplified it, extending into public demonstrations in urban areas. This saw the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA, the End Sars movement in Nigeria, New Year’s day protests in Hong Kong, Uganda’s protests and countless others. Digital media created a spatial avenue where people from other localities could help communities in amplifying their voices towards a cause.

Consequently, public spaces need to imitate this inclusion as a base principle in their development. Inclusive design should not just involve its elements, but these elements should be designed to affect social behavior and eliminate social hierarchy. Spaces in our cities would benefit when they aid our collective freedom of expression, when they are places that improve our self-awareness and when we feel comfortable in them irrespective of our self-identity. If designed properly, the architecture of physical spaces could be as addictive as digital spaces even when we exit the pandemic.

... the architecture of physical spaces could be as addictive as digital spaces even when we exit the pandemic

The liminal nature of digital spaces creates an unfinished space design that allows its users to further define its social boundaries. This would need to be translated to urban spaces where the informality of some public spaces is encouraged. In 1938, Louis Wirth noted in his essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” that despite a city being a place of urbanism, urban life is not confined to the physical entities of cities but the adaptable relations people get from interacting with the city. These interactions are aided by design informalities where the creative capacity of residents is being evoked to adapt parts of formal architecture. Designers should give a brief opportunity for people to shape parts of their cities to fit their social needs. The city could be a comfortably disorganized structure, as Rem Koolhaas (2000) describes Lagos and further imitate digital spaces as its chaos is part of its system of development.

capitalism largely drives architecture as space becomes mostly a legal tender

Furthermore, generosity as a principle for city development can also be learned from digital spaces. In our current clime, capitalism largely drives architecture as space becomes mostly a legal tender. Some spaces in digital media have helped level the economic field to be more inclusive and accommodate more people. Generosity is the call for designers and planners to give free space in the design of public buildings back to the city. It is a way to look at urban planning whether at a city scale or a housing scale with empathy; it is the removal of architecture’s hostility that embraces more people in the city. “Architecture can yield to progress, through variety, liberty, sincerity, and reason, and this is what consists the autonomy of architecture” (Carla, Christina and Martha, 2019).

Finally, as people yearn to experience cities again, it is highly noticeable that our cities are in need of empathy. There are many lessons to learn from digital spaces that would help achieve this, they include social inclusion, generosity (free space), and liminal spaces designed with informality. As digital spaces are the novel way to see the world, tangible architecture should still be the best way to experience it.