HYBRID PUBLIC SPACES - »HPS«
The boundaries between real and virtual publics have collapsed. Public space is no longer fixed to territory — it fluctuates across screens, platforms, algorithms, comments, and feeds. What emerges is a hybrid public space: a phygital, mixed reality shaped by gamified governance, filtered narratives, and attention economies.
On these platforms, global complexity is flattened into lifestyle advice and catchy feedback loops. Realities are uploaded, replicated, outsourced, and monetized. They are cutified and gamified into digital twins that offer more certainty, validation, and profit than the messy ambiguity of IRL encounters. The power to simplify realities is exported back into IRL, where identity, state and markets are becoming real-time renderings - malleable and manipulatable to fit changing Tiktokified worldviews.
Architecture has never been only a construction of form — it was always an ideological interface, a construction of fact-fictions and a concealment of friction and extraction. Likewise, IRL public space was never a stable counterpart to the digital dynamics. Both operate as overlapping extended realities rooted in selective interests - accelerated by platform logics of privatization and polarization, which are increasingly limit the access to hybric public spaces.
We explore how these construction methods of hybrid publics — gamification, cutification, filtering, life-styling — are currently used for a technologized revival of populist, neoliberal and patriarchal pasts. And how can the same methods be used to build training grounds for democratic futures? How can they become new urban tools to rewrite the terms of assembly - shifting from control towards collective agency?
What frictions, permissions, and exclusions shape our ability to gather, speak, or belong? Through mapping, prototyping, and storytelling, we aim to surface the architectures of hybrid statecraft — and speculate on new forms of hybrbid public assembly.
On these platforms, global complexity is flattened into lifestyle advice and catchy feedback loops. Realities are uploaded, replicated, outsourced, and monetized. They are cutified and gamified into digital twins that offer more certainty, validation, and profit than the messy ambiguity of IRL encounters. The power to simplify realities is exported back into IRL, where identity, state and markets are becoming real-time renderings - malleable and manipulatable to fit changing Tiktokified worldviews.
Architecture has never been only a construction of form — it was always an ideological interface, a construction of fact-fictions and a concealment of friction and extraction. Likewise, IRL public space was never a stable counterpart to the digital dynamics. Both operate as overlapping extended realities rooted in selective interests - accelerated by platform logics of privatization and polarization, which are increasingly limit the access to hybric public spaces.
We explore how these construction methods of hybrid publics — gamification, cutification, filtering, life-styling — are currently used for a technologized revival of populist, neoliberal and patriarchal pasts. And how can the same methods be used to build training grounds for democratic futures? How can they become new urban tools to rewrite the terms of assembly - shifting from control towards collective agency?
What frictions, permissions, and exclusions shape our ability to gather, speak, or belong? Through mapping, prototyping, and storytelling, we aim to surface the architectures of hybrid statecraft — and speculate on new forms of hybrbid public assembly.