
Have you ever wondered how Instagram photos, highlighting curated glimpses of people’s lives, affect our cities and how we think about these places? Do repeated posts about a new library, pretty mural or tasty brunch have an impact on the form of our city?
Researchers from the University of Amsterdam have started to explore the relationship between Instagram and the city.
In 2017, John Boy and his research partner, Justus Uitermark, published an academic paper called Reassembling the City Through Instagram. The goal of this research was to understand how people represent urban areas on social media, and how these representations feed into people’s uses of the city. Based on in-depth interviews and over 400, 000 geotagged Instagram posts in Amsterdam, the researchers analyzed how the city is reassembled on and through Instagram.

Resources
- Reassembling the city through Instagram (Boy et. al, 2017)
- The top 20 Instagram opportunites in Amsterdam
- Read about selfie-worthy sunflower patches in Ontario
- Welcome to AirSpace by Kyle Chayka