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Paper short abstract:

How social media are contributing to shaping the imaginaries and form of Dakar and participating in building the ordinary city of tomorrow? Floor plans and 3D images of houses available on the internet are contributing to defining aesthetics but also construction and architectural expertise.

Paper long abstract:

Big urban projects led by huge investors and developers are not the only ones shaping the future of cities in Africa. Dwellers are also shaping the city by initiating projects of their own private houses. Focusing on my ongoing fieldwork in Dakar (Senegal), my paper will attempt to investigate how the future of ordinary cities (J. Robinson) is notably negotiated on social media thanks to access to a vast amount of normalized floor plans and virtual images available on Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, and so on. How these images, available with a few clicks, are vectors of futurity? To what extent are social media questioning the link between expertise, development, and the built environment (M. Di Nunzio) since these images also pose the question of the role of the architect in the city making? Private small-scale constructors and dwellers are using these models to be found on the internet to save time and offer cheaper solutions, compelling with the necessity to build fast with constrained budgets, but also answering the desire to be able to visually and mentally imagine the place one will one day inhabit. These online computer images, often created on software such as SketchUp and Archicad, are contributing to reinforcing a (worldly?) common aesthetic (A. Ghertner), impacting the quality of constructions and the type of materials used (concrete, glass). This reflection highlights how the near future of Dakar could look like, between redistribution of expertise, temporality, and urban imaginaries, representation, and norms.