Urban Forest Tweeting: Social Media as More-Than-Human Communication in Tokyo’s Rinshinomori Park

Abstract

Urban parks are places that have significant impact on the physical and mental health of citizens, but they are also for safeguarding biodiversity and thus fostering human–nature interactions in the everyday landscape. The exploration of these spaces through social media represents a novel field of research that is contributing to revealing patterns of visitor behavior. However, there is a lack of comparable research from a non-anthropocentric perspective. What if we could use social media as a more-than-human communication medium? This research aims to reveal the possibility of communicating the urban forest’s voice through the examination of the official Twitter account of a metropolitan park in Tokyo. To this end, an analysis of the content of the messages is carried out, focusing on the narrative voice from which the message is told, the protagonists, the action performed, the network of actors deployed, and the place where it occurs. It is found that the majority of these messages are delivered from a non-human perspective, where plants, animals, or meteorological agents behave deploying complex networks of more-than-human interaction. The current study reveals the latent potential of non-humans as possible agents within the realm of social media, which can mediate the relationships between humans and their environment. It introduces a layer that can be incorporated into future lines of research, as well as provides a model case that illustrates a good practice in the management and communication of urban green spaces.

Keywords

• twitter
• more-than-human
• urban forestry
• urban park
• Tokyo