Mediating Design Claims: The Politics of Social Media in Iran’s Maskan-e Mehr Social Housing Disaster

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Media and Movements

Abstract

In the wake of disasters, social media becomes an important platform for sharing vital information among affected communities, responders, journalists, engineers, planners, designers, and policy makers. In some cases, however, social media becomes more; it emerges as a platform for contentious political and professional debates. The social media content that erupted around the damage at the social housing site, Maskan-e Mehr, in Kermanshah, Iran following the Halabja Earthquake that struck on November 12, 2017 became the center of design and policy controversy. The debates that propagated on social media connected Maskan-e Mehr residents, the lay public, technical experts, journalists, policy makers, and activists in a cacophony of discourse around social housing design, policy, government, and activism. In this paper, the authors explore how contentious social media debate around design and policy amplified the social and political impacts of the earthquake on social housing. Building on methods of tracking and evaluating social media discourse in crisis informatics and qualitative content analysis, the authors evaluate high-visibility and contentious claims on social media. They compare these claims against an interdisciplinary investigation of earthquake engineering and social housing planning. This engineering and planning analysis builds on official technical reports and the authors’ work in earthquake engineering and city and regional planning. By comparing contentious design and policy claims with engineering and planning complexities, the authors show that the social media response together with the earthquake hazard transformed the nature of the Maskan-e Mehr disaster. From politicians leveraging the debate around Maskan-e Mehr for policy directions on Iranian social housing on the one hand, to infrastructure design professionals reevaluating the politics of resilient design strategies on the other, this case demonstrates ways social media debates engage and amplify social response to disaster through contentious political debate. It is argued that the Halabja Earthquake together with the social media debates that ensued are poised to amplify and extend the effect of hazards into contested politics. We show that by conflating and collapsing design claims and complexities, social media debates can be leveraged for misinformed policy changes around social housing.

Authors

• Shawhin Roudbari, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Mehdi Heris, University of Colorado-Denver

• Shideh Dashti, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Manouchehr Hakhamaneshi, Amec Foster Wheeler