Digital Heritage in Transit: An Investigation into Online Heritage Narratives about Underground Metropolitan Transportation Networks

Abstract

This thesis explores how metro systems and social media platforms function as infrastructures in the production, diffusion, and deliberation of cultural heritage narratives. By analyzing digital content produced about the Washington Metro and the Metro de Madrid as comparative case studies, this thesis offers a multi-layered perspective on how these infrastructures interact with heritage narratives, specifically those authorized by powerful institutions. Our analysis finds that the Washington Metro facilitates digital heritage narratives that are more top-down, commodified, aestheticized, and aimed at tourists. On social media, the metro is depicted as a lifestyle or touristic object that validates AHDs. This digital content, while softer and more casual, confirms ideas and national identities related to the dominant neoliberal economic and political systems. The online heritage narratives about Madrid’s metro system are more resident-focused, participatory, and embedded with emotion, while still curated by institutions like the metro operator. This establishes the capacity for a metro infrastructure to encompass heritage narratives co-created by users and institutions alike. This is demonstrated by the public involvement in generating and spreading Madrid’s digital heritage narrative, as well as by subtle critiques of the state and heritage institutions in Washington, DC metro-related content. Digital media has the potential to subvert dominant heritage narratives and enable metro systems to be understood as cultural, not just technical, infrastructures. Drawing on infrastructure and critical heritage studies, this thesis argues that social media and metro systems together can (and should) shape new, multivocal frameworks for cultural heritage narratives and urban identity.