Eighteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

A fundamental shift has occurred in the 21 st Century, where facts are no longer (or possibly again not) considered to be the foundation of what is “true.” In an era of Deepfakes, image manipulation, and normalized lies, Identity and Truth (with a capital T) have formed the foundation of an emerging global discourse. Identity, in this context, is the story we tell ourselves ABOUT ourselves. Truth is the emotional weight we put behind that story. In this emerging world, Truth has become disconnected from fact and relies on the emotional investment we layer onto our identity, leading to a situation where much of our identity is formed by what our aligned tribe holds to be True. Our cities and landscapes, long a tool for embedding social values and belief systems, in some ways becomes reflection of our Identities and our Truths, where the places we chose to live come to define us as a member of a tribe, or possibly as a rebel against it. Further, in a polarized world, the design of environments becomes weaponized. We see this in attitudes towards social housing, the creation of hostile architecture, and the re-emergence of spatial segregation. What is the response? How do we as environmental designers re-embed identity into what we create without feeding into divisive culture wars? To respond to this, we must begin to tell the Truth, not simply facts and knowledge, but broad Truths that speak of connections, human to self, human to human, and human to world.