The role of mobility networks in the practice of spaces. Museum as a space of flows

The architecture of flows is gaining an increasing symbolic value related to the image of city as a tourist attraction and museums are ever more conceived of as the new hubs for global tourism encounters. Far from being just another icon in our hyper-saturated metropolitan imagery, however, museum space is also evolving as a dynamic scenario for new forms of social communication and interaction between museums and their visitors and among visitors themselves. According to this perspective, I will try to describe the idea of museum as a space of flows. The idea is related, on one hand, to a new concept of space determined by the increasing role of digital networks (Castells 1996; 2004) on institutional communication processes and, on the other hand, to mobility considered as a fundamental dimension even for those practices which traditionally are grounded on a located context like the museum: e.g. accessing the cultural heritage, obtaining and processing information, sharing ideas and impressions with peers.