Every year I pay out a sum of money to Flickr. This site, like Blogger, is a remnant of the internet as it existed in the era just before the mass circulation of smartphones, where proto-platforms provided a hosting framework for things like weblogs and photography so that they could be shared by people who didn’t have the html knowhow to make their own sites – but they remained part of the general churn of the internet, rather than standing aside as proprietary apps. I joined in 2007 and used it initially for putting up pictures taken with a cheap camera, which I would take to be developed at Snappy Snaps, then scan in – a process that already sounds comically antiquated and wasteful, though I still have the photos (of Thamesmead, of London’s Royal Docks, of my hometown, of Ljubljana, of several 1950s cafe interiors) in a box in my flat. I uploaded fairly few pictures, and mainly used Flickr for its groups – looking at those I’d joined over the years, they’re all topographical: The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society, TAKE A DECO IN THE UK (all caps), Telephone Exchanges, Skybridge-Skywalk-Skyway, and my favourite, Nicholas Ridley Ruined this Town.

Most of these are dumps – places with loads of pictures, often a little amateurish, which you can then sift through; and by now Flickr is nothing but a dump, and I pay my annual fee purely because it is more convenient for me to put the pictures I take – all of them digital, ever since that trip to Liverpool at the end of 2009, which was the first time I used a digital camera – on Flickr than it is for me to buy an external drive and use that, though by now a mere handful of people like or comment on these pictures. But when it was so totally suppressed by Instagram I initially felt a pang of something like nostalgia for the groups, the amateurism and the lack of chic of the average Flickr account. I also blamed a lot of the more boring ends of the cult of Brutalist and late Soviet architecture on the scrolling feed of Instagram, with its built-in-attention-deficit, the big wow photographs of an Iwan Baan, and the endless circulation of images of a handful of famous buildings which show people ‘learning how to do’ archi-porn as amateurs, while keeping all its tropes and predictability. I ended up writing grumpily about this, blaming particularly Dezeen as well as Instagram for the proliferation of meaningless images of buildings that hardly anyone had bothered to see in person. Dezeen then managed to track down a picture of me looking in a mirror, adjusting my hair, and put it under the banner headline “Architecture ‘Obsessed with its Own Image’, says Writer”. It was a fair cop.

But over the last couple of years many Instagram architecture accounts have started to take on some of the eccentric and informative qualities that I liked so much on Flickr. The various British accounts linked to the Manchester Modernist Society document provincial British buildings with an eye for humour and particularity; an account like Not Really Obsessive updates several times a week with mundane London council housing; even the usually rather exploitative world of Awesome Ruined Post-Atomic Cosmic Concrete Communist Constructions is increasingly complemented by accounts on flower arranging in Polish housing estates, mosaics in Azerbaijan, streetscapes in Almaty, or the remarkable dirty panoramas of Northern Friend. Many of these are far less touristic than the Instagram norm, less about things glimpsed on a weekend city-break and more a documentation of how space is really used and experienced and how it changes over time, rather than how it is gawped at: an approach architects and urbanists could perhaps learn a few things from – the extraordinary things about the unspectacular.