Workshop “Digital Cities 9 – Hackable Cities: From
Subversive City Making to Systemic Change”
27 June 2015
University of Limerick, Ireland, prior to the Communities & Technologies Conference 2015.
List of organisers and their backgrounds
Michiel de Lange (Utrecht University, The Mobile City)
Nanna Verhoeff (Utrecht University)
Martijn de Waal (University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam
University of Applied Sciences, The Mobile City)
Marcus Foth (Queensland University of Technology)
Martin Brynskov (Aarhus University)
Contact:
Martijn de Waal & Michiel de Lange (Digitalcities9@gmail.com).
The workshop’s theme, goals and activities:
This year again we are part of the C&T event to
further discuss these relevant themes, gain new insights and work
collaboratively towards a new publication, and explore opportunities for
cooperation in research programs for instance in the H2020-framework.
Abstract
The DC9 workshop takes place on June 27, 2015 in Limerick,
Ireland and is titled “Hackable Cities: From Subversive City Making to Systemic
Change”. The notion of “hacking” originates from the world of media
technologies but is increasingly often being used for creative ideals and
practices of city making. “City hacking” evokes more participatory, inclusive,
decentralized, playful and subversive alternatives to often top-down ICT
implementations in smart city making. However, these discourses about “hacking
the city” are used ambiguously and are loaded with various ideological
presumptions, which makes the term also problematic. For some “urban hacking”
is about empowering citizens to organize around communal issues and perform
aesthetic urban interventions. For others it raises questions about governance:
what kind of “city hacks” should be encouraged or not, and who decides? Can
city hacking be curated? For yet others, trendy participatory buzzwords like
these are masquerades for deeply libertarian neoliberal values. Furthermore, a
question is how “city hacking” may mature from the tactical level of smart and
often playful interventions to the strategic level of enduring impact. The
Digital Cities 9 workshop welcomes papers that explore the idea of “hackable
city making” in constructive and critical ways.
Call for papers
The Digital Cities workshop invites papers that explore the
relation between digital media technologies and everyday urban life, planning
and governance. We especially welcome papers within this year’s theme:
“Hackable Cities: From Subversive City Making to Systemic Change.”
“Hacking” has long been part and parcel of the world of
media technologies. From HAM radio amateurs to US west-coast computer culture,
users have been figured as active creators, shapers, and benders of media
technologies and the relationships mediated through them (Levy 2010; Roszak
1986; Von Hippel 2005). In general what the term refers to is the process of
clever or playful appropriation of existing technologies or infrastructures, or
bending the logic of a particular system beyond its intended purposes or
restrictions to serve one’s personal or communal goals.
Whereas the term was mainly used to refer to practices in
the sphere of computer hardware and software, more recently “hacking” has been
used to refer to creative practices and ideals of city making: spanning across
spatial, social, cultural, and institutional domains, various practices of
“city hacking” can be seen in urban planning, city management, and tactical
urban interventions. Worldwide, we have seen various artistic and political
movements making use of digital media to appropriate urban places as the locus
for theatrical interventions, often politically charged. A prominent book on
the future of “smart cities” makes an appeal for “civic hackers” (Townsend
2013). Urban governments around the world have embraced “hackathons” as a new
way for the development of urban services. Numerous events with titles like
“Hack Your City” (e.g. Sheffield) or similar, have been organized.
Municipalities have opened up datasets and created urban APIs or SDKs that
allow clever hackers to build apps and services.
What these examples have in common is that the term
“hacking” is used to evoke a participatory alternative to top-down ICT
implementations in cities. The term “hacking” suggests a novel logic to
organize urban society through social media platforms. It suggests a move away
from centralized urban planning towards more inclusive process of “city
making”, creating new types of public spaces. This logic of “hacking” is touted
as slightly subversive, innovative, and is associated with collaboration,
openness and participation. As such it is applied to various domains of urban
life. The term can be used to highlight critical or contrarian tactics, to
point to new collaborative practices amongst citizens mediated through social
media, or to describe a changing vision on the relation between governments and
their citizens.
Discourses about “hacking the city” are not unproblematic.
While the term suggests cities have embraced a new “hacker ethic” of
decentralized organization, reputation-based meritocracy and playfulness, at
the very same time many “smart city” policies reinstate modernist ideals of
centralized overview and pervasive control. As the notion is ported from the
field of software development to civic life and organization, it is used
ambiguously, loaded with various ideological presumptions. For some, “urban
hacking” is about empowering citizens to organize themselves around communal
issues and empowering them to perform aesthetic urban interventions. For others
it raises questions about governance: what kind of “city hacks” should be
encouraged and which ones are unwelcome, and who decides about that? Can city
hacking be curated? For yet another group it is a masquerade for neoliberal
politics in which libertarian values appear in the discursive sheep’s clothing
of participatory buzzwords like “Web 2.0”, “collective intelligence”,
“crowdsourcing”, “open source ethics”, or “sharing economy”. Furthermore, a key
question that remains largely unanswered is how “city hacking” may mature from
the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to the strategic
level of enduring impact.
The Digital Cities Workshop explores welcomes papers that
explore the notion of hackable city making both in a constructive as in a
critical way. We also welcome the discussion of related concepts that address
the relationship between bottom-up city making and issues of governance and
urban management.
We prioritize papers that address this overall theme, but
works connecting to adjacent themes may also come into consideration. Contact
the DC9 chair if you want to discuss before submitting.
Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- What are interesting examples of aesthetic and/or political event-based appropriations of public space making use of digital media technologies?
- What kind of tools or processes are empowering citizens in the processes of city making?
- What can we learn about this from empirical case studies or research by design projects?
- How can digital media open up existing urban infrastructures for appropriation by citizens?
- What are innovative examples of citizens taking ownership in and management of public interest issues?
- How have or could governments make room for ‘hackable city making’? What are the societal risks of such an approach?
- In what way can (and should) bottom-up city-making be curated?
- The call is also open to other relevant submissions outside the theme of hacking, but relevant to citizens making the digital city, such as studies on civic media, smart citizens, urban informatics, open data, etc.,
Maximum number of participants:
We have room for 20-25 people. A selection of applications
is made by the workshop organizers based on the proposal’s quality, thematic
relevance, and overall complementarity.
Submissions
Please submit your 300-500 word proposal through the
Easychair system:
Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: 2015-03-05 – 2015-05-01
Notification of selected papers: 2015-05-12 – 2015-05-12
Full Papers Due: 2015-06-12 – 2015-06-12
Conference: 2015-06-27 – 2015-06-27
