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Much of the recent excitement around data, especially ‘Big Data,’ focuses on the potential commercial or economic value of data. How that data will affect people isn’t much discussed. People know that smart cities will deploy Internet-based monitoring and that flows of the collected data promise to produce new values. Less considered is that smart cities will be sites of new forms of citizen action—enabled by an ‘economy’ of data that will lead to new methods of collectivization, accountability, and control which, themselves, can provide both positive and negative values to the citizenry. Therefore, smart city design needs to consider not just measurement and publication of data but also the implications of city-wide deployment, data openness, and the possibility of unintended consequences if data leave the city.

Even though emerging city-makers are increasingly organized to trigger social changes, it is still hard to apprehend their real power to transform space and the way we live together. In this chapter, we explore how designerly approaches, such as hacking, making, and prototyping, can empower emerging city-makers to trigger a broader change and transformation process. It can be concluded that hackable city-making can make a difference when combining top-down public management with bottom-up social innovation. A patchable plug-in platform might enable emerging city-makers to create value for the city and for society. However, it asks for new ways of participatory governance that enable these emerging, heterogeneous city-makers to participate actively in exploring the collaborative envisioned potential and to have constructive dialogues aiming for transformational change for the common good.

Henri Lefebvre’s urgent utopia of right to the city to achieve a new form of urban governance that moves beyond both capitalism and state bureaucracy seems timely with the increasing critiques of how techno-centric, top-down and corporate-driven smart cities are ill-equipped to deliver their promised civic, economic and political benefits. The exploration of the smart city through Lefebvre’s lens enables the reconceptualisation of the emerging notion of participatory city-making as a translation of the right to the city into practice. This chapter seeks, thus, to further unpack the concept of participatory city-making and, by linking it to operational concepts and proposing a taxonomy for the classification of initiatives that shape the city, clear a path forward towards systemic change.

This essay is intended to help further the understanding of contemporary social change and social activism, which in turn should assist people developing within both local and global communities. Civic intelligence is a social phenomenon that describes how well collectivities address their shared problems efficiently and equitably. It describes examples at a variety of scales from a neighborhood trying to stop a new trash incinerator from being built next to its school to the global climate change agreement negotiated in Paris in 2015. To accomplish this effort, the concepts of and , and (and seven of hacking spaces) are introduced and then employed in relation to an actual activist mobilization called , that was waged in Seattle by environmental activists over a 30-day period in Spring 2015.

How can citizens become active city-makers alongside design professionals, local government institutions and others, by creatively using digital technologies in collaborative processes of urban planning and management? This challenge is particularly daunting in the Buiksloterham, a brownfield area in Amsterdam North, that is assigned as an urban laboratory destined to grow from 200 inhabitants to over 10,000 people. The area was opened to selfbuilders: private individuals and households who build their own home, and collectives of about 15–50 people who build a shared apartment together. The research is based on ethnographic research carried out in the area. It provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the connection between bottom-up city-making processes and institutionalisation. It also proposes a research and design narrative about people-centric hackable smart cities. This contribution results from a long-running research project called (), which between 2012 and 2017 in multiple separately funded iterations, investigated new modes of city-making through the notion of ‘hackability’. The project was a collaboration between academics, an architecture and urban design office, and various organisations in the domains of policy, urban services and the cultural field.