Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.

This chapter presents a discussion about the design and development of bespoke “city hacking” initiatives focused on community engagement. We draw from the literature in the field to propose a definition of - as portable interactive technology deployed directly to public spaces on a temporary basis and addressing pre-existing architectural and social affordances. We then present a series of short-term cross-sectional field studies where we make use of two distinct plug-in interfaces to contrast different design scenarios against three core contextual constraints: (1) of the interfaces; (2) of the interfaces into the built environment; and (3) nature of ordinarily unfolding in the urban precinct. We then discuss the observations from the studies and derive some initial findings regarding the utilisation of plug-in interfaces as tools for city hacking with the purpose of developing community engagement campaigns with rapid deployment and quick turnaround.

Street games are predominantly physical games played in the streets, incorporating the built urban environment, spatial layout, social and political characteristics of urban sites into the gameplay. This paper outlines how rapid street game design and playing street games are means of knowledge generation for urban change. To develop the argument, it looks first at implicit aspects of design knowledge in an iterative design process. It then explores the role of explicit and implicit rules in game design as well as the concept of the magic circle that incorporates both the game design and the context of the actual urban site. Game design examples underpin the exploratory and prototyping aspects of street game design.

Applying the concept of perpetual beta to cities proposes a continual and never complete process of city-making. Building on this notion, this chapter employs a conceptual framework of for conducting and analysing localised small-scale community engagement activities through situated pop-up interventions. Pop-up interventions ‘hack’ public space by temporarily changing the feel of a place to promote awareness around civic issues. We argue that the use of situated pop-up interventions has the potential to provide more inclusive forms of community engagement by combining digital and physical media. The proposed framework employs pop-up activism to facilitate a middle-out approach that encourages citizens to actively identify topics for discussion. Two pop-up interventions in different locations in Australia are discussed in the chapter to assess in what way a systemic level of impact can arise from different processes of city hacking that are facilitated through a distributed, decentralised, yet concerted and regular local approach. We argue that a concerted process of implementing small urban interventions can contribute to an ongoing commitment to participatory city-making. Further work will show how each local intervention can contribute to translating the notion of perpetual beta into systemic change beyond the boundaries of their individual locale and—taken together—across different urban environments of the city.

The Adaptive Governance Lab at the School of Architecture at University of Limerick has been working collaboratively with local government officials and community activists on action research projects co-designing with communities in neighbourhoods, villages and city districts in various locations in Ireland since 2010. The collaboration model developed is a genuine example of ‘hackable city-making’, where the local communities are involved in designing specific solutions for improving liveability in their areas, with the involvement and support of local government. A ‘Designing with Communities’ framework has emerged from the process in the 5 years of practice this chapter refers to. This has led to the need to refine the characterisation of the time frame, the methodologies, the commitments required from participants, the financial costs associated with the process, the advantages and disadvantages of engagement as well as the replicability of the process across cultures and governmental systems. Our chapter documents that ongoing process, defines the emerging structure of the framework, reflects on the value and risks of the process that has been carried out to date in terms of its usefulness as an urban management tool and active learning tool and proposes ways in which the framework can be adapted to fit into the developing community engagement structures of both academia and local government in Ireland.

Shifts in the perception of risks and precedents of unsuccessful urban planning efforts in the twenty-first century highlight the conflicting nature of ‘control’ and ‘flexibility’ in modern urban practices. This essay argues that urban planning can be revisited today through the lens of the ‘commons’. The notion of commons can be seen as the key to approach top-down and bottom-up initiatives in a systematic way. In this contribution, we argue that collective self-building in Amsterdam-Noord is a type of commons-based urban planning that occupies a unique territory in between state-led and market-led practices, and private efforts of urban development. By correlating the evolving definitions of the commons with the omnipresent dilemmas of urban planning, this essay intends to draw a link between the two, arguing for a more resilient form of city-making. We argue that commons-based urban planning offers a resilient alternative to the master plan, as one of its key strengths lies in the economic and social models it is based on. Finally, this essay attempts to examine the ways new technologies allow us today to revisit and reform the understanding of self-initiation and shared resources in urban environments.

In this chapter, the author examines a citizen-driven intervention regarded as “city hacking”; the initiative empowered citizens to organize themselves around a communal issue and enact urban interventions at economic, social, environmental, and cultural levels. Using a formula created for a TV show that provided scaffolding and brought the community together in a very short interval of time as starting point, during the development the formula was hacked and appropriated in a convenient way, shifting from the expected support of broadcast media to an assemblage of social media tools fit for the purpose. The lived experience and the concrete results demonstrated to the local authorities the value of openness, collaboration with local communities of volunteers, and social media usage. This development provides an example of top-down curation of bottom-up city-making initiatives, opening the way toward hackable institutions. Scaffolding community initiatives through creating flexible formulas anchored in social media channels that are easy to appropriate and adapt are presented as a promising avenue to investigate further.

The potential of open data as a resource for driving citizen-led urban innovation relies not only on a suitable technical infrastructure but also on the skills and knowledge of the citizens themselves. In this chapter, we describe how a smart city project in Milton Keynes, UK, is supporting multiple stages of citizen innovation, from ideation to citizen-led smart city projects. The initiative provides support and funding to help citizens develop their ideas about making their communities more sustainable into reality. This approach encounters challenges when engaging with citizens in identifying and implementing data-driven solutions to urban problems. The majority of citizens have little practical experience with the types of data sets that might be available or possess the appropriate skills for their analysis and utilisation for addressing urban issues or finding novel ways to hack their city. We go on to describe the Urban Data School, which aims to offer a long-term solution to this problem by providing teaching resources around urban data sets aimed at raising the standard of data literacy amongst future generations. Lesson resources that form part of the Urban Data School have been piloted in one primary and three secondary schools in Milton Keynes. This work has demonstrated that with the appropriate support, even young children can begin to develop the skills necessary to work with large complex data sets. Through our two approaches, we illustrate some of the barriers to citizen participation in urban innovation and detail our solutions to overcoming those barriers.

This chapter describes Dublin City Council (DCC) Beta, an initiative developed as part of the City Council’s Architects’ Division to experiment, innovate and quickly test ideas directly ‘on the street’. Through the detailing of a number of Beta Projects, it illustrates how a project is initiated, what the key processes are, what the role of the citizen is and how the outcomes of completed projects are measured and formalised. It also discusses the Beta Model, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that such a model present for other city governments. Ultimately, it addresses the question of how such an initiative can increase the potential for more inclusive, immediate and innovative approaches to urban problems in a context of risk‐averse city governments with increasing constraints of both resources and finance alongside a growing demand for greater democratic authorship and ownership of the built environment.

Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate during gameplay. Energy Safari is a serious board game developed to make citizens familiar with the energy transition in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands and how it translates in local and regional policies. This chapter analyses how players have collectively exploited the ambiguities in the rule set of the game to define their own rules, regarding project selection, partnerships, knowledge exchange and attitude towards the local government. These ad hoc agreements encouraged players to reflect and relate in-game situations to their real-life experiences with energy transition, leading to civic learning. In doing so, they “bend the logic” of current assumptions for the energy transition and demonstrate possibilities for positioning emergent gameplay within the design and negotiation processes of actual hackable urban and regional policymaking.