The Digital Cities workshop series started in 1999, and is the longest running academic workshop series that has followed the intertwined development of cities and digital technologies. Earlier years have seen papers presented at Digital Cities to appear as the basis of key anthologies within the field of urban informatics, smart & social cities and civic media.

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.

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 system1

CHAIRS

  • 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 (Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology)
  • Martin Brynskov (Aarhus University)

CONTACT

  • Martijn de Waal & Michiel de Lange: digitalcities9[at]gmail.com
  • 1. https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dc9