The Hackable City

Michiel de Lange · Martijn de Waal
Editors
The Hackable
City
Digital Media and Collaborative
City-Making in the Network Society
The Hackable City
Michiel de Lange Martijn de Waal
•
Editors
The Hackable City

Digital Media and Collaborative
City-Making in the Network Society
123
Editors
Michiel de Lange Martijn de Waal
Department of Media and Culture Studies Play and Civic Media Research Group,
Utrecht University Faculty of Digital Media and Creative
Utrecht, The Netherlands Industries
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-981-13-2693-6 ISBN 978-981-13-2694-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3
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Foreword: Tackling the Challenge of Speed
What are cities? Some people say they consist of networks (transport, water,
electricity, waste), and other think they are made of structures (houses, roads, pipes
and wires). Most fundamentally, though, they consist of people. We are the city.
The way we are the city has been changing lately, assisted by smart gadgets most
people have started to use, and the ubiquitous platformisation of almost any
business from groceries to insurance. The speed of this change has created the
pressure for city organisations to change the way they manage the city, deliver
urban services and renew urban spaces.
Currently, most cities cannot cope with the speed of change. Legacy systems—
physical infrastructures, outdated IT systems, organisational models and practices—
are notoriously slow to change. Cities lack competence in understanding digitisation,
experimenting with technologies and approaching challenges flexibly. Business
models, funding models and procurement practices are underdeveloped, do not
support technological innovation and are often unsuitable for multi-stakeholder
strategic collaboration.
City governments are used to lead by strategies and policies. Those are still
needed, but the process of developing them must become much faster. If planning
takes five years, plans are out of date before they are even ready. Joy’s law says that
“no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”.
Shifting the mindset from “city as governance” to “city as an enabler” can help the
city administration to tackle the challenge of speed. This book covers many
examples of renewing the city by open collaboration, experiments, design
methodologies and agile development, which can deliver results faster and in an
iterative manner.
In order to create the digital and physical infrastructure which can accommodate
a crowdsourced way of problem-solving and solutions from different developers,
cities must also change the way they work with technology. Traditional city sys-
tems are monoliths—proprietary, complex, costly, and locked in to their vendors.
Instead, cities need technologies and infrastructure which can connect different
sectors together in a lightweight, modular manner, with components provided by
multiple vendors, sharing enough core protocols and data to be interoperable.
v
vi Foreword: Tackling the Challenge of Speed
Such horizontal systems are necessary, for example, for data clearing, management
and sharing; user dashboards; secure identification; capturing, managing and
exchanging value; and digital security.
Horizontal integration between systems must be done wisely, though. Cities are
not machines, for which you can develop an operating system. They are much more
like organisms, as complex as the range of human activities in them. Cities are not
companies, either—they do not operate like big corporations. The level of com-
plexity in an average city far exceeds that of any company.
Cross-domain harmonisation of city systems should be done by using loosely
coupled interfaces and “bring your own service” approach. Different subdomains
can develop and run services which are just right for them. These systems are
connected over a shared backbone only when the connection is necessary and only
harmonising the minimum amount of data and interfaces. Maximum interoper-
ability and resilience to future needs should be achieved with the minimum level of
integration, focusing on data models and APIs which are connected using, for
example, microservices and other flexible architectures.
Working with technologies and innovation should be seen as a core activity of a
city, as much as urban planning. Cities and companies should systematically share
good practices, replicate working solutions, exchange information with each other
and develop solutions together. Lastly, cities need to understand investment and
business models and become informed clients and partners for the companies. This
volume serves as a fundament for such a Future Cities agenda. The notion of a
hackable city provides an alternative to the relentless and rapid platformisation
mentioned above and entails a people-centric view of city-making with the help of
technologies and innovation.
London, UK Jarmo Eskelinen

Chief Innovation and Technology
Officer at Future Cities Catapult
Acknowledgements
This book presents the results of the ninth edition of the Digital Cities workshop,
titled Hackable Cities: From Subversive City-Making to Systemic Change held at
Communities & Technologies Conference in Limerick, Ireland, in 2015. 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 computing and smart cities.
Past Digital Cities workshops have produced high-quality publications containing
selected workshop papers and other invited contributions as follows:
Digital Cities 11 (C&T 2019, Vienna)
TBA
Digital Cities 10 (C&T 2017, Troyes)
Aurigi, A., & Odendaal, N. (2019, in press). Designing Smart for Improving Place:
Re-thinking and shaping relationships between urban space and digital tech-
nologies. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Digital Cities 9 (C&T 2015, Limerick)
de Lange, M., & de Waal, M. (Eds.). (2019) The Hackable City: Digital Media &
Collaborative City-Making in the Network Society. Singapore: Springer.
Digital Cities 8 (C&T 2013, Munich) & Digital Cities 7 (C&T 2011, Brisbane)
Foth, M., Brynskov, M., & Ojala, T. (Eds.). (2015). Citizen’s Right to the Digital
City: Urban Interfaces, Activism, and Placemaking. Singapore: Springer.
Digital Cities 6 (C&T 2009, PennState)
Foth, M., Forlano, L., Satchell, C., & Gibbs, M. (Eds.). (2011). From Social
Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous
Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Digital Cities 5 (C&T 2007, Michigan)

Foth, M. (Ed.). (2009). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The
Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. Hershey, PA: Information Science
Reference, IGI Global.
Digital Cities 4 (C&T 2005, Milan)
Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (Eds.). (2008). Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating
the Physical and Electronic City. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Digital Cities 3 (C&T 2003, Amsterdam)
Van den Besselaar, P., & Koizumi, S. (Eds.). (2005). Digital Cities 3: Information
Technologies for Social Capital (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 3081).
Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Digital Cities 2 (Kyoto 2001)
Tanabe, M., van den Besselaar, P., & Ishida, T. (Eds.). (2002). Digital Cities 2:
Computational and Sociological Approaches (Lecture Notes in Computer
Science No. 2362). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Digital Cities 1 (Kyoto 1999)
Ishida, T., & Isbister, K. (Eds.). (2000). Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences,
and Future Perspectives (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1765).
Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
We wish to thank Gabriela Avram for hosting the Communities & Technologies
Conference and Digital Cities workshop in Limerick. The workshop was organised
by Michiel de Lange, Nanna Verhoeff, Martijn de Waal, Marcus Foth and Martin
Brynskov. Nina Fistal and Tamalone van den Eijnden assisted in the production
of the book during the editing process.
The Hackable City workshop was related to the research project The Hackable
City. Collaborative City-Making in Urban Living Lab Buiksloterham. This project
ran from 2015 to 2017 and was funded through a Creative Industries Embedded
Researcher Grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NWO). The research project was hosted at the University of Amsterdam, the
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), Utrecht University and One
Architecture. The Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Pakhuis de
Zwijger and Stadslab Buiksloterham Circulair were partners in the project. For
more information see: http://www.thehackablecity.nl.
The following persons were part of the research team: Bart Aptroot (Architect, One
Architecture); Lipika Bansal (Researcher, Pollinize); Matthijs Bouw (Researcher,
Director One Architecture); Tara Karpinski (Embedded Researcher, University of
Amsterdam); Froukje van de Klundert (Embedded Researcher, University of
Amsterdam and One Architecture); Michiel de Lange (Researcher, Utrecht
University); Karel Millenaar (Designer, AUAS); Melvin Sidarta (Intern Research);
Juliette Sung (Intern Visual Communication); Martijn de Waal (Project Leader,
University of Amsterdam/Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences).
Many local parties contributed to the research project. We wish to thank Delva
Landscape Architects, Studioninedots and Stadslab Buiksloterham Circulair for the
cooperation to develop the entry Hackable Cityplot and a series of events for the
Acknowledgements ix
2016 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. We would also like to thank

the advisory board of the research project, consisting of Coby van Berkum
(President City Council Amsterdam-Noord); Ger Baron (Chief Technology Officer
City of Amsterdam); Prof. Dr. José van Dijck—Distinguished University Professor
at Utrecht University); Egbert Fransen (Director Pakhuis de Zwijger);
Prof. Dr. Maarten Hajer (Distinguished Professor of Urban Futures at Utrecht
University); Freek van ’t Ooster (Director—iMMovator Cross Media Network and
Programme Manager CLICKNL Media & ICT); Prof. Dr. Ben Schouten (Lector—
Play & Civic Media Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences); Mildo van Staden
(Senior Advisor—Ministry of The Interior and Kingdom Relations). Finally, we
would like to thank the many people who shared with us their knowledge and
experience of the Buiksloterham area, especially Frank Alsema, Saskia Muller and
Peter Dortwegt.
Contents
Introduction—The Hacker, the City and Their Institutions:

From Grassroots Urbanism to Systemic Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange
Part I Design Practices in the Hackable City

Power to the People: Hacking the City with Plug-In Interfaces
for Community Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Luke Hespanhol and Martin Tomitsch
Rapid Street Game Design: Prototyping Laboratory
for Urban Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Viktor Bedö
The City as Perpetual Beta: Fostering Systemic Urban
Acupuncture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Joel Fredericks, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Marcus Foth
and Martin Tomitsch
Part II Changing Roles

Transforming Cities by Designing with Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Rosie Webb, Gabriela Avram, Javier Burón García and Aisling Joyce
Economic Resilience Through Community-Driven (Real Estate)
Development in Amsterdam-Noord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Matthijs Bouw and Despo Thoma
This Is Our City! Urban Communities Re-appropriating
Their City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Gabriela Avram
xi
xii Contents
Removing Barriers for Citizen Participation to Urban Innovation . . . . . 153

Annika Wolff, Daniel Gooch, Jose Cavero, Umar Rashid
and Gerd Kortuem
Part III Hackers and Institutions

Working in Beta: Testing Urban Experiments and Innovation
Policy Within Dublin City Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Fiona McDermott
Reinventing the Rules: Emergent Gameplay for Civic Learning . . . . . . 187
Cristina Ampatzidou
Data Flow in the Smart City: Open Data Versus the Commons . . . . . . 205
Richard Beckwith, John Sherry and David Prendergast
Part IV Theorizing the Hackable City

Hacking, Making, and Prototyping for Social Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Ingrid Mulder and Péter Kun
Unpacking the Smart City Through the Lens of the Right to the City:
A Taxonomy as a Way Forward in Participatory City-Making . . . . . . . 239
Irina Anastasiu
A Hacking Atlas: Holistic Hacking in the Urban Theater . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Douglas Schuler
Of Hackers and Cities: How Selfbuilders in the Buiksloterham
Are Making Their City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Michiel de Lange
Epilogue: Co-creating a Humane Digital Transformation
of Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Michiel de Lange is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Studies

Department at Utrecht University. He is the Co-Founder of The Mobile City, a
platform for the study of new media and urbanism; co-founder of research group
[urban interfaces] at Utrecht University; a researcher in the field of (mobile) media,
urban culture, identity and play. He is currently co-leading the NWO-funded
three-year project Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart Cities. He is
co-editor of the books Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures
(2015) and Playful Citizens: The Ludification of Culture, Science, and Politics
(forthcoming).
Martijn de Waal is a Professor at the Play and Civic Media Research Group at the
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. At that university, he also holds the
position of head of research at the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries.
With Michiel de Lange, in 2007 he co-founded TheMobileCity.nl, an independent
research group that investigates the influence of digital media technologies on urban
life, and what this means for urban design and policy. His research focuses on
digital media and the public sphere. Key publications include The City as Interface.
How Digital Media are Changing the City (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2012) and
The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2018), co-authored with José van Dijck and Thomas Poell.
Previously, he worked at the University of Amsterdam and University of
Groningen. In 2009, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Civic Media at the
MIT.
xiii
xiv Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Cristina Ampatzidou Department of Spatial Planning & Environment, Faculty of

Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Irina Anastasiu Urban Informatics, QUT Design Lab, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Gabriela Avram Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick,
Ireland
Richard Beckwith Intel Labs, Hillsboro, OR, USA
Viktor Bedö University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwest Switzerland,
Academy of Art and Design, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures,
Basel, Switzerland
Matthijs Bouw One Architecture & Urbanism, New York, NY, USA
Glenda Amayo Caldwell Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland
University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Jose Cavero Department of Computing and Communications, The Open
University, Milton Keynes, UK
Michiel de Lange Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University,
Utrecht, The Netherlands
Martijn de Waal Play and Civic Media Research Group, Faculty of Digital Media
and Creative Industries, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Marcus Foth Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Joel Fredericks School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of
Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
Javier Burón García Fab Lab Limerick, The School of Architecture, University
of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Daniel Gooch Department of Computing and Communications, The Open
Luke Hespanhol Design Lab – School of Architecture, Design and Planning,
The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Aisling Joyce Adaptive Governance Lab, The School of Architecture, University
of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Gerd Kortuem Design Engineering Department, Faculty of Industrial Design
Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Editors and Contributors xv
Péter Kun ID-Studiolab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft

University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Fiona McDermott CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and Communications,
Trinity College, University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Ingrid Mulder ID-Studiolab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft
University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
David Prendergast Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University,
Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
Umar Rashid Department of Computing and Communications, The Open
Douglas Schuler The Evergreen State College & The Public Sphere Project,
Seattle, WA, USA
John Sherry Intel Labs, Hillsboro, OR, USA
Despo Thoma One Architecture & Urbanism, New York, NY, USA
Martin Tomitsch Design Lab – School of Architecture, Design and Planning,
The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Rosie Webb Adaptive Governance Lab, The School of Architecture, University of
Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Annika Wolff Department of Computing and Communications, The Open
Introduction—The Hacker, the City
and Their Institutions: From Grassroots
Urbanism to Systemic Change
Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange
Abstract 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.
Keywords Smart cities · Citizenship · Civic media · Participatory urbanism

Planning and urban design · Hacking and hacker cultures
M. de Waal (B)
Play and Civic Media Research Group, Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries,
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
M. de Lange
Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. de Lange and M. de Waal (eds.), The Hackable City,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_1
2 M. de Waal and M. de Lange
1 The Parallels Between Hacking and City-Making
‘Hacking’ has long been part and parcel of the world of computer science, ICT and
media technologies. From radio amateurs in the early twentieth century to the US
west-coast computer culture that gave rise to first personal computers in the 1970s
and the rise of the free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) movement in the
following decades, users have been figured as active creators, shapers and benders of
media technologies and the relationships mediated through them (Roszak 1986; Levy
2001; von Hippel 2005; Söderberg 2010). In general, hacking refers to 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, communal or activism goals.
Where 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 insti-
tutional domains, various practices of ‘city hacking’ can be seen in urban planning,
city management and examples of tactical urbanism and DIY/DIWO urban interven-
tions. Various authors have by now described the rise of ‘civic hackers’ (Crabtree
2007; Townsend 2013; Schrock 2016), where citizens are cast in the role of tech-
savvy agents of urban change, usually working towards the public good. For instance,
in the guise of monitorial citizens (Schudson 1998) that make use of open data to hold
governments accountable (Schrock 2016); or as coders that take part in programs
like Code for America to create apps or websites that can help solve problems posed
by local authorities (Townsend 2013); or alternatively, as participants in hackathons
that code more speculative prototypes to spark discussions around issues of concern
(Lodato and Disalvo 2016).
Furthermore, moving beyond the application of technology to civic life, the
ethos and spirit of various hacker movements have been invoked to describe new
forms of bottom-up, grassroots and collaborative city-making. Lydon and Garcia
(2015) connect their tactical urbanism paradigm to the iterative, learning-by-doing
approach of the hacker movement. Caldwell and Foth (2014) describe the emer-
gence of DIY-placemaking communities around the world, partly inspired by hack-
ing cultures and their ethos of shaping, bending and extending technologies to their
needs, often beyond their intended use. In professional circles, Gardner (2015) sees
a similar shift in the profession of architecture at large. Architects are moving from
the position of ‘the self-conscious designers of modernism, with its unassailable
belief in social engineering’ to an ethos of hacking, projecting their imaginations
of better futures onto the ‘full and buzzing activities and structures’ of the exist-
ing world. Examples are abundant. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a student in land-
scape architecture and urban planning, Matt Tomasulo, set up set up a guerrilla
wayfinding system to improve the walkability of the city that has gained traction
around the world (Lydon and Garcia 2015). In São Paulo, a group of concerned
citizens occupied the Lago Da Batata, a central city square in the gentrifying neigh-
bourhood Pinheiros. They reactivated it as a public sphere by programming it with
Introduction—The Hacker, the City and Their Institutions … 3
various activities, epitomising a broader reclaim-public-space movement in Brazil

(Montuori et al. 2015; de Waal and de Lange 2018). In another example, in Rotter-
dam, The Netherlands, an architectural office appropriated a vacant office building in
Rotterdam’s Central Station District, while also revitalising its derelict surrounding
public space through the construction of a partly crowd-funded pedestrian bridge
that relinks various sites in the area (Gardner 2015).
What these examples have in common is that the term hacking is used to evoke a
participatory alternative to top-down smart city technology implementations. Hack-
ing suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media
platforms. It suggests a move away from centralised urban planning towards a more
inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This logic
of hacking is touted as slightly subversive, informal, yet highly innovative and is
associated with collaboration, openness and participation. 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 rela-
tion between governments and their citizens. In sum, these discourses on hacking and
the city may pave the way towards a new paradigm for smart cities, urban informatics
and urban governance: a hackable city that combines bottom-up (albeit often profes-
sionally initiated) civic organisation with the opening up of top-down government
structures and procurement processes.
The articulation of civic hacking is especially interesting in this regard. Hacking
in these examples refers to the inspiration found in the playful, exploratory, col-
laborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker
cultures, constructively applied in the context of civics and politics. At the same
time, it also connotes the centrality of digital media technologies as tools for mobil-
isation, communication and civic organisation. As Saad-Sulonen and Horelli (2010)
point out, many self-organising civic groups rely on extensive ecologies of digital
artefacts, even if their activities themselves are not centred around technology. In
addition, the adjective of civic denotes that these activities not only concern societal
issues, but should also be understood as taking on a less adversarial position than
‘regular’ activists (or some hacker cultures for that matter) (Hunsinger and Schrock
2016; Schrock 2016). Civic hackers are seen as working with—or trying to reform
—governments and other institutional actors to address societal issues, such as
inequality, community representation, housing affordability and sustainability. The
civic hacker, Schrock (2016) writes, seeks ‘to ease societal suffering by bringing the
hidden workings of abstract systems to light and improve their functioning.’
With this volume on hackable cities, we aim to build upon these discussions and
further explore the affordances of digital media, urban informatics and smart city
technologies for practices of collaborative city-making in the era of the network or
platform society (Castells 2002; van Dijck et al. 2018). It contains chapters based
on revised and extended papers presented at the ninth edition of the Digital Cities
workshop series, titled Hackable Cities: From Subversive City-Making to Systemic
Change held on 27 June 2015 in conjunction with the 7th International Conference
on Communities & Technologies (C&T) in Limerick, Ireland (de Lange et al. 2015).
In these contributions, hacking is used as a lens or metaphor to explore both concrete
practices and theoretical, critical explorations of collaborative city-making, usually

using digital media technologies. The book continues the conversation and discussion
threads started at the Digital City 7 and 8 workshops, which culminated in a volume
focussing on the citizen’s right to the digital city (Foth et al. 2015a).
We find hacking a useful lens to explore these emerging practices of collaborative
city-making, as it can be understood in five ways. First, hacking can be understood
as an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era. In a hackable
city, citizens are organised into urban publics (de Waal 2014) or collectives (van den
Berg 2013) around particular themes. Working together, they attempt to appropriate,
improve upon or restructure existing arrangements, varying from the programming
of public space to the production of energy or the organisation of welfare provisions.
Second, hacking can be understood as a set of specific practices and ways of
collaboration that can be described, analysed and conceptualised. Here, we also see
a shift in the roles and relations between citizens, professionals and institutions. In
many instances of civic hacking, professionals such as architects or designers are in
the lead, presenting themselves as ‘urban curators’ or ‘community orchestrators’.
Third, the lens of hacking allows to shift attention from these practices to a set of
affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation. A
hackable city does not just refer to civic organisations aided by digital technology,
but also to the ‘hackability’ of systems of urban infrastructure, governance and polity.
To what extend have institutional parties found ways to open up their workings for
interventions (‘hacks’) by civic actors?
Fourth, hacking can also be understood as a critical lens, bringing in a normative
dimension and notions of conflict and power struggle. To what extent are these
collaborative practices truly democratic and inclusive? What kind of ‘city hacks’
should be encouraged and which ones are unwelcome, and who decides about that?
Last, in response to the critical approach, hacking can also be embraced as a
form of action research in which academics stage participatory research projects
that iteratively explore the affordances of digital media for collaborative processes
of urban planning, management and social organisation, to contribute to liveable
resilient cities, with a strong social fabric.
The perspective of this book on the hackable city combines these five perspectives
and brings out both normative (what should a hackable city look like?) as well as
practical perspectives (how could such an approach be enacted?) in the application
of technology to city-making. This is important. As the notion of hacking is ported
from the field of software development to civic life, it is used ambiguously, loaded
with various ideological presumptions. For some, it exemplifies that citizens have
started to embrace a new ‘hacker ethic’ of decentralised governance, reputation-based
meritocracy and playfulness. Urban hacking is then about empowering citizens to
organise themselves around communal issues and empowering them to perform aes-
thetic urban interventions. For others, it raises questions about governance: what is
the legitimacy of bottom-up movements? How can traditional practices of democratic
politics be remade to make room for civic initiatives? For yet another group, the term
is mostly 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’. Further-

more, a key question that remains largely unanswered is how ‘city hacking’ may
mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic
level of enduring impact.
The latter is one of the most important foci of this book. The contributing authors
have described and analysed various tools, practices and trajectories that seek to
leap the gap (or in some cases have failed to do so) between subversive, often iso-
lated practices of city-making enabled by digital media and the promise of systemic
change towards more democratic and collaborative cities that have been brought up
in discourses around hackable cities. As such we want to contribute to the further
development of the debate around civic media, civic hacking, smart cities and smart
citizens. We want to move this debate forward from the (promises of) practices of
computer-aided community organisation to a more systemic understanding of the
interactions between institutional actors such as local governments and bottom-up
civic initiatives in the context of democratic societies.
2 Hacking Against the Smart City
In that debate, more than just an empirical category, the hackable city can be under-
stood as an urban imaginary concerning more democratic and collaborative forms
of urban planning and city-making. This imaginary can be placed against another,
more dominant vision on the role of technologies in the future city: that of the smart
city (Ampatzidou et al. 2014; de Waal et al. 2017). Although definitions of smart
cities also vary widely (Hollands 2008; Allwinkle and Cruickshank 2011; Caragliu
et al. 2011; Nam and Pardo 2011; Chourabi et al. 2012; Brynskov et al. 2014; Kitchin
2014a; de Waal and Dignum 2017), in dominant visions of the smart city, technolo-
gies such as digital sensors collecting urban data, online platforms and the application
of various algorithms are presented as more or less neutral tools that can optimise the
management of urban infrastructures and resources or even solve urban problems,
such as traffic congestion, parking, and safety.
This approach has been criticised for various reasons. Many have pointed out that
such an approach is based on a top-down and technocratic ‘solutionism’ that serves
the interests of companies rather than citizens (Greenfield 2013; Morozov 2013;
Ampatzidou et al. 2014; de Waal 2014; Foth et al. 2015a; Cardullo and Kitchin 2017;
Morozov and Bria 2018). Many smart city schemes seem to underwrite neoliberal
approaches of urban governance in which ‘the logic of choice, consumption and
individual autonomy’ is favoured and the market is seen as the best way to determine
what is best for the city (Cardullo and Kitchin 2017). In reality, the most prominent
form the smart city has taken is that of a ‘platform society’ (van Dijck et al. 2018). This
term highlights the fact that various urban infrastructures such as transport and traffic
management are now turned into dynamically priced and algorithmically governed
on-demand consumer services made available through platforms such as Uber and
Airbnb. It is internationally operating corporate actors that provide these services,
who have set up their own schemes of governance, including the management of
identities and reputation systems.
The criticism here is not about data being used for optimisation of urban processes
per se. It is about data analytics being used in urban governance and management
through the application of non-transparent algorithms, instigated by non-democratic
actors that cannot be held accountable by the public, and that it is initiated without
democratic debate about the underlying values these systems serve (Kitchin 2014b;
Foth 2017). This smart city vision of neutral technologies providing ‘urban solutions’
negates or at least depoliticises the intrinsic conflicts at play in processes of optimi-
sation. After all, who defines the optimum, and whose interests does this optimum
serve? As Brynskov and Foth have argued, cities are wicked problems that cannot
be solved by the application of an algorithm (Foth and Brynskov 2016; Foth 2017;
Estrada-Grajales et al. 2018). Whereas the rise of digital media technologies initially
led to optimistic accounts of a ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006), in which cit-
izens would be empowered by technologies of communication and collaboration,
Foth (2017) has pointed out that instead we face the emergence of a data-driven
‘algorithmic culture’ (Striphas 2015) that may bypass democratic processes of gov-
ernance, transparency and accountability. It is time, therefore, Foth et al. (2015a)
argue, that citizens reclaim their ‘rights to the digital city’.
The hackable city serves as a model to think through such an alternative imaginary.
Whereas the smart city often takes a solutionist and depoliticised approach, introduc-
ing technologies as a means to ‘neutrally’ solve urban problems, the hackable city
departs from the city as a political site. It highlights a vision of the city as a site of both
collaboration as well as struggle and conflicts of interests. In this account, new media
technologies enable citizens to organise, mobilise, innovate and collaborate towards
commonly defined goals. Yet the hackable city also recognises the messiness of such
a process, the conflicts of interest at play and the continuous struggle between the
alignment of private goals, collective hacks and public interests. As an alternative
imaginary, the hackable city is not a progressive alternative panacea to a neoliberal
smart city that will by itself bring out a harmonious, inclusive resilient city, if only
citizens would start using the right technological tools and governments would be
willing to listen to them. Rather, as a lens, the hackable city aims to bring out the
underlying dynamics and (sometimes conflicting) values at stake in city-making. It
revolves around using the affordances of digital technologies to find new ways to
organise civic initiatives and align these with processes of democratic governance
and accountability in a society that is increasingly technologically mediated.
3 Hacking as an Ethos
In this process, the metaphor of the hacker opens up an alternative deployment of

digital media technologies; it calls for citizens to take on ‘ownership’ (de Lange and
de Waal 2013) in the process of city-making, defined as the degree to which city
dwellers feel a sense of responsibility for shared issues and also have the capacity to
take action on these matters. Hacking is then in the first place understood as an ethos:
a particular way of being in the world. Hacker cultures at large have been defined
and described in various ways, ranging from a subcultural techno-cultural jouis-
sance to models for participation-based governance (Powell 2016); from libertar-
ian cypherpunks developing cryptography tools to safeguard private communication
from government or corporate interference, to a countercultural post-hippie genera-
tion who consider computers as tools for liberation, expression and self-organisation,
to the rise of communities engaged in the collaborative production of free and open
software (Levy 2001; Turner 2006; Coleman and Golub 2008). In the case of civic
hacking, a more particular instance of these hacker cultures is instantiated. A (civic)
hacker is someone who does not take the world around them as it is but tries to
remake it and improve upon it with all means at hand. Hacking is about playfully
appropriating existing structures and systems, in an explorative and iterative way in
a process of learning-by-doing. Civic hackers do so in a spirit of collaboration and
sharing and in many instances work towards a common good (Ampatzidou et al.
2014; Estrada-Grajales et al. 2018; Travlou et al. 2018). They deploy ‘information
technology tools to enrich civic life, or to solve particular problems of a civic nature,
such as democratic engagement’ (Hogge 2010). Civic hacking ‘engages with polit-
ical causes through designing, critiquing, and manipulating software and data to
improve community life and infrastructures of governance’ (Schrock 2016, 583).
Civic hackers, as one influential definition has it,
eschew efficiency, instead seeking to amplify and accelerate the natural sociability of city
life. Instead of stockpiling big data, they build mechanisms to share it with others. Instead of
optimizing government operations behind the scenes, they create digital interfaces for people
to see, touch, and feel the city in completely new ways. Instead of proprietary monopolies,
they build collaborative networks. (Townsend 2013)
The emergence of this ethos can be linked to a broader change in the definition
of citizenship that has been summarised as a shift from ‘dutified’ to ‘actualising’
citizenship (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Gordon and Mihailidis 2016a). The for-
mer refers to the collective enlistment of citizens in organisations such as churches
and unions; the latter can be understood as the organisation of citizens in collectives
around issues they are intrinsically motivated for (Levine 2016). Traditional ways
of local community-based organisation of citizens and social capital have given way
to the emergence of networked publics (Varnelis 2008), assemblages of networked-
individuals (Wellman 2001) around issues of concern (Foth et al. 2016; de Waal and
Dignum 2017; de Waal et al. 2017). According to Franke et al. (2015), this devel-
opment should be understood as a reaction to the privatisation of the public domain.
As traditional public and civil society organisations have become bureaucratised
and more and more market-oriented, citizens try to reclaim the lost ground through
commons-based self-organisation around themes such as health, education, or public
space (Franke et al. 2015). Faehnle et al. (2017, n.p.) speak of a ‘self-organisation
turn’, in which ‘active citizens adopt new roles and increasingly “shape and make”
their cities through new self-organised forms of action, powered by the internet and
social media networking.’
However, the normative debate around the implementation of a hacker’s ethos in

society at large is far from settled. As Coleman and Golub (2008; Coleman 2011) have
convincingly demonstrated, various hacker cultures can be understood as various
interpretations of Western liberalism. On the one hand, some groups can be placed in
liberal and libertarian traditions of ‘negative freedom’, i.e. the freedom from coercion
by the state and other actors. Hence, the focus various hacker cultures have placed is
on cryptography and freedom of speech issues. Coleman links this vision to liberal
visions that argue that the ‘public good come from private vice’; that is, public benefits
will emerge when individual actors are given the freedom to act out of self-interest.
Curtailing the strive for individual rewards, be it through the market place or in the
form of recognition and reputation, would be seen as not only an infringement on
individual rights, but also undermining of the public good. It is not far-fetched to draw
a line from this perspective to the Silicon Valley start-up scene and the libertarian
ideology expressed by various tech entrepreneurs. These, too, have been placed in the
tradition of hacker cultures, with their agile methods of software development and
openness with regard to, for instance, the production of APIs that allow for various
actors to join the ecosystem provided by these companies. As Rayner (2018, n.p.)
claims in his book Hacker Culture and the New Rules of Innovation, the open-source
movement ‘democratised innovation, placing a vast realm of free or cheap software
tools introduced hacker mindsets and practices into the startup ecosystem’. Hacker
entrepreneurs now fill tech hubs, and this will automatically produce the public good,
Rayner claims, because ‘they bring out what is best in human beings—our social
nature, our creative spirit and our capacity to innovate’.
Civic hacking has mostly been placed in a different tradition that centres on prin-
ciples of ‘positive freedom’, that entail the creation of conditions for equality and
individual freedom through collective action. The free software and anti-copyright
movements can be placed in this tradition. Copyright here is understood as a mech-
anism to privatise knowledge and other forms of intellectual capital, curtailing the
opportunities for individuals to learn, develop and express themselves. Free software,
made available as a commons through peer production, does provide citizens with
means for expression and mutual exchange. This version of liberalism puts public
values at centre stage of economic production and social organisation. Or formulated
differently, a free individual is a citizen that ‘develops, determines, and changes his
own desires and interests autonomously through self-expression, debate and reasoned
deliberation’ (Coleman and Golub 2008). A prerequisite is of course that citizens
are enabled to do so. The establishment of public institutions that guarantee these
freedoms, such as the provision of education and a well-functioning public sphere,
take a vital role in these visions (Coleman ad Golub 2008). Referring to Richard M.
Stallman’s free software movement, Coleman and Golub (2008) see ‘a liberal version
of freedom that invoked the virtues of sharing and pedagogy’. For Stallman, hackers
collaborating in the free software movement formed a collective that subscribed to
shared norms and values.
It is this interpretation of hacking that has become a source of inspiration for
various civic hacking movements. For instance, Medosch (2018) has shown how
current notions of the digital commons are derived from this particular interpretation
of liberalism in hacker culture. These have manifested themselves amongst others
in community-run wireless networks that emerged from the 2000s on. Here, hack-
ers well-versed in technological skills worked together in wider social networks to
establish a communal infrastructure that could serve as an alternative to dominant
commercial ones. For Medosch, these initiatives illustrate that technological devel-
opment is not an autonomous force but is shaped through ‘social exchanges and
cooperative practices between communities of practitioners’ (Medosch 2018).
4 Hacking as a Practice of Collaborative City-Making
It is these practices that we turn to next. Hacking can not only be understood as a
particular ethos, but also as a particular set of practices, consisting of new forms
of civic organisation and professional engagement. If indeed civic hackers mobilise
around issues of communal concern, employing ecologies of digital artefacts, what
then are the platforms and practices through which they do so, and how can they be
designed? As Gordon and Mihailidis have argued, our interest there should not so
much lie in the reified features of the (digital media) platforms themselves, but in
the practices through which they are enacted. In their analysis of civic media, which
they define as ‘the technologies, designs, and practices that produce and reproduce
the sense of being in the world with others toward common good’ (Gordon and
Mihailidis 2016b), they bring out the notion of ‘communities of practice’. These
communities of practice cannot be reduced to individual actions that are undertaken
but bring out the ‘participation in an activity system about which participants share
understanding concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives
and for their communities’ (Lave and Wenger 1991 cited in Gordon and Mihailidis
2016b). The notion of ‘hacking’ brings out such a broader (sub)cultural context.
Amongst others, it draws attention to the production of knowledge and manage-
ment of expertise, a central theme in many hacker communities. In the discourse
around civic hacking, hackers are not just seen as mere appropriators who create
a simple hack to solve a local problem. Hackers are more broadly envisioned as
‘experts capable of applying technical knowledge to bring about systemic change’
(Schrock 2016, 592), where the source of this expertise is widely debated. Hacker
cultures centre around merit and processes of mutual learning, rather than officially
sanctioned expertise, where know-how is often more important than knowledge.
The point is not that expertise does not matter (quite the contrary, peer-recognition
of one’s clever solutions is understood as a key reward), but rather that the process of
producing knowledge and expertise is opened up. Hence, the often-made connection
is between civic or urban hacking and processes of ‘open innovation’ and ‘living
labs’. As Baccarne et al. have written, these living laboratory formats are understood
as expression of a hacker’s ethic, as they ‘promote the idea that anyone is capable
of performing a variety of tasks rather than relying on paid experts or specialists’
(Baccarne et al. 2014).
At the same time, and although they are often described as ‘bottom-up’, many
practices of ‘hackable city-making’ are initiated by professionals, be they designers,
architects or those working in the cultural and art sectors, bringing in particular sets
of expertise, grounded in community organisations as well as in the application of
design skills. These professionals have started to redefine their role; rather than grand
designers they see themselves as ‘community orchestrators’ or ‘urban curators’ who
organise publics around issues or places (van’t Klooster 2013; Beer et al. 2015;
Gardner 2015). In a related discussion, recently Foth et al. have argued for design
professionals to embrace ‘citizen-ability’ rather than usability as the main goal for
interaction designers: design that promotes the ability as citizens to use technologies
(Foth et al. 2015b). This perspective builds upon disciplines with longer traditions
such as participatory design and extended planning (Saad-Sulonen and Horelli 2010).
Similar to these approaches, professionals acting as civic hackers aim to bring out
the local knowledge of stakeholders while bringing in their professional domain
knowledge, in processes of open innovation.
This does not mean that authorship has vanished, but rather that it has shifted. It
lies not in the signature designs they deliver, but rather in the stories and process of
‘imagineering’ around these projects (Gardner 2015). Alternatively, it can be found
in the design of ‘dramaturgies’, defined by de Waal (2017) as ‘the design of local
settings and stories and the orchestration of events by which collective action is
organized in time and place’. Hacking as a lens can help to bring out the ‘thickness’
of situated practices involved in collaborative city-making, as well as point out the
various roles and relations emerging in these processes.
5 Hackability as an Affordance of Systems
The notion of ‘hackability’ further extends these relationships. The goal of many
urban hacks can be understood as part of a broader agenda of systemic change. Prac-
tices of hacking are not just about ‘infrastructuring’—the continuous reworking of
technologies and infrastructures to adapt them to the needs and realities of particu-
lar users—but also about ‘institutioning’—attempts to rework the organisation and
logic of institutions, existing or new, in relation to a project’s systemic goals (Pipek
and Wulf 2009; Dantec and DiSalvo 2013; Huybrechts et al. 2017). Civic hackers,
Hunsinger and Schrock have found, are increasingly willing to work with institutions
rather than just opposing them, as the anti-authoritarian stereotype of the hacker has
it. In their vision, civic hacking can be understood as practices that shape new spaces
for collective action. ‘As technologies and their communities of practice changed’,
they argue ‘new spaces were needed that reached beyond established collectivities
of group, community, and organization’ (Hunsinger and Schrock 2016). The civic
hacker can then be seen as an interstitial figure, perhaps even the ‘missing link’
between insular bottom-up movements and the top-down structures of government.
That is at least the promise that belies in the figure of the civic hacker.
Whether or not that promise is realised is not only a matter of hacking practices,
but also about the openness of systems and institutions to these hacks. Hacking is not
just about the practices of making-do, collaboration and appropriation, but also about
the affordances of the infrastructures or systems at play. The notion of ‘hackability’
shifts the attention to the structures of these systems. To what extend do they allow
or even welcome ‘civic hacks’? And to what extent do they ward off attempts at
systemic change? To stick with the metaphor: do local governments provide APIs or
even their source code? Or do they instead build firewalls? Research so far shows a
mixed picture. As we will also see in this volume, governments around the world have
started experiments in opening up the process of city-making, encouraged by various
(policy) frameworks and visions of ‘energetic societies’ (Hajer 2011), ‘spontaneous
cities’ (Urhahn Urban Design 2010), ‘the participation society’ (Tonkens 2014), ‘do-
democracy,’ (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkskrijkrelaties 2013) or
‘responsive cities’ (Goldsmith and Crawford 2014) and ‘big society’. What these
visions have in common is that they encourage governments to be more responsive
to citizens and/or professional initiatives. In these visions, governments set up the
larger policy frameworks, defining public values in democratic procedures. Yet they
open up the field of execution to various actors—collectives of civic hackers—that
can contribute to these goals. In turn—inverting Schudson’s analysis—governments
themselves become monitorial governments, using for instance technologies of big
data and social media to dynamically tune their policy-making process to societal
developments.
The implementation of such visions of hackable cities has proven to be difficult.
The logic of institutions and the fluid, networked assemblages of civic hackers around
issues of concern are difficult to reconcile. Government usually seek to follow stan-
dard procedures working towards clearly defined indicators of success, in line with
the underlying democratic logic of accountability and predictability. After all, gov-
ernments need to be accountable, protect their citizens and act as reliable partners.
Bottom-up initiatives of civic hackers tend to be much more open-ended in character,
working iteratively, and do not care much for extended procedures. In the spirit of
hacker movements: they just start without a clearly defined end goal, and adjust their
plans on the way (van den Berg 2013; Beunderman 2015). Governments have also
a hard time recognising collectives of civic hackers as potential partners. As they
often involve professionals, they are not always seen as entitled to grants for bottom-
up communities (Van den Berg 2013). And when it comes to policy execution, so
far governments often prefer to work with larger, established parties. For instance,
research by Joost Beunderman shows that in the UK the opening up of city-making
processes through instruments as Right to Challenge and Right to Bid has mainly
profited private outsourcing companies (Beunderman 2015). As de Waal, de Lange
and Bouw conclude (2017), to embrace the ideal of the hackable city and its practices
of collaborative city-making, much more experimenting and learning is needed at the
institutional level. Again, the notion of ‘hackability’ provides a lens to bring out the
attempts of institutions to embrace practices of collaborative city-making, as well
as a way to bring out the conflicting logics and processes of negotiation between
institutions and collectives of civic hackers.
6 Hacking as a Critical Lens and an Action-Based

Research Approach
So, a heavy load rests on the shoulders of civic hackers. They are to self-organise
around issues of communal concern, improve the world step-by-step, challenge exist-
ing paradigms of knowledge and expertise on the way, while working towards sys-
temic change and reinvigorating democracy. Meanwhile they have to face challenges
with regard to their legitimacy and negotiate their contributions to public values with
institutions of (local) governance.
Are we perhaps asking too much of this by now mythical tribe? Various criticisms
have pointed out that the rhetoric of participation at the heart of the civic hacker’s
ethos runs the risk of ‘responsibilisation’ (Iverson 2011), befitting a broader neolib-
eral trend of the dismantlement of the welfare state. Rather than making societies
more democratic, it could lead to a situation in which governments step back from
their duties to safeguard public values, outsourcing the management and responsi-
bility of essential public provisions to civic initiatives (Thomas et al. 2016), whereas
the citizens that are most apt to take on these challenges are those that are highly-
educated and already well connected with local institutions (Tonkens et al. 2015). In
addition, one could question the legitimacy of these civic initiatives. As Hill (2016)
has posed, they may be social, but are they democratic? These collectives may claim
their ‘rights to the city’, (Lefebvre 1996; Mitchell 2003; Harvey 2008) but whose
rights are they exercising exactly? After all, Thomas et al. argue that the right to the
city is a collective one, rather than an individual one, that should be incorporated in
‘the collective exercising of power in the processes of urbanization’ (Thomas et al.
2016). Furthermore, various authors have argued that it would be naïve to expect that
self-organisation would automatically lead to positive outcomes. On the contrary,
open systems, Rantanen and Faehnle write, are always vulnerable to misconduct and
manipulation (Rantanen and Faehnle 2007).
What these valuable criticisms demonstrate is the conflation of two discussions
and fields of study around civic hacking. On the one hand, hacking as we have
described it here is both a practice and set of affordances that can be studied empir-
ically and critically as ‘community of practices’. On the other hand, the notion of a
hackable city brings out a normative debate about democratic governance and civil
society in the network or platform society, producing imaginaries that have become
performative in social organisation, political debates and policy.
Research into the hackable city has started to combine these formerly separate
domains. As Kitchin has argued, the risk of normative debates is that academics
maintain their ivory tower positions, referring to the perils of dominant smart city
imaginaries while these work their ways into society at high speed (Kitchin 2016).
‘Critical scholars’, he argues, ‘have to become more applied in orientation: to give
constructive feedback and guidance and to set out alternatives and to help develop
strategies, not just provide critique’. That does not mean that critique is not valuable.
On the contrary, as Morozov and Bria state (Morozov and Bria 2018), constant
ideological and intellectual work is needed to think through the application of new
technologies in society in relation to power and their implications for democratic
governance. Yet, being critical is not enough. The rapid application of technologies
in society requires that researchers put their principles into action and contribute to
their translation ‘into practical and political outcomes’ (Kitchin 2016). In this line
of thinking, Foth and Brynskov have suggested ‘participatory action research’ as an
‘indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance infrastructures
and practices for civic engagement’ (Foth and Brynskov 2016). The lens of the
hackable city can serve as a critical reminder for these methods. It underpins both
ethos and praxis: normative discussions about principles and value systems of urban
governance, as well as practices to discuss and shape these principles in collaborative
ways and take on a learning-by-doing and iterative approach in their implementation,
including cycles of critical appraisal to see whether indeed these interventions live
up to the goals and expectations.
7 Overview of the Book
It is such an approach that informs the contributions to this volume. Taken together,
they explore normative points of view with regard to citizen empowerment and
inclusive democratic governance in an emerging network or platform society. They
also share their attempts to put this model into practice, by designing new modes of
iterative and inclusive urban design and dramaturgies for collaboration. This includes
the search for new roles for and relationships between citizens, professionals and
institutions. They also divulge the struggles these initiatives have run into, trying to
make the leap from subversive yet isolated acts of bottom-up city-making to systemic
change and institutional reform.
The first part is titled Design practices in the hackable city and explores a core
principle of hackable city-making: the notions of iterative design and beta-testing.
A hackable city is not made by top-down applied master plans but comes into being
through the orchestration of stakeholders with sometimes conflicting interests who
iteratively design, test and try out urban improvements. In the first chapter, Luke
Hespanhol and Martin Tomitsch explore the appropriation of public spaces as a
means to test out new ideas for city-making. Their notion of plug-in interfaces draws
the attention to the use of portable interactive technologies that can temporarily be
deployed in public space, creating choreographies that are based on pre-existing
architectural and social affordances and situated social dynamics. Their chapter
describes a first exploration of design parameters for such plug-in interfaces.
Viktor Bedö analyses the strengths of street games as tools for prototyping in
urban design. As he argues, ‘for the duration of the game, things that are not present
at an urban site outside the game become present in the fiction of the game and thus in
players’ experiences’. This allows for the temporarily modification of the affordances
of a particular urban site and encourage players to test out these affordances. As they
are played in the real city, this leads to a deep immersive experience that also leaves
space for emergent phenomena and real-life interactions by players that were not
foreseen by the developers. As these games usually have rather simple rule sets,
feedback from the playing sessions allows for rapid redesign of the prototypes and
thus contributes to an iterative process of knowledge generation.
In a similar vein Joel Fredericks, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Marcus Foth and
Martin Tomitsch explore the use of ‘pop-up interventions’ in public space as a
new methodology to engage communities in the city-making process. The authors
argue that the combination of digital and physical media used in their temporary
urban interventions has the potential to provide more inclusive forms of community
engagement. A middle-out perspective in which designers or researchers working
from a participatory action-research perspective could connect local communities
with local government agencies (LGAs), by designing situated, contextualised inter-
ventions that address local issues in an accessible way in public space. Working in
a broader context of media architecture, urban informatics, civic media and digital
placemaking, the authors describe two of their own pop-up interventions and have
reworked their outcomes into an ‘urban acupuncture framework’ that could serve as
a guide for the design of future interventions that could make the process of city-
making more interactive, building a bridge between policy makers actively looking
for more inclusive ways to gather input form the citizenry and local communities
actively identifying topics for discussion.
In the second part Changing roles we shift attention to new roles and relations
between actors that are emerging in a hackable city. Hackable city-making often
revolves around the organisation of collectives around issues of communal concern,
and this leads to new practices of social mobilisation and community organisation
that in turn need to be matched with (professional) design efforts that depart from
the interests of the community involved. In the context of hackable city-making,
these roles have been described as the ‘urban curator’ or ‘community orchestrator’.
Rosie Webb, Gabriela Avram, Javier Burón García and Aisling Joyce explore
collaborative city-making practices from such a perspective and bring out the role of
the ‘network weaver’. This person or organisation plays a pivotal role in opening up
traditional of civic participation. These are usually limited to passive forms of pub-
lic consultation on projects, often after most detailed design decisions have already
been made. Instead, network weavers engage their professional skills to help local
communities organise in long-term placemaking processes. Through a broad variety
of activities, they contribute to building up mutual trust, develop ideas and proto-
types in co-creation sessions, manage expectations and interface with local insti-
tutions. The ‘Designing with Communities’ framework introduced in this chapter
based on their experiences with the Adaptive Governance Lab (AGL) at the School
of Architecture at University of Limerick (SAUL) describes this new emerging role
for designers/professionals in more detail.
In the following chapter, Matthijs Bouw and Despo Thoma describe their expe-
riences as urban curators, more specifically as developing architects, who as ‘lead-
ers from behind’ have organised collective building groups in Amsterdam Neigh-
bourhood Buiksloterham. When traditional masterplanned and institutionally driven
development failed due to the financial crisis, in this brownfield redevelopment site
in Amsterdam various collectives emerged that started to build their own homes,
organising themselves under the flag of the circular economy. A new model for area
development emerged here, and looking at this through the lens of the commons,
Bouw and Thoma argue that such an approach is both more resilient and delivers a
better quality of life for its future residents.
Next, Gabriele Avram provides a series of action-research-based insights in the
emergence of a ‘hackable city’ initiative in the Irish city of Limerick in 2011. In an era
of economic downturn, various actors adopted the central idea of the television show
Local Heros to organise a local community to address and overcome local issues and
needs. In a detailed description of the process, she shows how a ‘hybrid community’
emerged, organised a series of events and later dissolved again. As online and offline
practices were combined, ‘digital objects’ played an important role as focal points
around which the community organised and represented itself to larger audiences. In
her analysis, she shows how the success of initiatives as the Limerick Local Heroes
can be understood through the notion of ‘scaffolding’: the adaptation and localisation
of existing (social) formats and templates. In this case, a television show provided a
recognisable dramaturgy that was easily understood by all participants. Similarly, a
broad range of freely available and widely used digital tools could easily be used to
set up a range of communal practices. These practices allow for the weaving of local
community threads that in themselves make it possible for new publics to emerge
around issues of concern even after the initial initiative has dissolved.
As a final contribution to the second part Annika Wolf, Daniel Gooch, Jose
Cavero, Umar Mir and Gerd Kortuem shift attention to open data and digital plat-
forms as one of the ways that local communities can identify topics for discussion,
explore opportunities to address them and formulate solutions. However, as these
authors show, it may be overly optimistic to expect that opening-up datasets will by
itself invite civic organisation around collective issues. First of all, data literacy in
society is still low, and initiatives are needed to address that issue. Further, based on
three data-driven projects carried out in Milton Keynes, they argue that the empow-
erment of citizen collectives could also benefit from professionals and institutions
such as researchers and community organisations taking up a role as organisers or
curators. They can use their professional skills and networks to get the project of the
ground and connect citizens with local institutions needed in the implementation.
Yet, while this may be a productive approach, it also raises its own questions. Such
a model depends on the availability of financing at the collective level. It also places
these collective organisers in a position of power deciding which projects they will
support. A hackable city, they conclude, is in need of new types of policies and
governance models that allow citizens a greater degree of freedom in their hacking
activities.
The third section, Hackers and institutions, further explores that last point. How do
local institutions relate to practices of hackable city-making? How can they initiate,
stimulate or regulate them in line with their principles of democratic governance and
accountability? And how can hackable city initiatives themselves be governed? Fiona
McDermott brings in such an institutional perspective. She describes how between
2012 and 2016 the city of Dublin ran the DCC Beta-programme to bring an approach
of small-scale experimentation and iterative design to urban planning. In addition,
ideation for and evaluation of these projects was organised in close collaboration
with both individual citizens and civic society organisations. As such, the project
was a serious attempt to create an ‘urban innovation system’ that would tap into the
collective intelligence of the city at large. While the collaborative design process
worked well, McDermott argues that the connection between the experiments and
institutional structures of democratic decision-making needs to be developed further.
One of the issues that emerged over the course of DCC Beta was the need for a
coherent mechanism for prioritising projects.
Cristina Ampatzidou explores the role that games can play as a setting and focal
point for communal action as well as a communicative interface between collectives
and institutions. Using the concept of emergent gameplay, she describes how games
can trigger social interactions between players that lead to ‘civic learning’. The latter
refers to the process through which citizens become familiar with a city’s institutions
and legal procedures, acquire the skills needed to navigate them and develop a sense
of ownership towards issues of communal concern. Likewise, these game sessions
could also trigger form of what analogously could be called ‘institutional learning’.
The debates and the exchange of knowledge and insights triggered by the game
could inform institutional officials about attitudes and concerns of citizens and civic
organisations.
Concluding this section, Richard Beckwith, John Sherry and David Prender-
gast approach the issue of governance from a perspective of data stewardship. Openly
accessible data, they write, is often argued to provide the best ways for citizens to
organise themselves around relevant issues and hold accountable those in power.
However, making all data available as open data can also lead to community impacts
that are undesirable. They argue that urban data should be understood as a rivalrous
good that requires stewardship by the community. In a case study, they analyse the
discussions around stewardship in a community that collected data about floodings.
To whom exactly should that data be made available? While the data collected by the
community allow residents to organise around an urgent local issue, publishing that
data in wider circles could also lead to higher insurance or lower real estate prices,
even after the issue itself has been resolved. Controlling the flows of information,
the authors conclude, is one way that communities express and steward their cul-
ture. Considering how communities choose to steward their culture (and their shared
information) allows us to see that it is not just the information but also shared beliefs
about that information that should define the practices of data governance.
In the last section of this book, Theorizing the hackable city, we move towards a
number of theoretical perspectives through which collaborative city-making could be
understood, further contributing to the normative debate about the hackable city. First,
Irina Anastasiu proposes to revive Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ as an approach to
participatory city-making. From this perspective, digital technologies can aid citizens
in their willingness, ability and right to act upon their cities and gain a sense of
ownership to their direct surroundings. While such a stance could be incorporated
into existing liberal-democratic models of urban governance, it could ultimately pave
the way for a radically new model for a grassroots democracy, based on a notion of
citizenship that is closely related to the hacker’s ethic. In her chapter, she develops
a taxonomy that could aid in the analysis and design of tools and practices to bring
about such an ‘urgent utopia’.
Next, using Murray’s six-step model for social innovation, Ingrid Mulder and
Peter Kun explore practices of hackable city-making and conclude that so far, suc-
cesses have mainly been achieved in the first three phases of the model. They describe
hacking, making and prototyping as practices that are well fitted to (1) explore social
issues and stretch the boundaries of existing imaginations as well as current legal
confines, (2) explore solutions in collaborative processes and (3) communicate the
ideas generated through prototypes. However, the leap from this ‘fuzzy front-end
of city-making’ to (4) sustaining and (5) scaling these ideas towards (6) systemic
change through co-creative partnerships so far has been less developed. Hacking, in
other words, opens up the process of city-making, but in itself that is not enough. A
broader approach, including political, organisational and cultural aspects, is needed
to ensure that bottom-up and middle-out practices such as hackathons can grow into
more than just generators for ideas and truly contribute to change for the common
good.
Doug Schuler provides a framework for what he calls ‘holistic hacking’. Hacking,
he argues, could all too easily be understood as revolving around a single intervention,
an improvised appropriation of this or that infrastructure to meet some goal or another.
However, practices of democratic and inclusive city-making in the network era need
a more holistic approach. His overview of seven spaces or spheres of action can be
helpful to understand how various independent hacks working in various domains
can be sufficiently coordinated so that they help bring about a common goal, working
towards systemic change. Each of these spaces—from the spaces of governance and
institutional organisations to physical spaces and infrastructure space—has its own
actors organising that space, and—importantly—its own particular affordances to be
‘hacked’, shifting the perspective from hacking as a practice to ‘hackability’ as an
index of openness and opportunities for social innovation and change.
This volume concludes with a final reflection on hackable city-making by co-
editor Michiel de Lange, who—like Bouw and Thoma—bases his analysis on his
fieldwork with a community of ‘self-builders’ active in the Amsterdam brownfield
redevelopment site of Buiksloterham. The key argument he makes is that hacking
provides a productive frame to look at emergent city-making practices from a cultural
and situated perspective. Despite the obvious differences between ‘original’ hackers
and self-builders, the notion of ‘hackable city-making’ provides an analytical frame
to look at city-making in terms of ethos, praxis, and structural affordances. De Lange
refers to a heuristic model for ‘hackable city-making’ developed as part of a research
project on The Hackable City, which describes the relations between individuals,
collectives and institutions in practices of collaborative city-making. This model,
he argues, is not simply descriptive or prescriptive but provides an entry point for
critical yet affirmative discussions about hackable city-making.
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Martijn de Waal is a Professor at the Play and Civic Media Research Group at the Amster-
dam University of Applied Sciences. At that university, he also holds the position of head of
research at the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries. With Michiel de Lange, in 2007
he co-founded TheMobileCity.nl, an independent research group that investigates the influence of
digital media technologies on urban life, and what this means for urban design and policy. His
research focuses on digital media and the public sphere. Key publications include The City as
Interface. How Digital Media are Changing the City (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2012) and The
Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018),
co-authored with José van Dijck and Thomas Poell. Previously, he worked at the University of
Amsterdam and University of Groningen. In 2009, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for
Civic Media at the MIT.
Michiel de Lange is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Studies Department at
Utrecht University. He is the Co-Founder of The Mobile City, a platform for the study of new
media and urbanism; co-founder of research group [urban interfaces] at Utrecht University; a
researcher in the field of (mobile) media, urban culture, identity and play. He is currently co-
leading the NWO-funded three-year project Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart
Cities. He is co-editor of the books Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures
(2015) and Playful Citizens: The Ludification of Culture, Science, and Politics (forthcoming).
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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the copyright holder.
Part I
Design Practices in the Hackable City
Power to the People: Hacking the City
with Plug-In Interfaces for Community
Engagement
Luke Hespanhol and Martin Tomitsch
Abstract 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 plug-in interfaces 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 con-
straints: (1) technology familiarity of the interfaces; (2) level of integration of the
interfaces into the built environment; and (3) nature of pedestrian activity 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.
Keywords Urban interaction design · Urban interfaces · Smart cities

Community engagement
1 Introduction
This chapter presents findings from a city hacking initiative focused on community
engagement. It is structured as a series of short-term cross-sectional field studies
evaluating the effectiveness of placing tangible user interfaces in public thoroughfares
for the purposes of public consultation on local community matters.
L. Hespanhol (B) · M. Tomitsch

Design Lab – School of Architecture, Design and Planning,
The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
M. Tomitsch

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_2
26 L. Hespanhol and M. Tomitsch
Community engagement initiatives provide public venues for citizens to partake

on decisions affecting their immediate environment (Gianluca et al. 2013), allowing
local governments to take actions informed by public opinion and aligned with the
community concerns (International Association for Public Participation Australasia
2009). However, face-to-face meetings, online surveys and other traditional methods
of consultation are often disconnected from the social-cultural context (Fredericks
and Foth 2013; Gianluca et al. 2013; Schroeter et al. 2012; Valkanova et al. 2014) or
not easily accessible. Consequently, they often fail to reach representative proportions
of the public.
In order to overcome those barriers to civic engagement, various initiatives
(Behrens et al. 2014; Mueller et al. 2012; Schroeter et al. 2012; Taylor et al. 2012)
have been proposed for situating digital polling interfaces directly in public spaces,
therefore lowering the entry barrier. However, a common observation from those
studies is that passers-by often do not notice the interfaces (Fredericks and Foth
2013; Gianluca et al. 2013; Taylor et al. 2012), which leads to low levels of participa-
tion. Recent research has demonstrated that the effectiveness of digital interventions
in public spaces is highly determined by constraints imposed by the local context
(Behrens et al. 2014; Hespanhol and Tomitsch 2014), including the type of digital
media devices used, how familiar they are to general members of the public, how
integrated they are to the physical built environment, their level of distribution across
the urban precinct, how the digital interfaces are introduced to passers-by as they
walk through the public space, how many people can simultaneously interact with
them at any given time, the type of feedback provided, and so on. To that end, we pro-
pose the utilisation of low-cost portable interactive technologies deployed directly to
public spaces on a temporary basis—as a platform to investigate three common con-
textual constraints (Hespanhol and Tomitsch 2015): (1) technology familiarity of the
interface; (2) level of integration of the interface into the built environment; and (3)
nature of pedestrian activity ordinarily unfolding in the urban precinct. Furthermore,
we propose the notion of plug-in interfaces—motivated, in turn, by architectural
and social affordances offered by the public space and resulting in temporary chore-
ographies of interaction—as a method for hacking the city to design lightweight
community engagement initiatives.
To address the first aspect, we implemented two interfaces: (I1) an iPad running
a traditional online survey; (I2) a portable ready-made device using audio to ask
“yes/no” type questions to passers-by, who could cast their votes by placing their
hands on top of sensors embedded in the device. By using those two interfaces,
we sought to compare the effects of technology familiarity versus the placement
of devices as unfamiliar urban furniture. For testing the level of integration of the
interfaces into the built environment, we deployed each of them in two configurations:
(C1) attached to a street pole next to where people walked; (C2) mounted on a portable
stand, placed on the sides of the thoroughfare. Finally, for gauging the impact caused
by the nature of pedestrian activity, we adopted two different locations for running the
studies: (L1) pedestrian crossing controlled by traffic lights; (L2) fully pedestrianised
thoroughfare.
Power to the People: Hacking the City … 27
We ran a total of eight field studies testing all combinations of the above variables.
In each study, we observed conversion rates and the behaviour of passers-by in regard
to noticeability and discoverability of the interfaces. From the observations gathered,
we then derived initial insights regarding motivational factors for impromptu inter-
action and intuitiveness of the interfaces. We discuss the issues commonly faced
by city hacking deployments for community engagement, as well as considerations
about the validity of the observed public participation. We conclude by pointing out
strategies for effectively employing plug-in interfaces as lightweight tools for similar
bottom-up initiatives.
2 Background
Community engagement is an administrative strategy commonly used by govern-

ments and research organisations to learn about the views, opinions and ideas of
local residents of a neighbourhood. Traditionally, they have taken the form of exhi-
bitions about new development proposals, followed by public sessions held at town
halls, where citizens gather to deliberate directly with the local authorities, voice
their concerns and vote on possible outcome options based on their preferences. Yet,
local government authorities themselves have started to acknowledge shortcomings
on traditional civic participation initiatives (Fredericks and Foth 2013; Gianluca et al.
2013; Schroeter et al. 2012; Valkanova et al. 2014). For example, many people may
not be aware of the community meetings and their schedules, or simply may not be
able to attend them. Some individuals may also avoid fear of public embarrassment,
feeling discouraged to express their opinions in front of others, especially if those
defy the views of the majority. The use of online surveys for gathering feedback from
local communities on development proposals addresses some of these aspects but
also introduces participation barriers, as people need to discover and be able to access
the online platform and have to make time to complete the surveys (Fredericks and
Foth 2013). The view that individual public spaces and communities have individual
requirements has encouraged the design and development of bespoke technologies
to engage specific sections of the communities directly within the public spaces they
use and provide a platform that appeals more directly to the patterns and concerns
of their daily life (Taylor et al. 2012). Interaction designers and urban planners have
increasingly grown aware of the fact that the design of interfaces for community
engagement is strongly shaped by the physical, social and cultural contexts of the
urban public space in which they are deployed (Behrens et al. 2014; Bilandzic and
Venable 2011; Hespanhol and Tomitsch 2015). Those factors, of course, may signif-
icantly shift overtime, and awareness of this shift has led to more lightweight urban
interventions, “hacking” various elements of an urban precinct by appropriating and
augmenting them for a short period of time and with a purpose often unrelated to their
original role in the public space. Caldwell and Foth (2014) investigated the emergent
attempts to articulate placemaking specifically with digital media and interactive
technologies through grassroots approaches generally referred to as “do-it-yourself”
Table 1 Theoretical angles informing plug-in interfaces

Theoretical angles Design options
TA1 Contextualisation Private and semi-public indoor spaces
Public plazas
Public thoroughfares
TA2 Agency and Top-down
accountability Bottom-up
TA3 Aesthetics of public Media modalities
interaction Placement
Spatial layout
Feedback strategies
(DIY) media architecture. Such a DIY mindset, coupled with the increasing afford-
ability and availability of Web, tracking and social technologies, has also prompted
numerous other instances of grassroots activism (Koeman et al. 2015; Kuznetsov
et al. 2011; Vlachokyriakos et al. 2014), where the urban environment is temporarily
hacked by its own citizens. Admittedly, in some of those instances, the city hacking
interventions are actually designed by academic researchers, with the goal of creat-
ing new platforms through which citizens could eventually take over and participate
in. Nevertheless, this trend reveals a shift in agency and accountability regarding
civic participation, from a traditionally top-down agenda driven by government and
occasionally consulted with people, to an emerging bottom-up movement rooted
on self-organisation. Notably, this movement works actively towards persuading the
authorities about new community solutions informed by peer feedback at the citizen
level and supported by rapid urban prototyping carried out directly in public spaces.
In that regard, Matsuda (2010) also identified a similar turning point in broader
social relations, observing an increasing appropriation of the public space for activ-
ities previously confined to private or semi-private environments, and pointing to a
fundamental shift in individual forms of expression towards shared spaces, a trend
he referred to as augmented domesticity. Digital technology has enabled experiential
privacy in public spaces by offering instant and ubiquitous availability to personal
data while providing acceptable levels of access control. Echoing Hill’s (Hill 2008,
2010) realisation of the city as a platform—or “soft city”—Matsuda argued that the
physical qualities of an urban space have become less relevant than its role as a
platform for technology-driven social interactions:
As the public and private spheres established in the 19th century merge, and space is perceived
differently by each person, this terminology [private/public space] can no longer express
universal spatial qualities. (source)
Based on the points above, we can therefore articulate the use of public space
for community engagement from three different—yet related—theoretical angles
(Table 1).
The first informs the themes of engagement and participation from a socio-political
perspective, particularly the attempts at contextualisation (TA1), referring to the
curated choice of specific public spaces for the deployment of lightweight commu-
nity engagement urban interventions [e.g. plazas versus thoroughfares, as defined
by Hespanhol and Dalsgaard (2015)]. The second angle relates to levels of agency
and accountability (TA2) prompted by different mechanisms of top-down (govern-
ment bodies) or bottom-up (citizens, community groups and design researchers)
appropriation of public space for the purposes of community engagement. And the
third angle relates to what we refer to as the aesthetics of public interaction (TA3),
more specifically relating to the design aspects (media modalities, placement, spatial
layout, feedback strategies, etc.) relevant to choreographing community engage-
ment and placemaking. In this chapter, we attempt to use those three theoretical
angles to inform our research in regard to investigating the utilisation of plug-in
interfaces—portable interactive technology deployed directly to public spaces on a
temporary basis—for the purposes of community engagement. As we will discuss in
the next section, this is not an entirely novel concept, rather a direct consequence of
the city hacking ethos born out of the above-mentioned bottom-up activism boosted
by digital technology. Yet, definition and understanding of plug-in interfaces as a
design strategy on its own right—particularly for the purposes of urban prototyping
(Hoggenmüller and Wiethoff 2014; Korsgaard and Brynskov 2014)—is still largely
lacking. To the extent permitted by the scope of this chapter, we propose a definition
of plug-in interfaces and present a series of short-term cross-sectional field studies
where we contrast different design scenarios against specific contextual constraints.
Further, we present initial findings regarding the utilisation of plug-in interfaces as a
tool for community engagement campaigns supporting rapid deployment and quick
turnaround times.
3 Plug-In Interfaces
In the 1960s, the British avant-garde architectural group Archigram conceived Plug-
In City, a futuristic concept for dynamic city planning (Sadler 2005). Plug-In City
consisted of a central scaffolding framework spanning a very extensive area, where
moveable modular residential and commercial units could be attached to, moved
around or removed according to local urban planning and design requirements. Trans-
portation, sanitation, computing and other essential services would be embedded
into the central infrastructure and shared by the community but designed in a way
that would allow them to be readily reallocated to other parts of the city, if neces-
sary. By allowing a temporary and flexible deployment of urban resources, Plug-In
City would enable adaptable collective living, integration of transportation and the
accommodation of rapid change in the urban environment (Merin 2013). Despite
its clearly utopian character, Plug-In City helped to forge a vision for a more agile,
readily adaptable deployment of specific resources for well-defined purposes within
the urban environment. By keeping the scope of the plug-in modules smaller, design
solutions could not only become more realistic, but also their implementation less
risky—if a newly tried module failed its intended purposes, consequences would be
less damaging, and reversing the change much easier and less costly.
The concept of plug-in modules has also been borrowed by information technology
and extensively used since the 1990s in the design of software applications. Typically,
plug-in modules consist of third-party software components that can be installed
as extensions to existing applications, expanding their scope of features. Plug-in
releases represent an extremely common platform for allowing controlled addition
of features by independent developers to well-established applications such as Web
browsers (Google 2015; Mozilla Foundation 2015), content management systems
(Wordpress.org 2015) or integrated development environments (Vogel 2015).
Recently, concepts reminiscent of Archigram’s Plug-In City have materialised
both in specific niches of architectural designs as well as in the form of digital furni-
ture in public spaces. Shipping containers, for example, have been used as temporary
dwelling units, movable hotels or structures for pop-up community markets (Williams
2015). Due to their resilience and portability, they have also become a popular tem-
porary housing option in Christchurch, New Zealand, following a 6.3-magnitude
earthquake that hit the city in 2011 (The Press 2014). Likewise, small-scale digital
devices extending the built environment for purposes of public consultation or track-
ing have become increasingly common, such as digital customer polling interfaces
(Fig. 1). Plug-in initiatives are particularly well suited for grassroots, placemaking
activities, for allowing the quick trial of new layers of public infrastructure that man-
age to fit—spatially as well as functionally—into perceived “urban gaps” resulting
from vacant or underutilised sections of the city. More importantly, those added lay-
ers can be completely and seamlessly uninstalled after the event, without loss of
features from the original design. PARK(ing) Day and Build A Better Block (Lydon
2012) are relevant examples of such grassroots plug-in initiatives.1 Examples exist
where, upon community endorsement on the outcomes of those initiatives, local
governments approve their deployments as permanent new urban features—as is the
case of the “parklets” installed at the Civic Centre in Canberra, Australia, illustrated
in Fig. 2.
We can observe, therefore, a degree of interdependency between system and inter-
face, whereby the plug-in character of the latter is a consequence of it fitting into the
social and architectural affordances of the former. In that sense, plug-in interfaces
represent more than just a temporary—or “pop-up”—feature added to an urban space:
just like in Archigram’s Plug-In City, they consist both of systemic factors—repre-
sented by an urban architecture designed with qualities that support (intentionally or
not) appropriation by external agents—as well as usability factors—represented by
the resulting urban interfaces, the mechanisms guiding their uptake by the commu-
nity and the orchestration of the interactions with them by the various social actors
involved. This is true regardless of whether the plug-in interface is designed as a
physical, digital or hybrid addition to the built environment.
1 PARK(ing) Day is an internationally recognised event where parking spots in various cities
and towns are transformed into pocket parks and parklets. See for instance https://www.
civicdesigncenter.org/events/parking-day.
Fig. 1 Customer polling interface at Aarhus Airport, Denmark
In this chapter, we focus on plug-in interfaces that incorporate digital media. To

that extent, examples of systemic factors include public infrastructure where sensors
or devices can be temporarily installed at (such as poles, trees, fences and benches),
provision of electrical power or Wi-Fi connectivity within an urban site, or even
spatial affordances such as a wider sidewalk, an atrium, a lobby or unused corners
of a plaza. Conversely, usability factors include the type of media device used to
construct the interface, the kind of sensing mechanisms employed, how feedback
is given to users, how many users can interact simultaneously, how discoverable
and intuitive the interface is, the time taken to answer the questions asked, and how
publicly or privately the interaction unfolds in the shared public space.
Following on from the concepts above, we therefore define plug-in interfaces
as portable, interactive media technology, deployed directly to public spaces on a
temporary basis and leveraging on existing urban infrastructure and social dynam-
ics. Conversely, we define (a) plug-in architecture as the set of design properties
observed in or assigned to a built environment that enables the accommodation of
plug-in interfaces; and (b) plug-in choreography as the set of new social dynamics
unfolding in the public space as a consequence of the deployment of a plug-in inter-
face. The design and implementation of plug-in interfaces tap into the ethos of the
Internet culture and agile practices (Silberberg et al. 2013; Urbagram 2011) to pro-
mote human-centred, participatory design of public spaces, whose features emerge
Fig. 2 Permanent parklets in Canberra, Australia
from its own live social dynamics through a low-risk iterative process that embraces
change and swiftly adapts.
The notion of plug-in interfaces is, therefore, largely formal, in the sense that
it is characterised by the spatial affordances of the public space architecture and
the social dynamics of its target urban precinct, regardless of its actual purpose or
content. However, it is precisely its property of being at the same time bespoke
and hyper-local, yet easily adaptable and ultimately reversible, that makes it highly
suitable for city hacking community engagement. As discussed above, community
engagement and, more broadly, placemaking initiatives have typically been realised
via top-down public consultation, following an agenda driven by the government.
More recently, local government authorities have also resorted to lightweight
urban interventions—often in the form of “pop-up” events (Fredericks et al. 2015,
2016)—in an effort to reach out to communities, especially citizens otherwise alien-
ated by the traditional political process. Given their temporary deployment in public
spaces, those government initiatives could arguably also employ plug-in interfaces
and rapid prototyping as a design strategy—and, in fact, the insights from this article
are also applicable to them. However, their agenda is still admittedly top-down in
the sense that the questions asked and the data gathered are still under the control of
a representative body. It is precisely the ability of plug-in interfaces to allow regular
citizens also to “attach” temporary, lightweight digital media interfaces directly
into “suitable” sections of the built environment that makes them such a powerful
tool for city hacking. In doing so, ordinary people can appropriate sections of the
public urban space, while retaining agency and accountability over the consultation
process with a relatively low budget. They can also subvert them for a controlled
and temporary manifestation of urban activism, reversible by nature and limited in
duration. By bringing rapid prototyping and continuous improvement into the urban
planning field, plug-in interfaces promote an iterative approach to placemaking
through direct consultation with the general public as well as with stakeholder-
s—such as urban planners, local governments, urban interaction designers and
community members. In the process, they also enable stakeholders to fail early, fail
often, welcome community input in the elaboration and test of urban interventions,
and attain continuous improvement from iterations of rapid prototyping.
Although, plug-in interfaces as a design strategy for urban prototyping and com-
munity engagement have not been previously formalised, numerous recent stud-
ies have started to trial plug-in interfaces as design solutions. In those studies, the
researchers often assume the role of regular citizens and probe the ability of the
designed plug-in interfaces to enable bottom-up and middle-out (Costa and Ferrão
2010; Fredericks et al. 2016) approaches to community engagement. Vlachokyriakos
et al. (2014) adopted the principles of DIY Media Architecture to conceive Poster-
Vote, a low-cost electronic voting system for conducting public surveys. The system
is designed as an open-sourced kit consisting of two components: (a) a lightweight
hardware set of buttons and LEDs; and (b) a paper poster placed on top of the hard-
ware module and displaying questions to the community. People can then answer the
questions by pressing the buttons, receiving some limited feedback on the interactive
process from the LEDs. PosterVote is a plug-in interface for making temporary use
of the affordances offered by public furniture—such as electrical poles, fences and
walls—where the posters can be easily hung from or attached to, but later also swiftly
removed without leaving traces. Given its low cost and portability, PosterVote makes
an ideal platform for grassroots activism and can be easily distributed across a public
space, allowing both dispersed and in situ social action.
The Viewpoint (Taylor et al. 2012) was a self-contained device unit that could
be mounted on a wall or flat surface, allowing people to vote both with a mobile
phone as well as by pressing physical buttons. The interface showed two information
windows: (a) a question box with voting instructions and (b) a small screen displaying
current results and cumulative number of votes. A rotating dial allowed users to
scroll through previous polls to see the final results and any response provided.
Three devices were deployed for two months, each in a different location within the
community: a busy convenience store; the foyer of a community centre; and in the
window of a local housing organisation. The results from the studies highlighted
aspects related to credibility, efficacy and format of the interfaces. In particular, they
pointed to the importance of keeping the interaction design simple and the positive
effects of deploying the interfaces into locations where members of the community
would normally already gather to discuss community issues, taking advantage not
only of architectural affordances, but also of the social interactions already in place.
Steinberger et al. (2014) developed Vote With Your Feet as a tangible plug-in
interface exploring the social and spatial affordances offered by a bus shelter. That
was augmented by allowing citizens to take advantage of their time waiting for public
transport to express their opinions on topics such as current affairs, cultural identity
and local matters. The interaction mechanism was very straightforward and intuitive:
a digital screen, mounted at the roof of the bus shelter, would display “yes/no”
questions, one at a time. Once a question was displayed, people could cast their votes
by stepping on one of two tangible buttons on the ground: one labelled with “Yes”, the
other with “No”. Following the same principle of creating “serendipitous encounters”
with the digital interfaces, Visualising Mill Road (Koeman et al. 2015) deployed
low-tech polling devices in shops and cafes along a commercial road spreading
two neighbourhoods, divided by a railway track. Each device was built from black
cardboard boxes, embedded with electronic hardware to process and store the votes
entered. On top of each device, a printed question was stuck above three buttons
providing a canonical set of possible answers: agree, neutral or disagree. Citizens
could vote in front of participating shops, in a way that would catch their attention as
they walked up and down the street. Cumulative results were visualised with marks
stencilled with coloured chalk spray along the street in front of each shop, exploring
the affordances of visibility and walkability offered by the sidewalk pavement.
Adopting findings from the studies described above, such as making a conscious
effort to keep the design of the voting interfaces simple, we developed our own case
study. It consisted of a series of short deployments ran at our university campus,
focused on testing the impact of certain contextual constraints on the observed par-
ticipation by the general public. In the next section, we explain why we decided
to investigate such a proposition, where we tested it, what interfaces we actually
deployed, and how each interface was made available for citizens in the public urban
space. Furthermore, we present the results of our studies and consider the design
implications suggested by their outcomes.
4 A Case Study on City Hacking for Community

Engagement
4.1 Why: Motivation
Above, we defined plug-in architecture as a process of opening up city-making and

empowering citizens to develop plug-in choreographies as a set of new and situated
social dynamics. As first line of enquiry, therefore, we decided to focus on the
design of plug-in interfaces as elements fitting into the architecture and enabling
choreographies.
When designing the deployment of digital interfaces to public spaces, researchers
are repeatedly faced with three common contextual constraints: (1) the technology
familiarity of the interface; (2) the level of integration of the interface into the built
environment it was deployed to; and (3) the nature of pedestrian activity ordinar-
ily unfolding in the urban precinct. Technology familiarity refers to the extent to
which passers-by would quickly make sense of the interface and learn how to use
it upon a brief encounter in the public space. Level of integration relates to how
much the interface blends into the surrounding architecture: for example, card read-
ers on train stations are usually installed into local public furniture such as gates
or station entrances (Fig. 3), while beverage machines or ATMs are often placed
alongside other architectural elements in the public space such as walls or escalators
(Fig. 4). Finally, the likelihood of passers-by stopping by an interface in a public
space is determined by extrinsic factors such as the primary function of the space
(e.g. connecting destinations, or else being a destination in itself) and the presence
of other elements of interest nearby, such as shops, buskers, public art, benches or
stairs (Mendelson 2015).
In order to get a better understanding about the impact of each of those contextual
constraints in the levels of participation by the general public, we devised a series
of field studies aimed at testing each of them with plug-in interfaces. The sections
below describe our design approach for the study of each of those constraints.
4.2 Where: The Locations
To gauge the impact caused by the nature of pedestrian activity, we adopted two differ-
ent locations for running the studies. The first location (L1) was a pedestrian crossing
(Fig. 5(1)–(4)) on a busy wide avenue running through our university campus. The
crossing is controlled by traffic lights both for cars and pedestrians, and pedestri-
ans can indicate their intention to cross the road by pressing button-driven devices
installed in electricity poles on each side of the zebra crossing. As we observed,
pedestrians tend to adhere to traffic rules at that particular crossing, as it is located at
a busy major road: they walk towards the area of the sidewalk immediately behind
the zebra crossing (and therefore besides the electricity pole where the button-driven
light control device is installed at) and then assess the status of the lights. If the
lights are red, pedestrians press the device button and stand at the same spot for a
few minutes waiting for the lights to go green. This waiting period offers therefore
a window of opportunity for casual interaction with a plug-in interface.
The second location (L2) was a fully pedestrianised thoroughfare (Fig. 5(5)–(8)).
Importantly, it was located in the same university campus as L1, so that we could
ensure participation in all scenarios would involve members of the same community.
The thoroughfare consisted of a 3-m wide concrete pathway running on a straight
line through a small park flanked by faculty buildings on one side and a wide grassed
area on the other. Sitting benches of different types are present on both sides of
the pathway, which connects one of the campus’ entrances and sport fields to a
library, food court and other faculty buildings. As a result, the thoroughfare receives
a continuous flow of pedestrians in both directions all day long.
Fig. 3 Transport card readers at a rail station in Sydney, Australia
4.3 What: The Plug-In Interfaces
As indicated by Table 2, to address technology familiarity (Blackler and Hurtienne

2007), we implemented two very distinct interfaces. The first (I1) consisted of a Web-
based survey running on a 9.7-in. iPad Air (Fig. 6, left). The Web application would
present the passers-by with a series of polar (i.e. “yes/no” questions). Walking up to
the interface, participants would encounter a single question displayed on the iPad
screen, above buttons corresponding to “yes” and “no” answers. Once participants
answered the question, an animation would play confirming that the vote had been
cast, followed by a visualisation of the cumulative results for that question gathered
up to that moment, so that the participants could learn how their opinion stood in
Fig. 4 ATMs at a food court in Sydney, Australia
Fig. 5 Setups for the field studies
relation to their fellow citizens. After 30 s, the interface would display the next
question, thus starting a new cycle.
The second interface (I2) consisted in a portable ready-made device using audio
to ask “yes/no”-type questions to passers-by, once they were detected to be in the
vicinity (within 3 m) of the device by a proximity sensor. After hearing the question
(recorded by an English-speaking female actor), participants could cast a vote by
Table 2 Design scenarios addressing the contextual constraints

Contextual constraint Scenario Description
Where Location Pedestrian People normally stop near the interface while
Crossing waiting for the traffic light to turn green
Thoroughfare There is normally a steady flow of people
walking past the interface
What Interface iPad High technology familiarity
Audio Low technology familiarity
How Configuration Pole Blended into existing street furniture
Stand New street furniture
Fig. 6 Plug-in interfaces used in our studies
placing their hands on top of one of two cards labelled with “yes” or “no” (Fig. 6,
right). The cards were embedded with sensors to detect the variation of light once
a hand was placed on top of it, and a vote was only counted if only one of the two
cards was covered. Like the iPad Web interface, upon computing a vote the audio
device would present the participant with the cumulative results for that question,
reading out loud how many other citizens had voted the same way. The cycle would
then resume, with the device asking the next question if the participant stayed around
or going silent otherwise until being approached by the next participant. The cycle
would also resume in case of no vote being detected in the first place (e.g. if the
participant walked away while the question was still being asked), timing out after
waiting 10 s for a response.
Through those two interfaces, we sought to compare the effects of technology
familiarity in the usage of urban plug-in interfaces for community engagement. We
assumed the iPad interface to be perceived as more familiar—being a well-known
device and given the fact we created the survey as a standard Web application.
However, we were interested in investigating how strong a role technology familiarity

would play when presented in a rather unfamiliar context. Also, to facilitate the
understanding of both interfaces, we designed them using a combination of very
simple user actions, quick interaction cycles and complete independence between
the questions, in order to produce walk-up-and-use interface scenarios (Jacucci et al.
2010). Our intention was to allow passers-by to join in or opt out from the interactions
anonymously, at any time and at their own pace, therefore facilitating the interaction
with the interface by individuals who would encounter them among other public space
features in a way that was most likely sudden and unexpected. The same concerns
with the passers-by choreography elicited by our plug-in interfaces led us to compose
the survey with polar (i.e. “yes/no”) questions rather than asking for more articulated
feedback from participants: we designed the plug-in interfaces to take advantage of
impromptu encounters with participants on their way to do something else as part of
their daily routines—a requirement derived, in turn, from the architectural and social
affordances of the chosen locations, as described above. Given that polar questions
demand very little time commitment, we expected, by adopting them, to minimise
the impact of time availability as a potential factor influencing participation. Had we
designed interfaces to “plug into” a more accommodating public space—for instance,
a public park with plenty of seating spaces, or even a bus stop, where people would
dwell for longer—we could have afforded to design the survey for eliciting more
articulated answers from citizens.
In order to isolate the survey content as a study variable, we asked the same
questions on both interfaces. As we ran the study at a university campus during
school holidays, we targeted the survey to the university staff community, asking
five questions about sustainability and physical activity around the campus:
1. Do you drive your car to work?
2. Do you turn off your computer when you go on lunch break?
3. Do you use a reusable coffee cup when you get coffee or tea?
4. Are you able to control the air condition or heating in your office?
5. Do you take public transport to get to work?
4.4 How: The Interface Configurations
To test the level of integration of the plug-in interfaces into the built environment,
we deployed each of them in two configurations. The first one was intended to give
the interface a seamless character, well blended into pre-existing elements of the
urban landscape. We chose to use Velcro straps to attach the interfaces to poles
on each environment next to where people walked: on the pedestrian crossing, we
attached them to the electrical pole also hosting the button-driven crossing lights
device (Fig. 5(2), (4)); in the thoroughfare, to a tree at the edge of the pathway
(Fig. 5(6), (8)).
While the first configuration would have the devices mounted on existing street
furniture, the second should, on the contrary, cause the interfaces to stand out promi-
nently on their own among the other elements in the local built environment. This
second configuration, therefore, involved having the interfaces mounted on a portable
stand, placed near the electrical pole (in the pedestrian crossing, Fig. 5(1), (3)) or the
tree (in the thoroughfare, Fig. 5(5), (7)), but as clearly separate visual entities.
4.5 Methodology and Results
We ran a total of eight field studies, testing all combinations of the above variables.
Each study ran for one hour, during which we recorded two metrics: (a) total number
of passers-by who approached the plug-in interface under observation and (b) number
of passers-by who actively interacted with the interface. For the purposes of this study,
we defined approaching the interface as the act of walking towards it while aware
of its presence, which therefore entailed slightly different behaviour depending on
the location. In the thoroughfare, we counted passers-by walking within a range of
up to 3 m from the interface and who performed active movements indicating their
awareness of it, such as changing their walking pace around the interface, turning
their heads to it or walking towards it. In the pedestrian crossing, we counted all
people walking from the side of the road the interface was deployed to and crossing
towards the other side, therefore incidentally coming within close proximity with
the interface. Figure 7 shows the breakdown of the total number of participants per
setup. The definition of actively interacting with the interface was the same for all
scenarios: the act of making explicit gestures in or around the interface in an attempt
to explore it further and cast a vote.
From the two metrics described above, we derived the conversion rate for each
field study (also displayed in Fig. 7) as the percentage of passers-by who, having
become aware of the plug-in interface, actually interacted with it. Combining the
numbers per design scenario, across all studies, we then derived the conversion rates
for each of them, as shown in Fig. 9. Likewise, Fig. 8 shows the distribution of
participants when each design scenario is looked at in isolation.
5 Discussion
Before we analyse the results obtained from our studies, it is important to acknowl-
edge their limitations. We should point out that the research questions presented in
the previous section, although informed by all three theoretical angles outlined in
Table 1, pose a much greater focus on aesthetic aspects that could influence public
interaction (TA3). When designing our field studies, we aimed to prototype scenarios
that could exemplify typical grassroots urban interventions. To that end, we designed
our plug-in interfaces to re-contextualise community engagement sessions from
Fig. 7 Conversion rates per field study setup (tick marks indicate the features of each setup)
Fig. 8 Percentage of participants per design scenario
private to public spaces (TA1) and simultaneously avoid perceived accountability

by government or administrative bodies (TA2). In addition to implying aesthetic
decisions (as discussed below), such a departure point also assumed public spaces
as test beds for our plug-in interfaces and a bottom-up approach to their deployment.
That, in turn, got reflected in the “urban guerrilla” manner we designed our inter-
ventions, employing low-cost interfaces and running each session for a very limited
amount of time: each study ran only for a short period (one hour) and, therefore, the
total number of participants coming into contact with the interfaces was relatively
low. Also, as Fig. 8 indicates, the percentage of total participants was somewhat
unbalanced when location is considered in isolation, with more than two-thirds
(70%) engaging in interaction with the interfaces at the pedestrian crossing. The
distribution of participants across the other two contextual constraints—configura-
tion and type of interface—was much more uniform: 54% pole versus 46% stand,
and 55% iPad versus 45% audio device, respectively. Given the reduced population
sample, the studies can only offer preliminary impressions of the effectiveness of
each design strategy regarding location, choice of interface or spatial configuration.
Despite those limitations, we believe the results obtained provide some important
initial insights into motivational factors for impromptu interaction, intuitiveness of
the interfaces and other relevant factors for consideration in the design of plug-
in interfaces for community engagement, which we intend to explore further in
upcoming studies. For example, from the metrics observed, the pedestrian crossing
location seems to offer more favourable conditions for passers-by to learn and actively
make use of the interfaces: not only the conversion rates across all setups (Fig. 7)
were greater for the pedestrian crossing (43%) than for the thoroughfare (28%), but
that was also the location for three out of the four setups with highest conversion
rates (setups 5, 6 and 7, respectively), including the two at the very top (setups 5
and 6), as indicated in Fig. 7. This seems to validate the strategy of positioning the
interface next to spots in the space where passers-by were already pre-conditioned to
stop by (e.g. next to the button-driven crossing lights controlling device), therefore
taking advantage of their natural behaviour in that space. We propose to refer to those
spots within the public space where people would normally already stop by during
their ordinary walk as resting areas and argue that they constitute a particular form
of plug-in affordance. Waiting for the traffic light to turn green seems to offer people
just enough time for noticing the plug-in interface, while the perspective to cross
the street provides a suitable excuse for quickly trying it out before walking away.
Since the normal routine of the pedestrian is not disrupted and requires little time
commitment, participation becomes more likely.
Equally important, the context offered by resting areas is conducive to those kinds
of quick interactions, unlike most other spots in a public space. As Aurigi (2013)
pointed out:
In many cases, terminals have been designed and placed to respond to a simplistic conception
of touch-and-go usage by an idealised model of busy, ‘always on the move’ connected citizen.
They depend entirely on an idea of fast movement space, and quick and casual interactions.
[…] They therefore end up being placed in entirely ‘public’ and over-exposed – and often
rather uncomfortable – locations, forgetting that the nature of the interactions allowed by
the terminal is rather personal and private. (Aurigi 2013)
The ubiquity of mobile technology and Web connectivity, however, have turned
resting areas, even during ordinary circumstances, into spaces that offer people the
opportunity to momentarily pause from other activities and engage in more per-
sonal, private and fleeting interactions with technology—in other words, into places
for emergence of the augmented domesticity patterns of behaviour identified by
Matsuda (2010). On those areas, and supported by digital technology, people would
naturally start to feel able and comfortable to perform in public tasks previously
reserved to the private home environment. For example, it is not uncommon to see
people engaged with their mobile phones—e.g. making calls, checking their emails
or quickly interacting with friends in social media—while waiting for the lights on a
pedestrian crossing to turn green. The placement of plug-in interfaces for community
engagement at or around resting areas encourages therefore situated participation by
leveraging directly on the local public space affordances, which are of both archi-
tectural and social nature.
This resulting plug-in choreography—which, importantly, also disappears from
the public space once its corresponding plug-in interface is removed—has also found
similar expressions in Visualising Mill Road, a study carried out by Koeman et al.
(2015), who placed voting devices in a strategic location where people would already
normally stop by: shop counters. While walking on the streets towards the shops,
passers-by were gradually introduced to the community engagement campaign via
the stencilled visualisations in front of the shops; upon entering a shop and stopping
by the counter to pay for their goods, they would then have just enough time to
engage with the voting interface without greater disruption to their normal routines,
while all along feeling that they had contributed by participating in the civic event.
Vote With Your Feet (Steinberger et al. 2014) also tapped into the local dynamics
by having the foot-controlled voting interface deployed in a bus shelter—again, a
location where people would otherwise have to stand idly anyway.
Even more significant, however, appears to be the effect of technology familiarity.
As indicated in Fig. 7, all three setups with the highest conversion rates (setups 5, 6
and 2, respectively) employed the iPad interface. Across all setups, the iPad interface
also resulted in a conversion rate more than 3.5 times higher than the one produced
by the audio interface (57 and 15%, respectively, as indicated by Fig. 9). Those
results strongly endorse the effectiveness of technology familiarity of the interfaces
for participation. Despite the lack of explicit signage guiding the interaction, and
the fact that neither interface constitutes a familiar feature in public spaces, passers-
by still managed to swiftly make sense of the iPad-based setups and engage in
interaction with that interface much more successfully than with the audio device.
This is consistent with the literature on intuitive interaction, which argues that an
interface will be perceived as intuitive if used in similar contexts as it is normally
found at or, if used in a different context, it follows the same interactive rules as those
on its original context (Blackler and Hurtienne 2007). A Web survey running on an
iPad works the same way as it would be expected to run in any other context, hence
passers-by making sense of it immediately. Our portable custom-made audio device,
however, may not have presented sufficiently recognisable interaction mechanisms
to allow for a swift uptake by passers-by in the community it was tested at.
Another important consideration relates to the utilisation of visual versus audio
feedback for the interaction. Previous research (Hespanhol and Tomitsch 2015) has
indicated that synchronous, immediate visual feedback—as the one provided by the
iPad Web application, upon input from the user, is a relevant factor for convey-
ing identity—i.e. for giving the individual interacting the sense that the interface
is responding directly to them—and, therefore, forging a sense of control. Audio
feedback, however, may easily become ambiguous: although our audio interface
started playing upon identification of a person close-by, if the person walked away
the device would continue to play; if a second individual then walked into the space,
they would encounter the audio being played half way through, therefore losing
the sense of being directly addressed by the interface. Likewise, if the surrounding
Fig. 9 Conversion rates per design scenario, across setups
environment became too noisy for the question to be heard, passers-by might not
understand that the interface could be addressing them.
In regard to the mounting configurations, 3 out of 4 of the setups where the inter-
faces were mounted on a stand produced greater conversion rate than their counter-
parts where the interfaces were mounted on a pole (Fig. 7). Likewise, when looked
at in isolation across the setups (Fig. 9), the stand configuration yielded a greater
conversion rate than the pole configuration (49 and 29%, respectively). Such a result
suggests that interfaces that are less integrated into the built environment are actu-
ally more effective in terms of attracting interactions from passers-by. Those results
reflect some of the conclusions raised by similar grassroots city hacking deployments
for community engagement. The design iterations reported in both Visualising Mill
Road (Koeman et al. 2015) and Vote With Your Feet (Steinberger et al. 2014), for
example, also pointed to the effectiveness of utilising elements that visually disrupted
and stood out from the ordinary street aesthetics (chalk visualisations and extra sig-
nage, respectively). This strategy also corroborates the use of visual disruption in
the urban space by other initiatives aimed at instigate civic engagement, such as the
London Is Changing project (Ross 2015), which used billboards to display opinions
about the city’s affordability originally expressed online by members of the public. In
all those scenarios, employing visual disruption in the urban space as a tool to attract
the attention of passers-by to platforms aimed at civic discussions pose benefits that
are twofold: in addition to the obvious increase in participation, it also presents citi-
zens with views expressed by others, potentially in conflict with their own. In doing
so, it counteracts one of the challenging factors to the public discussion of ideas
in modern society: filter bubbles (Pariser 2011). A result of the automatic selection
of news, topics and opinions by online search engines and social network based on
a user profile, filter bubbles emerge by the algorithmic tracking of an individual’s
preferences, subsequently feeding an increasing presentation of materials related to
their own interests, thus reflecting their own world views in detriment of others in
contrary. By employing visual disruption to persuade community members to pause
in a public space where they can get acquainted with a wider range of views from
their peers, plug-in interfaces can therefore strongly contribute to more balanced
civic debates and increased agency and accountability (TA2) of the views shared by
citizens (Hespanhol et al. 2015; Valkanova et al. 2014).
The considerations above, as well as observation from the literature, point to
some clear strategies to be observed in the upcoming design of plug-in interfaces as
lightweight tools for similar bottom-up initiatives:
Simple, clear and familiar interfaces, adaptable to the circumstances
As expected, walk-up-and-use interfaces that can be immediately understood, read
and accessed lead to greater participation rates. However, care should be taken so
that such clarity is kept despite of changes in the weather conditions, loudness or
other distractions of the environment and demographics of the general public.
Quick interactions, placed in or around resting areas
As verified both in our pedestrian crossing scenario as well as in similar studies—like
Visualising Mill Road (Koeman et al. 2015) and Vote With Your Feet (Steinberger
et al. 2014)—the combination of quick interactions prompted in locations, where
people would already stop by during their normal routines, creates a comfortable
context that encourages engagement.
Low integration and distinctive aesthetics
Prominent features that cause interfaces to stand out from other urban elements result
in greater participation, as verified by the greater conversion rates generally produced
in our studies when the interfaces were mounted to a stand. The effectiveness of low
integration and distinctive aesthetics has again also being verified in the recent related
research by Koeman et al. (2015) and Steinberger et al. (2014).
Iterative prototyping via human-centred, participatory design
Participation levels can be increased by tailoring the interaction to the demographics
and patterns of behaviour of the local community. Since those may vary overtime
around the public spaces the interfaces are deployed to, multiple iterations of partic-
ipatory design are required to uncover the patterns of behaviour and interaction of
the local community members. By definition, plug-in interfaces must be lightweight
enough to be deployed and pulled out multiple times.
Contextualisation of the interface
When designing our field studies, we were interested in comparing pairs of opposing
design approaches (TA3) against specific contextual constraints, therefore testing
the impact of each on participation. To address those objectives, we decided not to
make use of any external signage explaining what the interfaces were for—a fac-
tor that potentially contributed to the low participation rates observed. As Koeman
et al. (2015) pointed out, in addition to the attractive visual aesthetics of their voting
devices, factors found to significantly encourage community-wide engagement were

the participating shopkeepers and the media. The involvement of shopkeepers, in par-
ticular, was relevant for providing unsolicited endorsement of the process by people
perceived as peers within the community. Similarly, the PosterVote (Vlachokyriakos
et al. 2014) sessions run by a community group were perceived as having higher
degree of governance, therefore lending a more official atmosphere to the process.
As Taylor et al. (2012) pointed out, “if the results of a poll, the response posted
or the device itself cannot be trusted or are not seen as legitimate, then this impacts
the ability of the device to provide a sense of efficacy”. Based on our results and on
the findings from the literature, we argue that the observation of the points above
during the design of plug-in interfaces can increase its credibility and, consequently,
the trustworthiness of the community engagement campaign.
6 Conclusion
In this chapter, we presented the concept of plug-in interfaces: portable interactive

technology deployed directly to public spaces on a temporary basis and addressing
pre-existing architectural and social affordances. We derived the concept from the
observed increasing popularity of bottom-up activism initiatives and practices of
“hacking” the city for situated, purpose-driven design interventions. Plug-in inter-
faces allow citizens to appropriate and subvert sections of the city for controlled
and temporary manifestations of urban activism, reversible by nature and limited in
duration. By bringing rapid prototyping and continuous improvement into the urban
planning field, plug-in interfaces turn community engagement into city hacking, by
promoting iterations of direct and situated consultations with the general public as
well as with stakeholders.
After an overview of related research in the field, we presented a case study on the
utilisation of plug-in interfaces for community engagement. In particular, we sought
to gain further understanding about approaches to address three core contextual
constraints recurrently faced by studies of this nature: (1) technology familiarity of
the interface; (2) level of integration of the interface into the built environment; and (3)
nature of pedestrian activity ordinarily unfolding in the urban precinct. We presented
the eight setups ran in the studies as well as the metrics observed, from which we
derived conversion rates per setup as well as cumulative by design scenario. We then
discussed limitations of the studies as well as an analysis of the results, reflecting
on motivational factors for impromptu interaction with, and intuitiveness of, the
interfaces.
Our analysis points towards design aspects that should be favoured in the design
of plug-in interfaces as lightweight tools for similar bottom-up initiatives. Aspects
worth of consideration include: (a) use of simple, clear and familiar interfaces, adapt-
able to the circumstances; (b) quick interactions, placed on locations people would
normally stop by (resting areas); (c) low integration and distinctive aesthetics; and
(d) iterative prototyping via human-centred, participatory design. Furthermore, a
greater contextualisation of the interfaces regarding their purpose in the public envi-
ronment might have helped to make them more trustworthy among members of the
community and, consequently, increased participation.
We adopted the notion of plug-in interfaces from speculative design in architecture
(Merin 2013; Sadler 2005) as well as from software design. In both instances, plug-
ins are used to extend existing systems by adding new features that can be easily
adapted and removed without compromising the core functionality of the hosting
system itself. In software design, the development of plug-in interfaces is supported
and encouraged through the provision of application programming interfaces (APIs).
In comparison, cities do not yet offer similar frameworks that allow anyone to develop
and deploy plug-in interfaces. The studies discussed in this article, including our own,
attempted therefore to leverage on existing architectural affordances to design plug-
in interfaces to appropriate the built environment for the purposes of community
engagement. In that sense, the current state of plug-in interfaces is more akin to
hacking, compared to the more established, formalised and supported development
of plug-ins for software applications—in our study, for example, we “hacked” the
environment by attaching polling devices to existing urban elements or deploying
them into existing spaces. However, as the digital layer of cities develops and the
concept of smart cities matures, it may indeed be possible to conceptualise cities as
operating systems (Tomitsch 2016) with a more formalised API consisting of input
and output channels—such as the number of people or vehicles passing through a
space, for instance—that any citizen could build on.
Acknowledgements The research presented in this chapter was supported by the Design Lab, at
the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, and funded through the
Henry Halloran Trust.
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Luke Hespanhol is a lecturer, researcher and artist. His research spans a wide spectrum of inter-
active media applications, from urban media art and generative media to responsive environments,
technology-mediated social interactions, digital placemaking, urban informatics, smart cities and
media architecture. He has explored possibilities of public expression through the development of
interactive media installations for academic research, galleries and public art festivals, including
multiple editions of Vivid Sydney. At the University of Sydney, Luke is a lecturer in design and
computation, member of the Westmead Arts and Culture Advisory Committee and Lead Designer
and Curator for the Footbridge Plaza digital placemaking initiative. He is also a former guest
researcher at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark,
and a member of the international Urban Media Art Academy and Media Architecture Institute.
Martin Tomitsch is Chair of Design at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design
and Planning, and Director of the Design Lab, a research group that focuses on interaction design
and design innovation. He is founding member of the Austrian Network for Information and Com-
munication Technologies for Development (ICT4D.at); the Media Architecture Institute (medi-
aarchitecture.org); state co-chair of the Australian Computer–Human Interaction Special Interest
Group (CHISIG); visiting lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology’s Research Group for
Industrial Software (INSO); and visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
His research sits across the domains of interaction design, creative technologies and cities, and
explores the role of design for improving the experience and lives of people.
Rapid Street Game Design: Prototyping
Laboratory for Urban Change
Viktor Bedö
Abstract Street games are predominantly physical games played in the streets,
incorporating the built urban environment, spatial layout, social and political char-
acteristics 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 knowl-
edge 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.
Keywords Street game · Implicit knowledge · Prototyping magic circle

Rapid game design
1 Introduction
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. Since 2006, a small but constantly growing community
of urban and street game designers emerged along with events and festivals for games
and playful activities in the urban environment. These include Come out and Play,
Weekender and Playpublik among many others (for an overview see Wood 2016).
As the games featured by these festivals show designing street games can be a form
of artistic expression, a cultural form for negotiating what is possible and what could
be possible in the architectural, infrastructural, social and political context of urban
spaces. This chapter will outline how rapid street game design can contribute to
V. Bedö (B)
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwest Switzerland,
Academy of Art and Design, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures,
Freilager-Platz, 1CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_3
52 V. Bedö
urban change as a prototyping tool or as an in situ laboratory-like tool for exploring

city-related matters.
The use of prototyping goes beyond the areas of product or service design and is
now widely adopted in the testing and exploring of proposals for social change on a
smaller scale (Murray et al. 2010) or in the context of city-making (Mulder and Kun,
Chap. 12 in this volume). Koskinen conceptualises models, scenarios, prototypes
and sketches as design things that turn weak hunches into stronger claims (Koskinen
et al. 2011, 125–140). Arguments from design theory and philosophy suggest that
conceptualising thinking can include thinking in material artefacts just as much
thinking in words or language. Ehn’s term thinging highlights how artefacts enable
experts to gather, negotiate and think together in co-creation settings (see Koskinen
et al. 2011, 125). Malafouris’s framing of creative thinging outlines an even more
fundamental aspect of thinking in material artefacts, according to which shaping
artefacts and our environment allows for constant exploration and re-exploration
of the affordances of both mental and physical spaces (Malafouris 2014). Kristóf
Nyíri highlights that a technology like the word processor allows for a faster and
more flexible manipulation of language. He points out that the difference between
the materiality of the thought that is spoken and the thought that is written down is
only a gradual difference (Nyíri 1993). These arguments suggest that faster and more
flexible means of manipulating prototypes decrease the gap between thinking with
words and thinging with objects.
This chapter will outline how rapid street game design creates knowledge for urban
change from the earliest moments of the design process. To develop the argument,
the chapter first elaborates on the aspect of design knowledge that is employed in
sketching and prototyping. Then, the paper discusses the closed or open nature of the
game design concept ‘magic circle’ in the case of street games. The argument then
will be contextualised with game design examples before concluding on the kind of
prototyping rapid street game design is.
2 Enacting Design Knowledge
Iterative processes are characterised by frequent loops of prototyping, an increasing

level of detail and context of the prototype, but also the possibility of failure and
returning to earlier stages of the process. The earlier an idea is prototyped, the earlier
it is possible to get feedback in context. Yet quick iterations are not just a mere trial-
and-error strategy but build on and generate implicit knowledge. This knowledge
is embodied in our patterns of interaction with our environment and in our feel for
stuff which we are dealing with (Schön 1983, 49). Using an example borrowed from
Schön’s The Reflected Practitioner (1983) as a point of departure, I would like to
elaborate on the kind of implicit knowledge involved in iterative design processes.
Schön describes the situation when an experienced architect looks at a sketch and
changes it in order to create something better:
Rapid Street Game Design: Prototyping Laboratory for Urban Change 53
When looking at the drawing “[the architect] zeroes in immediately on fundamental schemes
and decisions which quickly acquire the status of commitments. He compresses and perhaps
masks the process by which designers learn from iterations of moves which lead them to
reappreciate, reinvent, and redraw. (Schön 1983, 104)
The architect recognises similarities with designs from his repertoire he acquired
in the past, and in the same moment, he has the implicit readiness to change something
in the sketch. Then the sketch is changed and observed again. Schön calls these cycles
reflection-in-action. Schön elaborates on how reflection-in-action is comparable to
a scientific experiment (like exploratory testing, move testing or hypotheses testing)
(Schön 1983, 147), and this resonates with approaches that emphasise the laboratory-
like character of iterative design (Koskinen et al. 2011, 55–65).
In an empiricist approach, knowing something—or having a concept of some-
thing—means that past experiences are saved in some form and these experiences
can be meaningfully recalled or reactivated (cf. Price 1953). Reactivating experi-
ences means the ability to produce mental or physical manifestations that are similar
to the objects and events that were experienced in the past. As a consequence, reacti-
vating experiences also means that objects and events can be the content of thinking
when they are not actually present to perception. According to Price, although we
predominantly think in words and images:
We also think sometimes by means of physical replicas, such as diagrams, models and dumb
show; sometimes by non-imitative gestures, as in using the deaf and dumb alphabet; and
sometimes by means of the muscular sensations which accompany incipient actions, gestures
or others, when then actions are not overtly performed. (Price 1953, 300)
Based on our fundamental ability to recognise similarity, we potentially can think

in everything what we can produce and what bears some similarity to past experiences
(Price 1953, 300). What is meant by the “muscular sensations which accompany
incipient actions that are not overtly performed” though? The example of dancers’
practice of marking (Kirsch 2010) sheds light on how a slight muscular sensation dis-
plays similarity with—and thus can stand for—a fully carried out movement. Dancers
don’t fully carry out a series of movement when rehearsing but enact movements
with smaller—in some respect more abstract—movements. According to Kirsch, this
enables dancers to go through a whole choreography not only in order to memorise
it, but also to reflect on aspects like speed and rhythm or communicate with other
dancers without having to fully carry all the whole phrase. Sometimes, the twitch of
a muscle or even just the mental activation is sufficient.
Price calls the kind of readiness to activate or produce instances of what we know
dispositions. However fully these instances are produced, they are always activated
as parts of a network:
[T]he ‘activating’ of any mental disposition is a matter of degree. Between the two extremes
– complete latency and complete actualization – there are many intermediate degrees of
sub-activation. When the word’cat’ occurs, or a cat-like image, a whole series of concepts
linked in one way or another with the concept Cat may be in some degree brought to mind.
It is true of me at all times that I am capable of recognizing mice, bowls of milk, fur, tigers,
mammals, hearth-rugs, at any rate so long as I retain a moderate standard of health and sanity.
At all times I have memories of what all these diverse entities are like (in the dispositional
54 V. Bedö
sense of the word ‘memory’). But if the word ‘cat’ occurs to my mind – or a cat-image or a
physical cat-replica – then something comes to be true of me which is not true at all times.
All these diverse memory-dispositions are in some degree excited or sub-activated. I am put
into a state of readiness to recognize mice, bowls of milk, tigers, etc., if I should happen to
perceive them; and also, in a state of readiness to talk of such entities or produce images of
them. I am ready to do these things, even though I do not actually do any of them. (Price
1953, 317–318)
To come back to the example of the architect working with the sketch, it is clear
that they not only recognise similarities and differences between the sketch and past
sketches but also the similarities and differences of the sketch with past experiences
of built architecture. They understand the built architecture that they see on the
sketch. Noë’s theory of enactive perception, according to which spatial experience
is transmodal, provides an explanation of how a sketch can display similarities to
architecture (Noë 2004). Transmodality, in this context, means that visual experiences
and tactile experiences—on an abstract level—are producing the same sensorimotor
patterns. I argue elsewhere that transmodal re-enactment is also possible when touch
and vision are on different scales: for example, when recognising visual patterns
for the first time on digital maps visualising traces of street-level activities we have
experienced before (Bedö 2011).
Based on past experiences in different modalities and scales, we have an under-
standing of what usually occurs together, and our respective concepts activate each
other in case one is activated. Based on this implicit understanding of what is usually
activated together, we may implicitly understand a disparity between the concept and
what we see, even if not in the whole, at least in certain details. For example, if we
draw a cat:
Sometimes I feel dissatisfied with my image; something is wrong with the ears, or the
whiskers are missing. My (dispositional) knowledge or memory of what cats are like –
in other words, my concept of Cat – is again occurrently manifested by this feeling of
inadequacy; and sometimes by the production of a better image which has fewer defects
than the first. (Price 1953, 338)
Also, in the case of Schön’s architect, this feeling of inadequacy is a symptom of

the disposition to produce another detail that he implicitly knows should be produced
along with the ones on the sketch.
With the above arguments, I wanted to outline how implicit embodied knowledge
acquired through interaction with artefacts generally or more specifically with the
urban environment is the driver of iterative prototyping processes. I will return to
these arguments after exploring the way urban and street games set the frame for
interacting with the urban environment.
3 The Rules of the Game
Street games are experiences embedded in urban space, constituted by the urban
environment and the rules to which players commit for the duration of the game (see
also Salen and Zimmerman 2004, p. 96). The rules on which players explicitly agreed
before the ‘Go!’ constitute only a part of the game experience. Salen and Zimmerman
differentiate between three kinds of rules constituting a game: operational rules,
constitutive rules and implicit rules (2004, 130). Operational rules are the only ones
explicitly stated in the rule set.
Let me illustrate the difference based on the street game MySpace (also see in
section MySpace game below). The game MySpace is played by six players: three
Claimers and three Don’ts. The game is played on sidewalks with pedestrian traffic.
For the initial set-up, the Claimers stand in a triangle two steps apart. Neither the
Claimers nor the Don’ts are allowed to talk or use any conspicuous gestures. The
Claimers just stand. The Don’ts walk around trying to block the paths of pedestrians in
such a way that they are guided into the Claimers’ triangle. Every time a pedestrian
crosses the triangle, the Claimers have to take two steps backs—opening up the
triangle. Claimers are allowed to adjust their positions by rotating the triangle around
the initial centre point. The Claimers win when less than four pedestrians cross the
triangle in two minutes (times adjustable to concrete circumstances like the time of
the day or crowdedness of the street). Otherwise, the Don’t team wins.
Now, this description of MySpace mostly includes the explicit rules of the game:
the number of players, the number of steps Claimers has to go back when their triangle
has been crossed and so on. Constitutive rules, on the other hand, are not explicitly
stated in the rule set but constituted by the game materials used and the features
of the playing field, which provide the framework for the possible interactions. For
example, MySpace works best on sidewalks that are broad enough to open up the
Claimers’ triangle. A narrow sidewalk would be a peculiar playing field of choice
for this game as it would force players to step onto the street. Having to avoid cars
would change the nature of the game completely. The width of the street is just one of
several potential constitutive rules. Other examples for constitutive aspects in street
games in general could be the density of street furniture shielding vision; corners
allowing for hiding; even the density of pedestrians.
Implicit rules of the game are more related to social behaviour and patterns of
everyday space use. These include everyday rules of living in a city: for example,
that Don’t players should not physically push uninvolved pedestrians; that Claimers’
know how to stand around on the street inconspicuously and how far they can reason-
ably expect non-playing pedestrians to detour in order to walk around the Claimers’
triangle. I want to highlight that the border between constitutive and implicit rules is
a rather fluid one. Norms, habits, rituals and the like—embodied in everyday chore-
ographies—can determine what people can do or will decide to do at a site just
as much as light, smell, Wi-fi coverage or the availability of benches. The explicit
rules, the choice of playing field and playing time as well as the playing materials
are elements that the street game designer introduces to the game. The affordance of
the space, mindset of players and uninvolved pedestrians, for example, are factors
the game designer makes a series of assumptions about. The explicit and implicit
factors above constitute the players’ experience within the temporary boundaries of
the game.
56 V. Bedö
Huizinga emphasises that play creates an experience outside of the everyday and
the ordinary when the more or less explicitly delineated sites of play are entered,
such as the stage, the card table, the tennis court or the magic circle (of sumo fights)
(Huizinga 1949, 10). Salen and Zimmerman borrow the term magic circle from
Huizinga to describe the space that constitutes a frame outside real life, where the
magic lies in exploring the game’s own reality repeatedly and safely (Salen and
Zimmerman 2004, 94–95). Salen and Zimmerman highlight the ways in which the
magic circle has porous boundaries. What’s more, they point out that games as
systems can have different levels of openness and closedness. A closed game forms
a self-contained world, and an open game allows interchange between the game and
its real-life environment. Tic-Tac-Toe is an example of a closed game. The game
MySpace is an example of an open one.
The genre of pervasive games challenges a narrower concept of the magic circle
as such games are played for a longer time period and with no explicit boundaries
of the playing field. The game often referred to as Killer,1 for example, turns players
into assassins who—besides living their everyday life—also invest days and weeks
in hunting down a target assigned to them by the game masters and eliminating the
person using, for example, a water pistol. Assassins are themselves targets for their
players, meaning that they have to watch their back during the game at all times. The
magic circle is expanded here as
[t]he game no longer takes place in certain times or certain places, and the participants are no
longer certain. Pervasive games pervade, bend, and blur the traditional boundaries of game,
bleeding from the domain of the game to the domain of the ordinary. (Montola et al. 2009,
12)
The praxis usually referred to as gamification is introducing an even thinner game

layer (like the possibility to earn points or collectable tokens) onto ordinary life.
People taking part in gamified activities mainly remain immersed in their everyday
lives, not really entering something like a magic circle.
The strength of street games as discussed in this chapter, on the other hand, is
exactly that players exit the realm of their everyday lives and commit to the rules and
the narrative of the game for its duration. The collectively understood boundaries of
the magic circle foster players’ flow and serious engagement and create an experience
in which the urban environment is as real as the game. At the same time, the magic
circle is not entirely closed: although players of street games are invited to enter into
the world of the game, the playing experience never entirely blinds out architectural,
social or political settings of the urban environment. Drawing a parallel between
locative games—a genre mostly driven by the rise of the positioning capacities of
mobile technologies—and Situationist artistic practises, Flanagan points out that
due to the embeddedness into the local, games played in the streets “cannot help but
refer to, rework, or, conversely, avoid history, social relationships, and customs of a
play site” (Flanagan 2009, p. 207). When blending the games and the city, the game
designer decides on the extent to which the players’ experiences are shaped by the
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(game).
everyday features of the site or by the game. For the duration of the game, both the
rules of everyday urban existence and the rules and narrative of the game are equally
‘real’ in the experience of the players.
In addition to their relative closedness, simplicity is another aspect of Huizinga’s
magic circle that is relevant for street games. Huizinga’s depicts games an almost
sacred physical or ideal space with a certain completeness temporarily carved out
of the complex everyday world: “[Play] creates order, is order. Into an imperfect
world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection”
(Huizinga 1949, 10). Indeed, a game must be simple enough so that its rules are easy
to comprehend and remember and players can immerse themselves in the flow of the
game. Although the level of complexity may vary between game formats—simulation
games dealing with complexity, for example—street games mostly only have a few
rules that fit on a rule card. The game is a framework where the explicit rules have a
limited complexity. This makes it easier for the players to achieve the state of flow:
state challenging enough not to be boring and simple enough not to be frustrating.
For the game designer, it means that particular focus can be given to one aspect.
Even though the rules of the game are simple, it is played within a complex urban
environment, which gives often unexpected responses to the gameplay.
The three game projects discussed below were chosen to illustrate some aspects
of activating implicit dispositions of players who are interacting with urban space
in the framework of a street game. The ‘MySpace’ game shows the permeability of
the magic circle. Embedded in the pedestrian flow, the gameplay reveals how the
implicit rules of being a pedestrian change depending on the broader urban context.
The ‘Shelf’ project demonstrates rapid prototyping and iteration for exploration
and hypothesis testing: the playing expert team changes the rules of the game in
each round to match the playing experience with their implicit understanding of
the question to be explored. The ‘Blackout’ game functions as a testing tool for
a prototype solution which is employed in a hypothetical situation. In the playing
experience, a hypothetical blackout is activated in the actual urban space through the
game’s fiction, and the proposed solution is ready to be used in the game—although
most of its functionality is simulated for the duration of the game.
4 ‘MySpace’ Game
The street game MySpace2 is one of the results of a five-day workshop with students
exploring and prototyping alternative uses of urban resources. The assignment was
to scout urban resources that could be hacked in order to be used in a different way
or redistributed and to create street games that prototype those alternative uses. The
2 Created bymaster students of the Faculty of Arts in Design at the Zurich University of the Arts in
the framework of the Resourcing Design workshop program. Student team: Marina Llopis, Diego
Martinez, Simon Peter Pfaff, Philippe Stauffacher. Supervision: Nadine Kuhla von Bergmann and
Viktor Bedö.
58 V. Bedö
team who created MySpace returned from the research phase with material about
urban citizens claiming some private retreat space in midst of the urban tumult. For
example, an informal smokers corner with a chair at the back entrance of a shop-
ping mall or three girls sitting in a circle on a park lawn reading. MySpace uses
the mechanics of opening up a triangle on the sidewalk (see game rules above) to
prototype temporarily claimed private spaces and test their resilience and fragility.
Some pedestrians would not recognise the triangle; others would recognise it and
walk around it; still others would recognise it and deliberately cross through it. Using
gameplay, the team could test out pedestrians’ awareness about certain choreogra-
phies of bodies forming a unity and implicit norms of allowing or denying spatial
claims of this unity. Furthermore, the gameplay iteratively revealed the most suc-
cessful spatial constellation of the triangle in terms of claiming private space on the
sidewalk. The game functions like a probe in the context of a given site at a given
time of day.
5 ‘Shelf’ Game Session
The ‘Shelf’ session was a cooperation between the Berlin-based architects Studio
Schwitalla and Tacit Dimension in order to explore the types of contributions that
street games can play in the studio’s design process. The studio was in the process
of designing an urban shelf-like structure the size of a small neighbourhood, sev-
eral levels high with inner yards. According to the architectural concept, the Shelf
provides a basic urban infrastructure while allowing for a self-organising spread
of residential, communal and commercial units within it.3 The structure existed on
paper and in an architectural model. After preliminary discussions, we identified the
following challenge for a game-based research and prototyping session: how to test
the architects’ assumption that an open view of the inner yard from all levels of the
shelf would foster ad hoc gatherings in the inner yard. Obviously, the paper plans
and the architectural model did not allow for testing such affordances of the space.
I designed and play-tested a game to explore meeting and gathering dynamics
in the shelf and set up a game session. In order to keep the explicit rules of the
game simple and to delegate as much as possible to the constitutive factors of the
urban environment, I was looking for a site that was a close enough analogy to the
model of the Shelf regarding spatial layout. The playing field of choice was the
Berlin Hauptbahnhof train station building. It has five levels made up of platforms
and shopping areas and features agora-like sections and good visibility between the
levels. The players were six members of the architecture studio. The plan was to
play several rounds of the game and iterate the rules during the rounds in order to
take away the best learning. According to the fiction of the Shelf game, players were
inhabitants of the Shelf who are out to look for a fictional party crowd. The game
had the following rules:
3 http://studioschwitalla.org/work/hashtag-urban-shelf.
• As an initial set-up, all players are dispersed in the building. They find a ‘home’
that is a corner in a dead end where no other players are in sight.
• The goal was to meet with every other player at the ‘party’.
• The ‘party’ (for the first round) was defined as any gathering of at least five non-
players with no more than two sittings.
• Players were allowed to make a single phone call not longer than one minute to
one other player of their choice.
• Being a cooperative game, players win if all of them succeed in meeting at the
party within 10 min.
During the first session, players adopted a combination of emergent strategies:
random walking, tactical positioning to create a partial chain of eye contact between
players, random calls to other players. The players succeeded in meeting at the
‘party’. In the second round, we decided to change the ‘party’ into a moving target:
someone on the move, walking a dog. This decision reflected the architect players’
understanding of how real-life gatherings emerge in an area of the size of a small
neighbourhood. We also limited the maximum calling time to half a minute so that
the role of the visual chain was emphasised in the gameplay. In the second round,
playing tactics did not change a lot, but with more elaborated tactics the interplay
with visibility and architecture become more prominent.
Three months later, we reflected with the studio on how the experiences and
learnings of the studio members contributed to the ongoing design process. According
to the lead architect, the areas more or less explicitly impacted by the gameplay were
the measures to allow or cover free view between the levels of the shelf (e.g. the
distance of the railing from the edge changing the axis of vision). The session also
triggered ideas about mirrored ceilings on some floors to increase visibility of the
level from lower levels.
The methodological learning was that the street game format is an effective tool to
explore relatively focused aspects in planning processes, like the effect of visibility
conditions on finding other people in the case of the Shelf session. Street games are
very effective tools for activating and generating in situ embodied knowledge that
explicitly or implicitly can be built on in a design process. They can therefore be
used to test a prototype in cases where the prototype’s critical function affects the
scale of human interaction. Street games have limitations, however, in embracing
the full complexity of urban planning, a scale for which moderated board games and
playful co-design formats labelled as urban games or city games city games are more
useful.4
6 ‘Blackout’ Game Session
Blackout is an example of a mini-street game in the context of prototype testing.

It was created in the framework of the Energyhack 2015 hack day organised by
4 For a collection of examples see http://gamesforcities.com/database/.

60 V. Bedö
Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and the electricity utility provider Stromnetz
Berlin.5 The hack day’s topic was ‘blackout’, meaning spatially and temporally
extended power outages with potentially catastrophic consequences. Teams attending
the hack day were provided with energy consumption and energy network-related
open data in order to work on solutions for a blackout. I cooperated with the SMS
Gateway 3000 team6 by providing rapid street game design as a testing method for
the team’s prototype. The team was working on an automated SMS-based system
that would set up meetings between those in need those who could help them, in a
blackout scenario (e.g. connecting people who need blankets with people who have
blankets they can offer). The concept was that both groups could send an SMS to
an emergency number with what they need or what they can offer. A server with an
intelligent matching system would connect the requests with the respective offers and
send out a meeting place in the city for the matched users. The solution addressed
the time window when the Internet was down while the GSM network was still
functional: an uncertain time span of a maximum of 30 min, according to experts.
The street game-based testing took place in the afternoon. At that point, the SMS
Gateway 3000 team had already implemented an SMS server that could receive
and send out SMS messages. Due to the obvious constraints of the hack day, the
intelligent matching functionality had yet to be implemented in the prototype. At
this stage, we set up a mini-street game to test the proposal of the SMS Gateway
3000 team. The playing field was the neighbourhood around the site of the hack
day. There were two players, a ‘giver’ and a ‘receiver’. The two players start from
two different positions in the neighbourhood with some distance from each other.
The goal of the game was to succeed in meeting and to shake hands as a symbol
of handing over the goods within 20 min. The—not yet implemented—matching
algorithm was simulated by a non-playing character who read incoming messages
through the SMS server terminal, matched messages manually and manually sent
messages to players’ phones. According to the fiction of the game, the blackout has
just started with Internet already down, GSM network still functional for an uncertain
duration. Everything else in the gameplay was carried by the fiction of a blackout
(on which players had been educated by expert presentations in the morning of the
hack day) and the actual urban environment.
When the game started, both players sent their messages to the emergency number.
After some time, they both received an answer from the system (sent by the non-
playing character using the terminal interface of the SMS server) giving them a
meeting point defined by the intersection of two streets in the neighbourhood. To jump
ahead, the players did not succeed in meeting in twenty minutes. What happened?
Even though the streets that were used to specify the meeting points were not hidden,
they were not very obvious either and the players did not know them by heart. Neither
of the players checked a map application on the phone, as this would have been
cheating after committing to the scenario that Internet is down. Asking not involved
pedestrians did not prove useful either as it turned out that people hardly know the
5 http://energyhack.de/.
6 Team members: Mark Rentschler and Jakob Penka.
name of the streets they don’t walk regularly. Players ran out of time while searching
for the respective intersection.
One of the insights from this round was that more obvious and unmissable land-
marks should be used as meeting points, even if getting there potentially involves
a detour; intersections offering more choice of meeting points closer to the parties
involved. Another unexpected design requirement for the emergency SMS system
derived from the players’ experience of waiting for the system to answer SMS. Due
to some technical difficulties with the SMS server, the non-playing character was
only able to answer several minutes later. Players knew that in a real-world blackout
the GSM system could go down every minute, so while waiting for the SMS dur-
ing gameplay they started to suspect that the non-playing character is simulating a
breakdown of the GSM system. Even though that was not the case, the experience
of the terrifying uncertainty about what the silence of the system means taught the
SMS Gateway 3000 team that the next iteration the system should ping users from
time to time as a vital sign. This experience also triggered the idea that the first thing
the system should do in case of a blackout is to send out a message to every user
giving them instructions for the time after the GSM is down.
The Blackout mini-street game was a very lightweight game, hardly more game-
like than a conventional in situ prototype testing known from iterative design pro-
cesses. Yet even this thin fictional layer and the defined space in which players had
to act tactically arguably pointed to aspects of the blackout experience that plain
prototype testing might not have revealed.
7 Street Games as Prototypes
Street games as prototypes enable us to test our assumptions about what works
at concrete urban sites. The challenge of setting up a street game for this goal is
to translate the problem we would like to explore or assumption we would like
to validate into game mechanics. A very basic scheme for setting up the game is
to define actions (e.g. stand in a formation, block pedestrians path, search for the
‘party’), constraints (e.g. phone calls no longer than 30 s, navigate without a map),
a goal (meet within 10 min) and a story or narrative for the game. In MySpace, the
problem of claiming private space in the city was translated into the mechanics of
forming and gradually opening a triangle on the sidewalk. In the Shelf session, the
assumption that open visual fields between levels of a building would enhance the
occurrence of ad hoc gatherings was translated into the mechanic of keeping visual
contact and the goal of meeting at an unknown moving target. The game designer
defines the operational rules, chooses the constitutional rules and makes assumptions
about the implicit rules.
Once the rules are set up and the game is running, both the explicit and the implicit
rules of the game as well as the explicit and implicit characteristics of the urban site
are equally real. What players know about the city (knowledge acquired through
their involvement in everyday urban life) and what they know about the game (the
62 V. Bedö
fiction and rules they have committed to) trigger interactions and activate tactics in a
completely equal manner. The magic circle of the street game incorporates the game
design and the actual urban context into the gameplay experience. Players of the
Blackout game are prone to fear the eventual breakdown of the GSM network just
as much as they are ready to ask pedestrians about street names (both of which can
be seen as dispositions, in accordance with Price).
For the duration of the game, things that are not present at an urban site outside the
game become present in the fiction of the game and thus in players’ experience. The
game temporarily modifies the affordance of the respective urban site, and players can
explore this modified urban experience through gameplay. The temporarily modified
urban experience, the circle, is provided and set up by the game designer, but when
the game starts players step in and explore the world of the game autonomously.
This is the sometimes tiny yet significant difference between conventional, more
or less moderated prototype testing in an iterative design process and using street
games to test ideas and explore questions about street life. It is this that creates the
laboratory-like condition of a balance between a controlled set-up and the potential
for emergent tactics and interaction with the urban environment.
Street games that are set up to test proposals in context will also reveal if the
proposal (translated into game mechanics) does not resonate with the urban site.
This might manifest itself in players’ slight feeling of the inadequacy of certain
interactions analogously to Price’s above example of changing the drawing of a cat.
For example, players of the Shelf session decided to change the meeting point (the
‘party’) into a moving target (a dog walking person) as this resonated more with
their understanding of the dynamics they were envisioning in the structure they were
planning. Insights, new tactics or new questions emerging from gameplay can, in
turn, be iteratively translated into new rules. In subsequent iterations, the rules or the
game set-up can be easily modified or the game rules can be complicated if necessary.
It needs to be noted that changes to the rules might be applied by players within
a game session too: known as cheating. Even if players do not cheat, the feeling
of inadequacy might manifest itself in an exploitation of the rules, bending them to
the limit of what is allowed, not explicitly violating the explicit rules but violating
the implicit rules dictated by common sense. From the perspective of generating
knowledge through prototyping, both practices can be insightful.
Experience shows that the number and complexity of rules of street games should
be constrained to a set of rules that a player can remember at once. For unmoderated
games, this allows players to be in a state of flow, not overwhelmed by the effort to
remember the rules. Also, in order to create a coherent game experience, obedience
to game design principles sometimes results in a slight distortion of the matters to
be tested as they are translated into game mechanics: a circumstance designers have
to be aware of. Due to the constrained complexity of rapid street game designs (as
described above), the game designer has to decide on the specific aspect or function
that the street game ought to explore. Before choosing the core game mechanics, the
core of the idea to be explored or the critical function of the proposal tested has to be
clarified. This makes street games as a format a good probe that can be implemented
in the complexity of an urban site. Through the permeability of the magic circle, the
responses of the complex environment become part of the experience.
8 Conclusion
Street games can be quick sketches, rough prototypes or full-blown balanced set-ups.
If built with the purpose of exploring or prototyping, they function as in situ labo-
ratories. Considering the duration and invested resources, rapid street game design
as a prototyping tool can be positioned sketching at the drawing table and instant
architecture7 that is installed at urban sites using lightweight materials. Analogously
to the toolset of tactical urbanism,8 street games hack into the experience of everyday
urban life to set a precedent, test the ground and seed new urban forms. Elsewhere
in this volume, Mulder and Kun (2018) emphasise the effect of cross-pollination
at ‘pressure cooker events’ (like hackatons) and are pointing at the strategic impact
of knowledge developed in such frameworks when prototypes spark more sustained
and dedicated actions if stakeholders taking part in such an event turn into change
agents. Considering the ‘fuzzy front end’ of city-making, as described by Mulder
and Kun in this volume, rapid street game design can be positioned at the proposal
and prototype phase in the life cycle from small-scale experimentation to societal
change.
As the magic circle of the game by design introduces a conceivably simple order
into the complexity of urban life, it invites a deep immersive involvement which
allows for the creation of make-believe strategies. It also renders some aspects
of urban interaction controllable while leaving space for emergent phenomena or
interactions. Therefore, street games have leverage as a laboratory on a street and
neighbourhood scale, exploring embodied aspects of interacting with the given and
possible urban environments. At the same time, it is challenging for street games
to embrace higher levels of complexity of the kind more easily addressed in mod-
erated board games and playful co-design formats labelled as urban games or city
games. A further design challenge would be laying down how to plug street games
into moderated board game like urban games that embrace the higher complexity of
multistakeholder urban planning and city-making processes.
With some experience, street games can be set up easily and are a relatively
accessible tool for a wider circle than professional or trained game designers. The
speed and flexibility with which a game can be changed and adopted with every
session or even round indicates how much closer rapid street game design gets to
the concept of thinging about what is possible at urban sites than just seeing this in
the dichotomy of acting and reflecting. As new technologies and techniques have
the potential to change how we think (like in the case of the word processor), rapid
7 For an example of instant architecture, see the project series 72 h Interactions, http://
72hourinteractions.com/ or Construct Lab http://www.constructlab.net/.
8 For an overview of the approach and projects, see http://tacticalurbanismguide.com/.
64 V. Bedö
street game design has the potential to become a more widespread tool of thinking
about the city.
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Viktor Bedö is a researcher, street game designer and innovation consultant interested in experi-
menting with method. He is a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cul-
tures in Basel and founder of Tacit Dimension, the independent research laboratory for street
games. His games were featured at numerous international festivals from Metropolis Festival
Copenhagen, to Hide&Seek Weekender London, to the Festival of Future Nows in the Neue
Nationalgalerie Berlin. Viktor is a former member and co-founder of the street games collective
Invisible Playground. He was visiting researcher at Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperi-
mente, and at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Junior Researcher
at the Institute for Philosophical Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Humani-
ties. In 2011, he earned his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in philosophy with a thesis about visual
thinking, embodied knowledge and interactive street maps at the Humboldt University Berlin and
University Pécs. As a freelance innovation consultant, he helps clients in setting up user-centred

innovation projects.
The City as Perpetual Beta: Fostering
Systemic Urban Acupuncture
Joel Fredericks, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Marcus Foth and Martin Tomitsch
Abstract 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 urban acupuncture 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 citi-
zens 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 con-
tribute to an ongoing commitment to participatory city-making. Further work will
show how each local intervention can contribute to translating the notion of per-
petual beta into systemic change beyond the boundaries of their individual locale
and—taken together—across different urban environments of the city.
J. Fredericks (B)
School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT,
University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
G. A. Caldwell · M. Foth
Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
M. Foth
M. Tomitsch
Design Lab, Sydney School of Architecture Design and Planning, The University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_4
68 J. Fredericks et al.
Keywords Perpetual beta · Urban acupuncture · Community engagement

Middle-out design · Pop-up interventions · Systemic change · Australia
1 Introduction
Humanity faces many challenges in both the natural and the built environment. Cities
struggle with increased pressure on urban infrastructures and housing caused by pop-
ulation growth, lack of public transport options and more frequent natural disasters
triggered by climate change. At the same time, citizens have more opportunities than
ever to be involved in the planning, design and decision-making process of city-
making. Often seen as only a formality, local governments undertake community
engagement processes to ask citizens about policy change and proposed infrastruc-
ture developments. This top-down approach generally ‘informs’ citizens only rather
than to ‘engage’ people in the decision-making process. As a result of this, grass-
roots movements, such as urban guerrilla (Hou 2010) and DIY/DIWO1 (Caldwell
and Foth 2014, 2017) movements, have encouraged bottom-up community engage-
ment through localised urban interventions. These approaches empower citizens to
identify topics and issues that need to be addressed within local communities.
Through our research on situated community engagement, we have found that
drawing on the collective knowledge of all actors has a greater opportunity to enable
a more collaborative city-making process. This can be achieved by employing a
‘middle-out’ engagement process (Costa and Ferrão 2010; Fredericks et al. 2016a)
that integrates the needs and interests from the decision-makers at the ‘top’ (e.g.
policy-makers) with those of the everyday people from the ‘bottom’ (e.g. local citi-
zens), which are met somewhere in the ‘middle’. Depending on the situation or issues
being addressed, this part in the middle (between the top and the bottom) refers to the
policy-making process, the community engagement procedure, the social context or
the organisational structure. Another critical aspect of ‘middle-out’ engagement is
acknowledging that the city is in a state of perpetual beta, which indicates that the
processes of city-making and urban renewal are never complete. These processes are
cyclical, occurring in different parts of the city at different times, and need to respond
to a range of shifting issues from social to political, environmental to economic.
Community engagement activities range from paper-based interactions to those
that are supplemented by digital and physical applications providing new means
and interfaces for the formation of ‘urban publics’ (de Waal 2014). Such novel
and complementary approaches to community engagement, aiming to address the
shortcomings of traditional processes, are being investigated through the fields of
digital placemaking (Fredericks et al. 2016b), urban interaction design (Brynskov
et al. 2014), urban HCI (Fischer and Hornecker 2012), urban informatics (Foth et al.
2011), urban computing (Kindberg et al. 2007) and ubiquitous computing (Weiser
1993). This range of novel community engagement approaches and city-making
1 Do It Yourself/Do It With Others.

The City as Perpetual Beta: Fostering Systemic Urban Acupuncture 69
concepts are helping to improve the use of existing urban infrastructure to provide
new opportunities for connecting citizens with their city (Shepard and Simeti 2013;
Tomitsch 2014).
To focus on a particular approach that can create novel prospects, pop-up interven-
tions ‘hack’ public space by appropriating new purposes and temporarily changing
the nature and feel of a place. In doing so, they surprise people, stimulate their imagi-
nation and create public awareness in citizens (Fredericks et al. 2015). In this chapter,
we discuss how situated pop-ups can offer both built environment professionals and
local citizens an alternative option for community engagement to ultimately inform
and improve the city-making processes. Between 2014 and 2016, we have conducted
and investigated a range of situated community engagement activities through the
deployment of pop-up interventions in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia.
From our research, we have found that pop-up interventions serve to: (a) raise
awareness of the engagement process; (b) encourage community discussion around
urban planning, design and architecture topics; (c) involve greater cross sections of
the community (e.g. time, poor citizens, younger demographics and culturally and
linguistically diverse people); and (d) allow citizens to submit their responses on the
spot. Based on our research findings and to facilitate a more collaborative and middle-
out engagement approach, this chapter presents an urban acupuncture (Lerner 2014)
framework for undertaking localised small-scale community engagement activities
through pop-up interventions. We discuss two case studies that deployed pop-up
interventions in Australia, as different tactics that attempt to give the community
a say in the transformation of their city. The framework is intended to encourage
citizens to actively identify topics that they would like to see community discus-
sion around. Designers and policy-makers can also apply the framework to guide
their city-making strategies. In our approach and through the use of the framework,
systemic change in city-making is fostered by accumulating many voices, actors,
devices and technologies.
2 Context
Local governments are no longer seen as the sole caretakers of cities that have
to respond to the needs of their inhabitants. Conventional community engagement
processes are still central to the renewal cycle of city improvement; however, it is
a difficult task challenged by citizens who are hard to reach and communicate with
using archaic engagement mechanisms. We refer to Foth and Brynskov (2016a) who
examine civic media and technologies to indicate that “in order to provide meaningful
civic engagement, the city must provide appropriate interfaces” (564).
We are interested in exploring what Brynskov et al. (2014) describe as a shift from
city management to city-making through urban interaction design. Urban interaction
design is the making of urban interfaces to provide a means of citizen engagement
(Foth and Brynskov 2016b). These views on the co-creation of cities are in line
with the work of de Waal (2014) who examines the city as an interface, and we can
Table 1 Evolving City government People

relationship between cities
and citizens (Foth and City 4.0 Collaborator Co-creators
Brynskov 2017) City 3.0 Facilitator Participants
City 2.0 Service provider Consumers
City 1.0 Administrator Residents
conclude that both sets of arguments are applicable and compatible with each other.
Interfaces in both instances similarly refer to the setting that fosters the adaptation
of different systems to one another, such as citizens adapting to the practices of
their local community or city (de Waal 2014). Synthesising these thoughts, Foth and
Brynskov introduce four stages in the evolution of the relationship between local
governments and city residents (Table 1) (Foth and Brynskov 2017). The city operates
on multiple scales and can be approached from many angles, but in this chapter we
are particularly concerned with the ways in which people leverage technologies for
their own purposes to pioneer new community engagement tactics and ultimately
bring about a participatory and collaborative approach to city-making.
To support our research and novel approaches to community engagement, we
layout the foundations for these evolving relationships between cities and citizens as
we strive to go from City 1.0 to reach City 4.0. To better understand the theoretical
principals that guide our work, in this chapter we first discuss the concept of perpetual
beta and how it applies to the city. We position the perpetual beta concept as a
platform that supports the need for situated pop-up interventions as key instigators
of change. Second, we discuss the urban acupuncture framework as a guide to inform
the development of pop-up urban interventions, such as the two Australian examples
discussed. We conclude with a series of questions that explore the potential of cities
to move from a state of perpetual beta through a series of accounts and sites to the
possibility of producing systemic change.
2.1 The City as Perpetual Beta
The twenty-first-century city will never be complete as governments around the world
continuously realign strategies to address a myriad of political, social, economic and
environmental challenges that engender contemporary society. This unfinished state
of cities is not anything new to anyone; however, embracing this unresolved aspect
of contemporary cities can be leveraged for the benefit of citizens.
Originally used in the context of software development, the open-source advocate
O’Reilly (2015) states, “The open source dictum, ‘release early and release often,’
in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta,’ in
which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a
monthly, weekly, or even daily basis”. O’Reilly (2015) argues that the ‘perpetual beta’
concept harnesses collective intelligence by acknowledging users as co-developers.

Applying this concept to contemporary cities, ‘the city as perpetual beta’ provides
a theoretical lens for city makers and citizens to understand their collective roles in
a state of perpetual beta where all users of the city are co-developers of the city.
The concept of perpetual beta has also been applied to other areas outside of
software development, such as in business, knowledge management (Levy 2009)
and entrepreneurship. In 2010, Pierce (2010) ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise
funds in support of the documentary film Life in Perpetual Beta about the influence
that technology has on how we consider business and our lives. Perpetual beta in
these instances commonly refers to the process of continual improvement, where a
finished product would never be good enough. The foundations of the perpetual beta
concept connected to technological developments and an open-source approach led
us to apply the ‘unfinished concept’ to that of city-making.
Sassen (2015) refers to this notion of the city as perpetual beta when describing
“…an understanding of the city as a combination of incompleteness and complexity:
it is this mix that has enabled cities to outlive enterprises, kingdoms, nation-states,
and, yes, Cisco Systems” (Sassen 2015, 1). The city, as a concept, is one that is
continuously changing, evolving—it shrinks and grows, ebbs and flows, with multiple
layers of complexity in both physical forms (buildings, roads, people, trees, etc.)
and digital forms (electricity, telecommunications, Internet, etc.). We recognise that
the management and administration of a city can be smart, for example, by using
technology for controlling traffic patterns, lighting up, sensing weather, managing
waste. People can be smart, too, in that they use mobile technology to plan meetings,
communicate with anyone, anywhere, record videos, access and create information,
seamlessly and simultaneously (Hemment and Townsend 2013). How do these smart
citizens who live in smart cities tap into the digital layers of the city’s communication
flows to inform the creation of the environments in which they live, work and play?
If these cities are so smart, how do they use this acquired intelligence of the many to
keep getting better and tackling the big social and environmental challenges facing
our society and our planet (Foth and Brynskov 2016b)?
2.2 Urban Acupuncture
Helping us zoom from the bird’s eye view of the city administrator to the pedestrian,
that is, local view of the smart citizen, is the notion of urban acupuncture. This concept
was originally conceived by the Barcelonan architect and urbanist, Manuel de Sola
Morales. The concept aims to use localised small-scale socio-technical interventions
to transform the larger urban context (Houghton et al. 2015; Tomitsch et al. 2015).
Locations are selected through a comprehensive analysis of social, economic and
ecological factors that involves dialogue between designers and communities. Urban
acupuncture embraces the city as a living organism (Iaconesi and Persico 2014;
Lerner 2014) and identifies areas within cities that require urban renewal. Lerner
(2014) describes the essence of urban acupuncture as
…sometimes, a simple, focused intervention can create new energy, demonstrating the pos-
sibilities of a space in a way that motivates others to engage with their community. It can
even contribute to the planning process. This gets to the essence of true urban acupuncture-it
needs to be precise and quick, that’s the secret. (Lerner 2014, 4)
Our research and case studies presented in this chapter are based on this notion
of urban acupuncture, each a temporary intervention in an urban space purposefully
deployed precisely and quickly to provide people an opportunity to share their ideas or
voice their concerns. Building on these principals of urban acupuncture, we focus on
how these short-term or ‘pop-up’ interventions facilitate participation, collaboration
and knowledge sharing to ultimately inspire forms or degrees of change.
The urban acupuncture framework we propose draws on the literature from three
key areas: (1) existing community engagement within the built environment; (2)
digital technologies and their influence on the approach to community engagement;
and (3) from top-down to bottom-up to middle-out engagement concepts.
3 Existing Community Engagement Within the Built

Environment
Community engagement is undertaken by Local Government Authorities (LGAs)

around the world to obtain public feedback on the development of infrastructure
within the built environment. Through collaboration with communities, businesses
and government organisations (Foth and Adkins 2006), community engagement
should guide urban planning decisions based on the outcomes of the engagement
undertaken (Fredericks et al. 2015). LGAs, as the level of government closest to the
people, undertake community engagement, generally as a legislative requirement,
to inform communities on the creation of policies and infrastructure developments
within the built environment. However, relationships between local communities
and LGAs have traditionally played a consultative role, with the level of engagement
reduced to informing communities only. As a consequence, the engagement process
and the level of community input are controlled by LGAs and are often attributed to
political agendas of elected representatives, political party practices and bureaucratic
power brokers (Cuthill 2003).
Current methods of community engagement, such as face-to-face workshops,
community forums, public hearings and online forms, only reach certain demo-
graphics of the population. As a result of this, opinions of community members
classified as ‘hard to reach’ are not reflected in the overall engagement process.
Innes and Booher (2004) argue that legally required methods of community engage-
ment in government decision-making rarely achieve genuine engagement outcomes;
create dissatisfaction amongst citizens who feel they are not being heard; do not
significantly improve the decisions of government agencies; and do not incorporate
a broad spectrum of the community. It has been further argued that some traditional
engagement practises suffer from a lack of integration between governments and
the public, and has been shown to have inadequate representation of age groups and
demographics (Fredericks et al. 2015; Hosio et al. 2014; Schroeter 2012). Sarkissian
et al. (2009) developed the following eight points that identify the underpinnings of
successful collaborative community engagement rather than top-down approaches
employed by government agencies:
1. People know more than they realise.
2. People cannot participate satisfactorily unless they can understand the language
being used.
3. People often fear giving opinions, especially in their local community.
4. People’s involvement improves the quality of local government.
5. Synergy is more likely to occur when people collaborate.
6. Specific skills are required.
7. Relevant professionals should be involved from the start.
8. There is community value in sharing participatory experiences.
The eight points place the focus on people not on the policy. The essence of
a middle-out approach arises from the needs and will of people to take action for
themselves. It is in this spirit that the interventions we discuss in this chapter are
directed towards providing a voice for more people.
3.1 Digital Technologies and Community Engagement
Within the last decade, information and communication technology (ICT) has
evolved from the workplace and integrated into all aspects of daily life (Tomitsch
2014). Moreover, human–computer interaction (HCI) technologies are increasingly
being designed for urban environments, such as smartphones and web 2.0 appli-
cations. Tomitsch (2014) explains how the ICT industry is in the early stages of
exploring the variety of possibilities that new digital technologies offer to make
more efficient use of existing infrastructure within the built environment.
Gordon and Manosevitch (2010) introduce the concept of augmented deliberation
as a design solution to address challenges where community engagement is compli-
cated by external factors. Augmented deliberation is intended to address a range of
social challenges, including language barriers, demographic variations and profes-
sional discourse. The intention is to enhance community engagement by incorporat-
ing appropriate technologies, for example combining traditional planning practice
and public deliberation into a digital environment (Gordon and Manosevitch 2010).
Fredericks and Foth (2013) investigated how social media and web 2.0 appli-
cations could be incorporated as additional tools and techniques for community
engagement in urban planning. They examined this approach as a way of supple-
menting traditional methods of community engagement that had a general preference
for participants attending an organised consultation event. Additionally, the research
explored how community engagement can include a broader cross section of society
through the adoption of digital tools. The study concluded that traditional and digital
Fig. 1 Screenshot of the urban screen used during the Vote As You Go study
methods of community engagement could be used as a hybrid approach. Furthermore,

the research identified that the integration of digital tools presented opportunities to
capture a wider audience, attract younger participants and provide communities with
the ability to be actively involved in the urban planning process (Fredericks and Foth
2013).
Schroeter and Foth (2009) created Discussions In Space (DIS) as a design exper-
iment to facilitate a locally situated discussion and opinion forum around urban
planning topics, issues and questions, which were displayed on a large public screen.
Members of the community were able to submit questions directly to the screen using
their mobile phone’s SMS, Twitter or web capabilities. The messages displayed on
the screen in real time provide citizens an additional platform for collective expres-
sion and public discourse. Schroeter and Houghton (2011) discuss how community
engagement is usually resource and time intensive and how this challenge can be
addressed by capturing the attention of digitally savvy community members. They
call on LGAs to go with the times by adopting some of the digital channels already
well established by corporate entities for the purpose of sales and marketing.
Hespanhol et al. (2015) undertook a research study that deployed two situated
Vote As You Go polling interfaces on a public urban screen for community engage-
ment. Engagement questions were posted on the urban screen to obtain community
feedback via a polling system (Fig. 1).
The first scenario used a tablet device mounted on a stand that participants could
interact with, by simply answering yes or no on the application. The second sce-
nario incorporated a playful full-body interaction application where an outline of
participants playing with the interface would be visible on the screen. They could
then indicate yes or no by using gestures such as moving their hands. The different
scenarios allowed the researchers to compare data on participant experiences and the
effectiveness of the interface’s visibility within an urban space. The study concluded
that using these types of interfaces in urban spaces could be an effective strategy
for attracting the attention of the general public and converting them into active
participants (Hespanhol et al. 2015).
The Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard (Behrens et al. 2014) took the form
of a media architecture interface, which connected users in public spaces to media
façades. Participants were able to activate the media façade of a building by using
RFID cards to respond to civic issues pertaining to topics such as safety, transport,
housing and public spaces (Behrens et al. 2014). Responses were aggregated and
displayed through mood-indicating colours and animations on the screen to represent
the overall sentiment of city dwellers. This project is a valuable example of how
existing infrastructure, such as a media façade, can be ‘hacked’ as a type of DIY or
DIWO (Caldwell and Foth 2014, 2017). Without dedicated interaction mechanisms
(here the RFID interface), city dwellers have no way of interacting with or informing
the content displayed on large-scale urban interfaces, such as media façades or urban
screens.
Each of these cases exemplifies alternative approaches to community engage-
ment, which rely on different forms of technology to expand the reach and extent of
participation from users. Similarly, our projects discussed in this chapter continue to
develop a broader understanding for the ways in which different media types (digital,
physical and social) can be implemented within the design and deployment of urban
interventions. We expand on this research by examining how the different stakehold-
ers’ needs and interests are met and responded to and what impact for them and the
city at large they may have. The purpose of each example is to increase the levels
and depths of community engagement by creatively hacking into public space.
3.2 City Hacking: From Top-Down to Bottom-Up

to Middle-Out Engagement
Since the early twentieth century cities around the world have established and imple-
mented a variety of urban development paradigms that have shaped the urban fabric
within local communities. Government decision-makers have taken a centralised
top-down approach in the design and implementation of city-making. For example,
Ebenezer Howard conceived the ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’ as a solution to decen-
tralise from congested and unhealthy cities into groupings of 30,000 people along
an agricultural green belt (Richert and Lamping 1998). Le Corbusier (1967) created
the Radiant City, which has influenced the design of large building blocks through
‘brutalism architecture’ (Shonfield 2000). This was a top-down and highly contro-
versial solution to address public housing needs across cities in Europe, America and
Australia. Present-day paradigms such as transit-oriented developments aim to foster

economic and residential development around public transport routes and master-
planned communities that incorporate civic services, residential housing and public
amenities. Although these top-down initiatives have varying degrees of success in
creating urban environments, many citizens across the world continue to feel disem-
powered or unheard when it comes to urban development. Traditional approaches
still employed by LGAs are outdated, have the ability to fragment communities and
exclude certain demographics of society (Fredericks et al. 2015; Sarkissian et al.
2009; Schroeter 2012).
As a result, many people are taking matters into their own hands with grow-
ing evidence of bottom-up approaches to city-making. Community members have
taken it upon themselves to test the needs, wants and aspirations of civic spaces in
modern society. This contemporary approach has led to bottom-up localised urban
interventions in the form of pop-ups—referred to as pop-up urbanism (Fredericks
et al. 2015), tactical urbanism (Lydon et al. 2014), guerrilla urbanism (Caldwell et al.
2015; Hou 2010), DIY/DIWO urbanism (Caldwell and Foth 2014; Douglas 2014;
Iveson 2013) and urban acupuncture (Houghton et al. 2015; Iaconesi and Persico
2014; Lerner 2014; Tomitsch et al. 2015). Pop-up interventions ‘hack’ public space
by appropriating new purposes and temporarily changing the nature and feel of a
place. These approaches can be used as temporary installations that are either set up
for a few hours or for an extended period of time.
The Better Block project (‘Better Block’ 2016), which is being implemented
in many cities throughout the USA, is an example of rapid urban revitalisation or
otherwise known as guerrilla urbanism (Caldwell et al. 2015; Hou 2010). Being a
community-driven initiative, the Better Block project aims to revive underutilised city
blocks by retrofitting these spaces to promote pedestrian and cyclist activity through
temporary interventions, such as pop-up shops, positioning of trees and painting bike
lanes onto the road. The project thus utilises existing community resources to create
multi-modal transportation that takes the focus away from private vehicle-dominated
roads. These temporary interventions enable communities to experience the potential
of underutilised spaces and how they can be repurposed as usable civic space.
Attempts to employ more collaborative engagement approaches have seen part-
nerships established between LGAs and local communities to create a middle-out
approach for community engagement. The concept of middle-out was coined by
Kinchla and Wolfe (1979) as a collaborative process that draws on the knowledge
from higher (top-down) and lower (bottom-up) information channels that come
together and meet in the middle. An example of this is the PopUp MANGo tem-
porary street festival where local citizens could interact with proposed urban design
and roadway changes through a collaborative design process.2 The pop-up interven-
tion included temporary traffic calming devices, a parklet with plants and seating,
live entertainment, food trucks and activities for children. The event was organised
as a partnership between the LGA, an urban planning and design consultancy, and
2 PopUpMANGo https://www.smgov.net/uploadedFiles/Departments/PCD/Plans/Streetscapes/
Michigan-Ave-Greenway/PopUpMANGo_Summary_Sheet.pdf.
local community groups. This approach provided all stakeholders with an opportu-
nity to evaluate the proposal within the space and be involved in the planning process
through a practical hands-on approach. As a result of this community engagement
event, a concept plan was created based on the feedback of all stakeholders.
Pop-up town halls are another example of informal and collaborative community
engagement that provides opportunities to involve a variety of top-down and bottom-
up stakeholders. These types of pop-up interventions are located in public space that
is easily accessible to community members in comparison with traditional events held
within specific time frames and locations (e.g. charrettes, town hall events, public
workshops). They can utilise unused civic spaces and empty shop fronts; however,
for maximum impact they should be located in an area of high pedestrian activity
and be held in parallel with other public events, such as festivals, exhibitions and
conferences.
Pop-up interventions have the potential to hack into the collective knowledge of
all stakeholders within local communities. This provides opportunities to encourage
a more rich and open civic discussion, enable collaboration between a variety of
top-down and bottom-up stakeholders and inspire the exchange of ideas (Fredericks
et al. 2016a; Lydon et al. 2014). We will further expand on these examples through
our filed studies below by demonstrating a middle-out (Costa and Ferrão 2010;
Fredericks et al. 2016a; Janda and Parag 2013) engagement approach that aims to
integrate the needs and interests from LGAs (top-down) with those of the everyday
people (bottom-up).
4 Urban Acupuncture Framework
Linking our research to the previous examples from HCI, media architecture and
urban planning, we discuss two pop-up interventions in this chapter that were con-
cerned with community engagement in two different Australian cities. Reflecting
on the design process leading to the interventions and the result from their deploy-
ment evaluations, we have developed an urban acupuncture framework (Fig. 2),
which asus in highlighting the decision-making process for implementing pop-up
interventions in-the-wild. The concept of conducting research in-the-wild refers
to the testing of prototypes in public space to see how they are adapted and used
in everyday life (Chamberlain et al. 2012). Evaluation in-the-wild can include the
recording and observation of how people interact with, adapt and use the prototype
providing a different approach than testing in controlled laboratory environments
(Chamberlain et al. 2012). Many researchers in the HCI field have incorporated in-
the-wild approaches to their research and design development, whereas in urban
studies research is constantly tested in the built environment and has always been
Fig. 2 Urban acupuncture framework using pop-up interventions. Source Authors
in-the-wild.3 Recent research pertaining to media architecture and urban interfaces

has also relied on in-the-wild research (Fatah gen Schieck et al. 2014; Hoggenmüller
and Wiethoff 2014).
Our urban acupuncture framework applies a participatory action research method-
ology (Foth and Brynskov 2016a; Hearn et al. 2009) with the intention to include
local stakeholders in the different planning stages of the interventions. The urban
acupuncture framework draws together the previously reviewed concepts of, the city
as perpetual beta and middle-out community engagement. The framework is intended
to be used as part of an iterative process within an engagement strategy where the
pop-up intervention would be deployed in different locations across the city respond-
ing to different issues. Due to their agile nature, the pop-ups can respond in each
step or iteration to the needs of the context and people involved in the deployments.
The framework does not provide an answer or a mechanism towards the completion
of a city; it is a process that assists citizens to in-act their role as co-developers in a
perpetual beta city. The urban acupuncture framework can be used by individuals,
within groups or across groups of people as a vehicle for communication and idea
generation across the different stakeholders from the top, the bottom and the middle.
The framework consists of six stages: context, objectives, elements, approach,
deployment and outcome. Each stage is made up of different concepts that require
consideration when creating and deploying a pop-up intervention.
1. Context—The first stage is to examine and understand the local context including
the people who create the places within it. The use and type of technology that will
be utilised and the needs to be considered in line with the engagement objectives.
3 We acknowledge that there is a trend to the opposite where urban science is pushing for more
‘modelling’ using big data analytics, so the focus of that part of the research community is going
back into the ‘laboratory’.
2 For example, see these websites: civicmediaproject.org, beautifultrouble.org, citystudiovan-
couver.com.
2. Objectives—The second stage focuses on the objectives of the intervention

including how to activate the public space by involving a greater cross section of
the public through a variety of tools or approaches within the pop-up, informing
local communities about the engagement activity to promote collaboration and
interaction with the intervention. Stage one and two often inform each other and
do not necessarily occur in a linear manner, and they can be developed in parallel.
3. Elements—The third stage takes into consideration certain design elements of
the pop-up, such as the location, timing and duration, in addition to the materials
and equipment required to construct it. The size and scale of the pop-up are also
important factors to consider when addressing the context of the site.
4. Approach—The fourth stage addresses the approach undertaken for implement-
ing the pop-up intervention, including collaboration with top-down (LGAs, pri-
vate enterprise) and bottom-up (local citizens, community groups) stakeholders
to co-create the engagement process.
5. Deployment—The fifth stage considers the actual deployment of pop-up inter-
ventions in public spaces. This includes the mechanisms to document and col-
lected data and how it can be evaluated and analysed.
6. Outcome—The sixth and final stage identifies the results of installing the pop-
up intervention, including the identification of engagement themes and a deeper
understanding of local demographics needs, wants and aspirations. The responses
collected through the intervention in both their input and output formats can
be analysed to discover recurring themes arising from the contributions of the
participants.
The following field studies are the basis on which the framework was devel-
oped. The case studies as discussed in the following sections demonstrate how this
framework can be implemented using situated pop-up interventions in two different
Australian cities: Sydney and Brisbane. Both studies formed part of two existing com-
munity engagement programmes with official stakeholders deciding the engagement
objectives prior to the pop-up deployment. However, we employed a transdisciplinary
approach in the design and development of the engagement activities, which included
informal meetings with local stakeholders and co-design workshops.
The two case studies were developed and deployed in parallel and independent of
each other; however, the design concept and engagement approaches informed one
another. Through our collaborative approach between the Design Lab (University
of Sydney) and the Urban Informatics Research Lab (Queensland University of
Technology), we have come together to review our learning from the research within
the different contexts of Sydney and Brisbane. We acknowledge that addressing broad
theoretical concepts such as the city as perpetual beta, urban acupuncture and middle-
out engagement approaches requires input from multiple perspectives and contexts.
Therefore, this chapter and the framework we have collaboratively developed are
a first step towards addressing these much larger questions regarding participatory
methods for city hacking.
4.1 Study I: Digital Pop-Up
Context
Digital Pop-Up was implemented in collaboration with an LGA in Sydney, Australia.

It is a result of a multidisciplinary research team from the Design Lab, University of
Sydney, involving an urban planner, interaction designer, visual designer and creative
technologist. The findings of this study were published by Fredericks et al. (2015).
We deployed three variations of our pop-up intervention over three separate days
within a busy public square consisting of: (1) a stand-alone tablet device on a stand
with a customised voting web interface juxtaposed with an existing urban screen,
during a regular workday; (2) an unstaffed pop-up during a cultural festival using a
tablet device, an adapted web interface that allowed text responses, the urban screen,
market umbrella, synthetic turf and barstools; and (3) a staffed pop-up during a regular
workday utilising the same tablet device with web interface, the urban screen, gazebo
structure, synthetic grass, ottoman seating, plants and ‘call-to-action’ signage, which
was displayed on the urban screen and on physical posters at the pop-up.
Objectives
The objective of this study was to obtain community feedback on how to promote
healthy lifestyles and improve recreational needs within the community. Specifically,
our intention was to engage with a variety of demographics, including local office
workers, business owners and people who are culturally and linguistically diverse.
In addition to that, we wanted to deploy a pop-up intervention that included the
engagement objectives of the LGA, but was able to openly capture the needs, wants
and aspirations of local citizens without any interference from other actors.
Elements
The civic space in which this study was conducted is used by local residents, office
workers and as a pedestrian thoroughfare. The location is surrounded by an enter-
tainment quarter, restaurants, a public library and is within close proximity to a large
shopping precinct and public transport interchange. The civic space also features
an existing urban screen used for delivering a variety of entertainment content and
a grassed open space used as a meeting point and for social gatherings. The first
iteration of this study was deployed for a total of two hours and incorporated a stand-
alone tablet device on a stand that was used in conjunction with the existing urban
screen. The tablet device was situated diametrically opposite the urban screen, which
was located on the intersection of two walkways exposed to continuous pedestrian
movement. The second iteration was deployed for a total of two hours within the
same civic space, incorporating the tablet device on a stand, and market umbrella
and seating. The third iteration was also deployed for a total of two hours; however,
a gazebo structure was used and call-to-action signage was introduced on the urban
screen and surrounding the pop-up to draw attention to the engagement activities.
Fig. 3 Study 1 pop-up design
Approaches
We held informal meetings with a representative from the LGA (top-down decision-
maker) to discuss the engagement objectives, including the contextual information,
engagement questions and types of demographics they wanted to capture. In addition
to this, we employed a transdisciplinary research team for the design and develop-
ment of our pop-up interventions. Over a 3-month period, we evaluated and tested
our designs, which we continuously refined based on observations and participant
feedback during the deployments. For the purpose of this study, the bottom-up com-
ponent incorporated the community interactions during the three deployments and
the feedback received from participants regarding the pop-up set-up and functional-
ity.
Deployment
Our overall goals for this study were (1) to draw attention to the engagement activity;
(2) to create discussion around healthy built environment; and (3) to provide a space
for participants to interact within the civic space. Each of the studies utilised the
existing urban screen, which was used as the output channel to display the community
engagement questions and participant responses in conjunction with a tablet device
with a customised web interface that served as the input channel for participant
responses (Figs. 3 and 4).
Fig. 4 Study 2 pop-up design
Outcome
Data collected from the three iterations produced valid responses in regard to LGA
services and healthy lifestyles with a total of 27 responses received. In addition
to this, we undertook 13 semi-structured interviews with willing participants. All
participants expressed positive feedback regarding Digital Pop-Up, reflecting that
this approach to community engagement works well in contemporary society and
is not something that is not normally located in a civic space. Representatives from
the LGA highlighted that Digital Pop-Up is an effective approach to complement
existing community engagement approaches and has a greater potential to attract a
younger demographic. Our case study showed how this approach deployed within a
civic space provides citizens the option to participate on the spot, with little effort
in comparison with attending an organised engagement event during a specific time
frame. Our study further demonstrated how existing digital technologies, such as
tablets and urban screens, can be easily appropriated to engage citizens in a pop-up
environment within a civic space.
4.2 Study II: InstaBooth
Context
The InstaBooth is a telephone booth inspired portable flat-packed structure that has
been designed and fabricated to enable an alternative approach to community engage-
ment (Johnstone et al. 2015; Caldwell et al. 2016). The InstaBooth incorporates
a combination of interactive modules with different types of physical and digital
media to ask questions of its users and gather feedback. It is the result of a transdis-
ciplinary research project led by researchers from the Urban Informatics Research
Lab, Queensland University of Technology, that consists of team members from the
disciplines of architecture, urban planning, interior design, interaction and visual
design, computer science, business and urban informatics. In collaboration with the
U.R{BNE} Collective (urbne.com), an independent group of urban planners, archi-
tects, designers and artists, the InstaBooth (Figs. 5 and 6) was deployed in April
2015 during the U.R{BNE} Festival. The festival is an annual event held within the
Brisbane central business district with the purpose of bringing together a range of
artistic, design and social interventions to inspire people to question the future of the
city of Brisbane.
Objectives
The nature of the deployment and the types of questions asked through the InstaBooth
during the U.R.{BNE} Festival were discussed and elaborated based on collaboration
with the festival-organising committee and the InstaBooth team. The questions and
interaction modules were designed to gather insight into the community on their needs
for better infrastructure to promote healthy and active lifestyles including better food
Fig. 5 InstaBooth design

Fig. 6 InstaBooth activities
options. This approach was in line with the overarching theme of the festival which
focused on creating a vision of a better future for Brisbane. The InstaBooth was
viewed by the festival committee as an opportunity to trial an alternative approach to
traditional community engagement. The combination of digital and physical media
and design of the questions as part of the engagement strategy was purposefully
designed to attract the engagement of more people from diverse backgrounds, cultural
and age groups.
Elements
During the U.R{BNE} Festival, the InstaBooth was installed in two distinct locations
in the Brisbane central business district over the course of 5 days. In the first location,
the InstaBooth was set up for a Friday evening at the location of the main event of
the festival, a park in inner-city Brisbane. During this event, the local city council
conducted a formal community consultation on development ideas for that precinct.
In addition, there were food trucks, live music, art installations and projection art as
part of the festival. The second location was on the edge of the Queensland University
of Technology (QUT) campus and next to a busy pedestrian and cycle bridge linking
the Brisbane central business district with the cultural precinct across the river. The
InstaBooth was set up for 4 days and evenings. There were no other events as part of
the festival occurring at this location. During this deployment at the two locations, the
compilation of interaction modules and the questions asked through them remained
the same. The InstaBooth had a range of interactive modules including paper-based
questions, iPads with photograph sharing and voting options, an overhead projector
and Discussions in Space (Schroeter and Foth 2009) a screen-based consultation tool
that promotes a question, and responses are collected through Twitter or SMS. The
data collected was concerned with three aspects of the InstaBooth project; (1) the
experience of the user with the InstaBooth; (2) the comments and drawings created
by the users in response to set questions; and (3) observations.
Approaches
The composition of the interaction modules included a range of paper and tangible
media to allow for a greater range of participation and interaction to occur regardless
of a user’s ability to use specific technology or ability to write. The bespoke design of
the InstaBooth including the open and anonymous nature of the interaction modules
stimulated playful yet authentic forms of dialogue to occur within the commentary
and drawings collected through the InstaBooth during U.R.{BNE}. The level of
engagement within the InstaBooth was controlled by the participants which helped
to foster a sense of empowerment. This process allowed for users to co-create the
media content within the InstaBooth (Caldwell and Foth 2017).
Deployment
To evaluate the experience that users had with the InstaBooth, 27 participant inter-
views were conducted. The responses collected from the people through the inter-
action modules increased over the days of deployment perhaps indicating a level
of growing comfort or increased curiosity of the InstaBooth. The overall sentiment
was generally positive. In total, 138 notes and drawings were collected through the
paper-based interactions, and 6 text and Twitter messages were recorded through the
digital module.
Outcome
A thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) was conducted on the comments (paper
and digital) and drawings that were captured through the InstaBooth. The findings
indicated that participants tended to seek more playful physical infrastructure, greater
variety of healthy food options and diversity of cultural and social events to promote
better health within the city of Brisbane. During its deployment at the festival and
through the different interaction modules and media types, the InstaBooth created
a temporary place for voicing concerns, sharing ideas and learning from others that
was open and accessible to anyone. The observations and experience from this initial
deployment of the InstaBooth informed design changes to some of the interactive
modules, mainly to improve their ease of use for future deployments of the Insta-
Booth. Following the U.R.{BNE} Festival, the InstaBooth to date has been involved
in 15 communities and public events throughout Brisbane and southeast Queensland
since 2015. The InstaBooth has shown how an urban intervention such as a ‘pop-up’
structure can ‘hack’ into parts of the city to transform them from public spaces to
places that generate discussion, learning and different forms or levels of community
engagement to occur.
4.3 Contribution to City Hacking
Applying the notion of the city as perpetual beta where all users are co-developers
is fundamental to situated pop-up interventions. The field studies were designed
based on participatory and co-design methodologies as a form of DIY/DIWO media
architecture (Caldwell and Foth 2014, 2017). This approach is characterised by its
temporary, pop-up nature as urban acupuncture by capturing the pulse of its users.
Its combination of playful materials and media not only stimulates the interaction
and engagement of its users but also inspires them to think, reflect, share and act.
Situated pop-up interventions can perform on multiple levels to reach across the
people from the bottom, to the top, acting as a middle-out approach to community
engagement. Our two field studies were partnered with LGAs, government agencies
and private entities (people at the top of the decision-making process) who were
seeking a communication channel with everyday people (at the bottom). Developing
the engagement strategy with the stakeholders is a crucial aspect of its success as
the media through which the questions are asked have to be designed and tailored to
suit the context and place of intervention. This collaborative approach involves the
stakeholders in part of the design process, thereby extending the value and appre-
ciation they have towards the engagement strategy. Similarly, the creative process
through which users respond to different interactive modules and questions empow-
ers them to be a part of the engagement strategy. It is within this strategy and the
space provided by these situated pop-ups that the people meet in the middle.
By providing a small temporary space for questioning, reflecting, learning, expres-
sion and fun, within the larger city domain, these interventions not only hack into the
city infrastructure but hack into the city-making process. Embracing the middle-out
approach where people at the bottom and the top feel empowered, the outcomes of
Digital Pop-Up and InstaBooth as a means to city hacking is strategic in deepening
its impact towards a more open and inclusive form of city-making.
5 Implementing Systemic Change
Everyone knows that planning is a process. Yet no matter how good it may be, a plan by itself
cannot bring about immediate transformation. Almost always, it is a spark that sets off a
current that begins to spread. This is what I call good acupuncture – true urban acupuncture.
(Lerner 2014, 3)
In this contribution, we have proposed an urban acupuncture framework to assist

in creating urban interventions that are based on the community engagement objec-
tives, location of the activity and duration for pop-up interventions. To exemplify
how the framework can be implemented, we presented two middle-out (Costa and
Ferrão 2010; Fredericks et al. 2016a) city hacking activities through pop-up inter-
ventions that were undertaken at two different locations in Australia. We argue that
city hacking through pop-up interventions can contribute to systemic change in both
Fig. 7 Pop-up deployments in different locations to foster systemic change
local communities and across entire metropolitan areas, fostered by the accumulation
of many voices, actors, devices and technologies. Figure 7 conceptualises a series of
pop-up interventions that individually address the locations in which they are situ-
ated; however, it is the evolution and series of pop-ups building on each other that
will assist in creating systemic change.
An example of systemic change created through city hacking is PARK(ing) Day
(‘PARK(ing) Day’ 2016). This DIY urbanism concept or ‘hacktivism’ has evolved
from an unauthorised reclaim of public space into ‘parklets’. The parklet concept
is an example of systemic change through the support gained by elected represen-
tatives, government agencies and communities throughout the USA, Europe and
Australia and has become an acceptable reclaim of public space beyond a ‘one day
a year’ intervention (Mustafa et al. 2014). We point out similarities to the concept of
‘perpetual beta’, in the context of the built environment, where a city is continually
changing, evolving and growing. The pop-up approach is particularly promising for
addressing increased pressures on infrastructure within the built environment, such as
population growth, housing densities and public transport. Perhaps, our cities do not
need more infrastructure, and instead we should use what we already have in a better
way? Similarly, the notion of ‘infrastructure’ could extend to the entire city (Ratti
2015) and also consider the city’s ‘infostructure’ (Tomitsch and Haeusler 2015) as a
way of making better use of existing resources.
Although parallels can be drawn between urban acupuncture through localised
small-scale interventions, such as the Digital Pop-up and InstaBooth case studies dis-
cussed in this chapter, results informing city-making, however, depend on the com-
munity engagement methods used. For example, employing a participatory action
research methodology (Foth and Brynskov 2016a; Hearn et al. 2009) by involving
LGAs, community groups, organisations and relevant stakeholders from the outset
of the engagement activity is promoted in order to create a middle-out approach. It
should be highlighted that LGAs undertake engagement with the intention of obtain-
ing community feedback as a legislative requirement (Innes and Booher 2004); how-
ever, the decision-making process and power still lie with the LGA and not the
community. Traditionally, urban acupuncture has been used to create a dialogue
between designers and communities around architecture projects located in areas

that had been identified as needing repair. We propose to extend this definition to
include city hacking through pop-up interventions for community engagement, to
obtain public feedback on infrastructure within the built environment. Through this
attitude, we encourage LGAs to explore the idea of opening their cities to hacking
in order to create an open-source city. This can be achieved by lowering regulations
and restrictions for the deployment of pop-up interventions, hosting hack-a-thons,
providing hackable spaces and sharing data and resources to encourage citizens to
question and provide solutions to city-making. Additionally, this approach can be
used for both locally based (e.g. urban renewal in a local community) and citywide
projects (e.g. improvements to city pedestrian and cycle paths).
We have shown that implementing the urban acupuncture framework has encour-
aged a middle-out approach to community engagement by drawing on the collective
knowledge of top-down and bottom-up stakeholders. This concept further explores
how the final outcomes of each local intervention can contribute to systemic change
past the individual locale and—taken together—across different urban environments.
We propose the urban acupuncture framework as a dynamic, continuously evolving
tool, to be adopted, further expanded and developed by practitioners of commu-
nity engagement, urban planners, designers, architects, academics and community
members who contribute to the engagement process.
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Joel Fredericks is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Software at the University
of Technology Sydney. His research sits across the domains of community engagement, urban
planning, digital placemaking, media architecture and smart cities. He has worked on a variety
of transdisciplinary research projects that adopt human–computer interaction and participatory
design approaches to enable collaborative city-making. He has authored and co-authored many
publications in journals, edited books and conference proceedings.
Glenda Amayo Caldwell is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture, School of Design, Creative Indus-
tries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. She leads the Design for Communi-
ties and Resilient Futures Research Program in the QUT Design Lab. Embracing transdisciplinary
approaches from architecture, interaction design, human–computer interaction and robotics, she
explores the intersection and translation of physical and digital media in creative processes. She
is the author of numerous publications in the areas of Community Engagement, Media Architec-
ture and Design Robotics. Her research has informed policy development, urban master plans and
the adoption of design-led manufacturing capabilities in Queensland. She is an active researcher
in the Urban Informatics and the Design Robotics research groups at QUT.
Marcus Foth is Professor of Urban Informatics in the QUT Design Lab, Creative Industries Fac-
ulty at the Queensland University of Technology. He is also an Honorary Professor in the School
of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research brings together peo-
ple, place and technology. His transdisciplinary work is at the international forefront of human—
computer interaction research and development with a focus on smart cities, community engage-
ment, media architecture, Internet studies, ubiquitous computing and sustainability. He founded
the Urban Informatics Research Lab in 2006 and the QUT Design Lab in 2016. In 2017, the Aus-
tralian Computer Society (ACS) made him a fellow for “a sustained and distinguished contribu-
tion to the field of computer science. He is the international thought leader who coined the term
urban informatics—now adopted by universities and industry worldwide. His work makes clear
how academic research can successfully respond to societal challenges”.
Martin Tomitsch is a Chair of Design at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design
and Planning and Director of the Design Lab, a research group that focuses on interaction design
and design innovation. He is the Founding Member of the Austrian Network for Information
and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D.at), the Media Architecture Institute
(mediaarchitecture.org), state Co-chair of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special
Interest Group (CHISIG), Visiting Lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology’s Research
Group for Industrial Software (INSO) and Visiting Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts,
Beijing. His research sits across the domains of interaction design, creative technologies and cities
and explores the role of design for improving the experience and lives of people.
Part II
Changing Roles
Transforming Cities by Designing
with Communities
Rosie Webb, Gabriela Avram, Javier Burón García and Aisling Joyce
Abstract 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 improv-
ing 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 char-
acterisation of the time frame, the methodologies, the commitments required from
participants, the financial costs associated with the process, the advantages and dis-
advantages 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.
Keywords Co-design · Community engagement · City-making

Tactical urbanism
R. Webb (B) · A. Joyce

Adaptive Governance Lab, The School of Architecture, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
A. Joyce
G. Avram
Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
J. B. García
Fab Lab Limerick, The School of Architecture, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_5
96 R. Webb et al.
1 Introduction
Since the autumn of 2010, the Adaptive Governance Lab (AGL) at the School of
Architecture at University of Limerick (SAUL) has been working in close cooper-
ation with local government officials and community activists on action research
projects, co-designing with communities in neighbourhoods, villages and city dis-
tricts in various locations in Ireland.
The goal of these projects was to involve the local communities in designing and
adapting specific solutions for improving liveability in their areas, with the support
of local government collaborators. The current chapter focuses on the ‘Imaginative
Community Woodquay’ project, undertaken in Galway, Ireland, between 2013 and
2015.
To achieve this goal, the AGL has developed a framework that can assist local
government in supporting changes in the fabric of communities and in the natural
and built environment of these places, using methodologies that have been modified
to suit the objective of aligning bottom-up initiatives with top-down planning. The
‘Designing with Communities’ framework was developed and then improved through
the experience gained working directly with community groups using innovative
collaboration tools and processes.
The current chapter documents the methodology that has been developed and
refined in five years of practice. We describe a framework for our interventions,
connecting design-driven, bottom-up actions to top-down sustainable development
initiatives, in a way that impacts not only the immediate outcomes of built environ-
ment projects, but the systems of governance themselves. Within this framework,
we define parameters such as the time frame, the commitments required from stake-
holders and the methodology associated with the process. In addition, we want to
reflect on its advantages and disadvantages—the value and risks of the process that
has been carried out to date—in terms of its usefulness as an urban management and
active learning tool, and propose ways in which the framework can be replicated and
adapted to fit into the developing community engagement structures of both local
government and academia in Ireland.
Taken together, it is our ambition to identify the appropriate means for supporting
government to become adaptive, through the incorporation of a process that aligns
local creativity and experimentation with government processes, through iterative
feedback loops.
Our approach combines a number of broader developments. From a top-down
perspective, governments have become more interested in finding new, more inclu-
sive ways for public consultation. Public consultation is a mechanism built into
the fabric of democratic governance. Such consultations are usually organised by
local authorities to explore the opinions and positions of the citizens whose lives are
to be affected by future decisions related to the built environment, transport, local
resources, etc. Typically, they involve the passive participation of the public once
most of the detailed design decisions have been made on a project.
Transforming Cities by Designing with Communities 97
In order to increase the efficacy of public consultations, local authorities are

exploring new modalities of reaching out to communities and neighbourhoods, using
social technologies such as forums, mailing lists, Facebook groups and pages, Twitter
and others. However, these tools are there mainly for supporting coordination and
awareness, and for facilitating face-to-face meetings and decision-making. At the
same time, local authorities are also interested in employing tools and strategies
inspired by the smart city concept (Nam and Pardo 2011) to provide better public
services and more efficient governmental systems. They are becoming more adept at
using digital technologies to crowdsource information related to local problems that
need interventions and at using Internet-of-Things devices to target services more
efficiently.
In Ireland, local government policy encourages early public engagement in identi-
fying local needs, involving citizens directly in decision-making and data collection,
to back up decision-making with evidence. Amongst Irish local authorities, a few
have adopted an innovative perspective and encourage the so-called beta approaches
to solving complex urban problems, relating, e.g., to the environment, to safety and
street hassles, to public realm, street art (DCC Beta Projects 2013).
From a bottom-up perspective, particularly in the wake of the recent global finan-
cial crisis, citizens in many countries have been organising themselves around tactical
urbanism initiatives. Tactical urbanism interventions are short-term, low-cost inter-
ventions, initiated by a range of actors including governments, businesses, citizen
groups, artists, non-profit organisations or communities, and involve actively design-
ing, building and implementing small, incremental changes to the built environment,
rather than just discussing long-term strategic plans. They attempt to solve complex
problems that confront the city population by creating quick and easily implemented
solutions through micro-level project opportunities. Some of these interventions are
sanctioned by the public authorities; some others are unsanctioned and happen in a
more DIY, guerrilla manner. Saitta (2009) refers to these as ‘tactical urbanism’ and,
respectively, informal interventions.
In the planning process itself, we have also noted a rising interest in co-creation
sessions between planners and residents, involving local authorities and citizens
working together to design and implement the most desirable solutions. While con-
sultation asks people what they think about possible solutions, co-creation involves
an imaginative exercise of thinking about and describing (or even building) proto-
types of what could exist in the future.
Taken together, the formation of strong communities and of strong networks
between public officials and members of these communities is meant to create a base
for opening the city for changes, entrusting local communities to bring to life new ini-
tiatives. In their Hackable Cities Manifesto, Ampatzidou et al. (2015) speak about this
kind of initiatives as ‘making the city hackable’. Such initiatives encourage various
stakeholders, often using digital technologies, to initiate changes that incrementally
make the city more resilient and more liveable through the direct involvement of
local communities.
98 R. Webb et al.
There has been a rise in practices in which the public is involved or involves itself
directly in urban planning/city-making worldwide. Various practices (from commu-
nity mapping and social media campaigns to events designed to support capacity
building) assume different levels of public involvement, ranging from consultation
to co-creation. The AGL acted as a facilitator for a specific local community inter-
ested in city-making to collaborate with Galway City Council and enact collective
(hacking) practices. It is worthwhile noting that the local authority could not be con-
sidered an open institution before this project, and its appetite to collaborate with
citizens developed during the process. With our work at the AGL, we aimed to create
a framework to support these co-creation processes between local authority officials
and residents that builds on the tactical urbanism interventions repertoire. This reper-
toire offered inspiration and encouragement to the members of the local community,
who adapted some of these interventions to the local conditions.
Increasingly, innovative local government managers are encouraging tactical
urbanism interventions they see as instruments for achieving sustainable urban devel-
opment while working in an environment of increasingly complex regulatory and
statutory systems for city-making.
The AGL sees its role as a change agent, enabling, but also challenging gov-
ernmental systems to become more responsive. It supports local input that could
influence the direction of action and policy. Our approach is an alternate approach to
master planning, which envisages a unique outcome and tries to find a direct route
to achieve that end. This alternative approach allows a number of possible futures to
emerge. It can be seen as an overarching framework for experimentation and action
in which similar organisations can engage, in a coordinated way, in order to make
an impact on the direction of urban development and to feed back findings to assist
collaborative decision-making (or governance).
The AGL is a service organisation, a civic, public interest design workshop facilita-
tor, embracing the open-source principles—rather than having the intent of creating
a product or business, although industry actors can be involved in the prototyp-
ing activities. It has a role in the cross-fertilisation of teaching and research. From
a teaching perspective, it engages in training professional designers in facilitating
community input into the use, design and operation of public spaces and services.
In the development of new urban space solutions, innovation forms an important
constituent element of the community engagement framework. Research into the
collection, analysis and visualisation of local data forms another key element. Good
local governance and the forging of strategic partnerships with public, private and not-
for-profit agencies are at the heart of AGL’s mission. From a governance perspective,
the AGL works to embed design thinking and methodologies in civic governance.
In 2013, the AGL was invited to work in Galway, a city on the west coast of
Ireland, with the Woodquay business and residents association and Galway City
Council. The partnership developed between Galway City Council, the University
of Limerick (represented by the Adaptive Governance Lab, the Interaction Design
Centre and Fab Lab Limerick) and an assemblage of local actors in Woodquay,
Galway, coming from various backgrounds, such as residents and business people,
artists and craftspeople, and others connected to the area, has given us the opportunity
to distil lessons learned that we share.
2 Background
The Adaptive Governance Lab approach was informed and inspired by the role of
urban designer as ‘network weaver’ (Webb 2010), the tactical urbanism movement
and co-creation methods that use participatory design approaches involving commu-
nities. Each of these influences is discussed below.
2.1 The Role of the Urban Designer as ‘Network Weaver’

to Enable the Democratic Right to the City
In the context of the complex systems of conflicting interests that contemporary cities
are, the role of the urban designer necessarily includes that of ‘network weaver’ (Hol-
ley and Krebs 2002)—seen as facilitator, enabler and animator of both the built form
and cultural manifestations of places. The urban designer is becoming a connector
between innovators, local residents, research institutions and local governments, as
well as outside partners (Webb 2010).
Holley and Krebs (2002) refer to smart communities and, in this context, to their
findings concerning the building of robust, intelligent community networks. They
put the emphasis on the phenomenon commonly referred to as emergence, in which
local interactions lead to global patterns. Smart networks require active management,
and when left unmanaged, networks result in small dense clusters with little or no
diversity. These clusters are characterised by the fact that ‘everyone knows what
everyone else knows in the cluster and no one knows what’s going on in other
clusters. The lack of outside information, and dense cohesion within the network
removes all possibility for new ideas and innovation’ (Holley and Krebs 2002).
Most communities start as small emergent clusters organised around common
interests or goals, usually isolated from each other. Without active leaders (‘network
weavers’) who take responsibility for building a network, spontaneous connections
between groups emerge very slowly or not at all. Network weaving involves: (1)
relationship building across traditional divides, so that people have access to inno-
vation and important information and (2) learning how to facilitate collaborations
for mutual benefit. The culture of collaboration triggers a state of emergence, where
the outcome is more than the sum of the various collaborations (Holley and Krebs
2002).
Urban designers working within local authorities must become network weavers
in order to support the creation of smart community networks—as advocated in the
principles of sustainable development. Unless this happens, small, common interest
100 R. Webb et al.
cluster organisations will fail to grow into the robust, smart community networks
they have the potential to become.
In an age of declining local authority resources, universities, in their aspirations to
connect developing knowledge with real-world problems and community initiatives,
can play an active role in supporting the workings of government through engagement
in action research projects.
2.2 Tactical Urbanism
Tactical urbanism is an approach to neighbourhood building and activation using

short-term, low-cost and scalable interventions and policies (Lydon et al. 2012a). The
term ‘tactical urbanism’ was inspired by a blog post describing the temporary pedes-
trianisation of Times Square by the New York City Department of Transport (Lydon
et al. 2012b), referring to ‘low-cost, un-, semi- and fully sanctioned interventions’
in the built environment as ‘tactical’. The first two volumes on this topic—‘tactical
urbanism’ 1 and 2 (Lydon et al. 2012a, b) contributed to the dissemination of infor-
mation on the agents and the practices used in this type of hackable city-making,
reaching wide categories of public.
Tactical urbanism initiatives make use of open and iterative development pro-
cesses, put an emphasis on the efficient use of resources and rely on the creative
potential unleashed by social interaction.
Urban planning has tried to create social order and growth by organising and
disciplining the ‘unruly and seductive’ city (Cuff and Shermann 2011, cited by Fabian
and Samson 2015). More and more, this top-down approach to urban planning is
being questioned, and there’s an opening amongst planners, architects and politicians
to learn from and incorporate DIY urbanism and bottom-up approaches into urban
planning processes (Fabian and Samson 2015). According to Fabian and Samson
(ibid), bottom-up urban DIY design contributions aim at re-appropriating public
space by listening to real-time and real-space constraints and to the different needs
and hopes of the involved citizens and communities. Modern planning is largely
focused on developing a symbiotic relationship between private market forces (e.g.
developers or entrepreneurs) and the public sector, with planners performing mostly
creative, diplomatic and exhortative roles as shepherds of the public interest (Myers
and Banerjee 2005).
Finn (2014), speaking about the rights and responsibilities of the public as they
relate to public space, also considers tactical urbanism from a DIY perspective. In
an era when public resources are limited and participation is a compulsory require-
ment of effective practice in municipal planning, DIY approaches represent a viable
alternative (Finn 2014).
Regarding the kind of interventions included under this umbrella term, a note-
worthy example is the ‘Spontaneous Interventions’ exhibition of the US Pavilion at
the 13th International Venice Biennale (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
of the US Department of State 2012) that included interventions described as ‘pro-
visional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY,

unplanned, participatory, open source’.
The AGL has taken inspiration from tactical urbanism approaches that focus on
reclaiming shared public space for the use of people and for improving the environ-
ment. These solutions re-appropriate space that has gradually been converted from
space available to people to space devoted to the movement or storage of cars, or
that has become unused or unsafe due to dereliction and neglect. Interim solutions
that instigate an incremental re-balancing to accommodate human activity and/or
environmental diversity have been of particular interest to the AGL. Various tactical
urbanism approaches and projects such as Open Street initiatives, Parklets, Inter-
section Repair, Better Block, Urban Farms, PopUp Gardens, Play Streets, Mobile
Vendors, Imagination Playgrounds and DePaving (Lydon and Garcia 2015) have all
featured as proposals in the AGL ‘Designing with Communities’ framework. As
well as increasing the liveability, vitality and attractiveness of an area, the collab-
orative design and creation of these urban installations have assisted the AGL in
identifying the creative agents, environmental stewards and public space caretakers
who can ensure that the changes to the public space are locally informed and locally
appropriated.
One of the interventions that inspired the participants brought together by AGL
was Park(ing) Day, a public participatory art project, started in San Francisco in 2005
by a group of artists and urban interventionists. Park(ing) Day immediately became a
worldwide viral phenomenon which has been helping people all over the world to re-
envision the parking spot as a space for human use. One of the innovations that came
out of Park(ing) Day was the parklet. A parklet is a sidewalk extension that provides
more space and amenities for people using the street. The parklet programme, realised
through a partnership between business and neighbourhood groups benefitting from
rapid facilitation by local government officials, has spread to other cities in the USA
and has been replicated in neighbourhoods around the world.
According to Lydon et al. (2012a), tactical urbanism is not the same as informal
interventions like pop-up or guerrilla urbanism, which just appropriate a space. The
goal of the tactic is to actually ‘prove’ to strategic decision-making levels that the
temporary intervention/‘hack’ should lead to more permanent change in the direction
of the intervention (Lydon et al. 2012a). The experience of the City of San Francisco,
involved in the creation of a licensing programme for the tactical urbanism initiative
dubbed ‘Parklets’, demonstrates how the local government was able to employ com-
munity design processes—incorporating tactical urbanism interventions—to learn,
respond and adjust its mechanisms to better achieve the aims of sustainable city
development. The San Francisco Parklet Manual v2.2 clearly outlines the rules for
proposing, designing, building and placing a parklet, including all the stakeholders
of the process, addressing transport and health and safety regulations and outlining
the approval workflow (City of San Francisco 2015).
This scaling up of the process and its adoption by the bureaucratic and commercial
interests has led to questions about how hacking public space can scale:
But why did scaling up a good idea have to mean ruining it?
102 R. Webb et al.
There is a fervent debate happening at the moment about tactical urbanism and its relationship
to social equity. As a veteran practitioner of tactics, I’m also curious about their potential to
catalyse long-term urban transformation and institutional change. (Bela 2015)
Bela calls the early activation process, which can seed culture, commerce, recre-
ation and play on a site or neighbourhood prior to permanent construction, ‘itera-
tive placemaking’, and he sees the process gaining traction as a tool for instituting
organisational change in government systems. The method mirrors the prototyping
of interfaces and devices in interaction design. (Ibid.) Looking into the future, he
claims:
As the tactics of guerrilla artists become adopted into the operating procedures of city
government, this draws a new frontier for further tactical action. Today’s tacticians must
push beyond the pop-up and the temporary and seek to hack the DNA of organisational
structures themselves. (Bela 2015)
The approach of small experimental prototyping instigated by Park(ing) Day has

been adopted as a strategy by city hackers and has manifested itself in a number of
recent Urban Prototyping Festivals. In Singapore in June and July 2012, UP Singapore
held a series of events in conjunction with the World Cities Summit. The Science
Gallery at Trinity College Dublin curated an events week and exhibition ‘Hack the
City, Take Control’ in June 2012. In San Francisco, the Grey Area Foundation for the
Arts held an ‘UP Festival’ in October 2012, to identify replicable, affordable ideas
at the intersection of public space and technology.
Since those events, ‘civic hackathons’ or ‘coLABs’ have formed and continued
to prosper and their output has addressed themes ranging from health and ageing to
green issues and energy efficiency to industry sectors like tourism as well as cultural,
artistic and social concerns. Thousands of passionate citizens and experts from a
diverse range of professional fields and industries have contributed to experimental
projects to make the places they live more liveable, competitive, sustainable and just
more fun.
Tactical urbanism interventions are important processes to enable the transforma-
tion of public space with maximum bottom-up input. This is because they fill the
gap between the temporary, short-term programming of public space in daylong or
weeklong events/festivals, and the permanency of public realm improvement projects
that are usually associated with urban renewal or sustainable travel initiatives. Fes-
tivals are almost exclusively instigated by ‘creatives’ working in public space and
are usually driven by community interest, local tradition or a deeply felt need for
community. Public realm improvements, on the other hand, generally derive from a
top-down governmental drive and involve limited opportunity for local engagement
in the change process. This is particularly the case if they have strict time constraints
and a raft of statutory and regulatory mechanisms to fulfil. In a temporal sense, urban
tactics allow local actors to understand the implications of change in public space in
a more substantial way than a short-term event allows and yet without the commit-
ment required for a permanent project. In short, medium-term installations in public
space allow for experimentation and feedback, both activities that are required for a
system to achieve adaptivity.
3 Designing with Communities—The Woodquay Project
As we have seen, co-creation projects can help to create connections between urban
planning, local governance and community development. These initiatives focus on
the co-creation of common urban space, on re-thinking communal and public ser-
vices, as well as on creating new digital or hybrid tools for citizen participation
(Saad-Sulonen and Horelli 2010). Such tools can empower people to get involved in
solving urban issues. De Lange and De Waal (2013) discuss digital media technolo-
gies as a co-creation enabler, which can support peer-to-peer citizen engagement as
an alternative to the institutionalised top-down or local bottom-up ways.
Inspired by the development of these three visions of city-making, the AGL has
designed a framework for participatory action research projects, as an attempt to set
up a process to actively manage co-design and collaboration in urban development.
This process endeavours to facilitate learning and communication through flow of
local information from within and introduction to diverse ideas from without, in an
effort to allow innovative solutions to emerge and to prevent stagnation. We will now
move on to discuss how this was applied in one of our projects in more detail.
‘Imaginative Neighbourhood Woodquay’ was a community design process which
leads by the Adaptive Governance Lab (AGL) at the School of Architecture at Uni-
versity of Limerick, working together with the Woodquay Business and Residents
Association and Galway City Council from 2013 till 2015.
The initiative belonged to the Woodquay Business and Residents Association,
who approached the local authority (Galway City Council). The combined residents
and business group were concerned about the declining residential population and
the increasing incidents of antisocial behaviour. They advanced a request to revive a
market in their public space on a periodic basis, with the belief that providing a better
balance to the use of the public space, (almost entirely being used for vehicular traffic
and parking at the time), would make the area safer, livelier and more attractive.
The Council invited the Adaptive Governance Lab—an academic research labora-
tory—to engage with the community and to discuss options, also involving officials
working in various functional areas of the Council. Thus, the initiator was the res-
idents and business association, who had a possible solution in mind. The Council
took advantage of this opportunity to open a dialogue, and invited a third party,
known for its interest in urban development and co-design facilitation skills, to lead
the process.
3.1 Evolution of the Process
The process started in the autumn of 2013, with two weeks dedicated to a ‘Designing
with Communities’ exercise, held in a pop-up shop in Woodquay in September
and October. Rather than supporting the revival of the weekly market, the AGL
104 R. Webb et al.
Fig. 1 Community learning day; pop-up shop; field visit
suggested a wider process, where the different stakeholders would establish a

common understanding of the issues confronting the community.
Each of the two weeks consisted of community learning days—during which
information was gathered from both local and official sources, and the audience
(formed of locals, students, academics and representatives of the local government)
heard presentations from people experienced in collaborative local planning. Com-
munity workshops and field visits were initially organised for the Woodquay Business
and Residents Group and extended (by publicising them openly) to a wider public
audience. These allowed the participants to listen and gain an understanding of the
needs of local collaborators. Design ideas were presented at an open critique session
(held as an event during European Culture Night) in Galway, to test the appetite for
proposals and to get feedback. Culture Night provided a perfect format to extend the
discussion beyond the local community to include those engaged on a wider scale in
the social and cultural life of the city (Fig. 1).
During the first week, students from the School of Architecture at the University
of Limerick (SAUL) collected data and produced strategic maps for the area, describ-
ing what existed already in Woodquay and then what could exist, making proposals
for short-term interventions/temporary uses that could be executed immediately and
inexpensively to catalyse the community towards fulfilling broader long-term objec-
tives for the area. During the second week, the students designed a ‘Toolkit for
Streets’, including street furnishing for their tactical urbanism interventions, street
layouts to support them and an event programme to develop and promote emerging
themes (Fig. 2).
In the spring of 2014, the Woodquay Residents and Business Association, who
were an informal organisation of local home-owners and locally owned and run
businesses, formed an alliance with a local Men’s Sheds organisation to apply for
funding from a youth and community fund. The partnership was facilitated by the
City Council and was necessary as the Woodquay Business and Residents Associa-
tion lacked formal articles of association to apply for funding. The group used the
documentation produced during the previous AGL sessions to form the basis of the
application. The funding was granted, and it was used to facilitate four events in the
public space of Woodquay during 2014. These events took place in conjunction with
national holidays and aimed to draw attention to the potential of the particular public
space. They included a dance demonstration, a Teddy bear picnic, a street critique
Fig. 2 Short-term interventions and temporary use layout by Luke Benson, Eimear Egan, Jennifer
Hogan, Laura Pembroke, Lauren Quinn McDonagh and Orla Punch, AGL, Fall 2013
and a Christmas tree lighting event. Organising these events gave the association the
chance to attract people to Woodquay and to showcase the potential of the public
space.
In the fall of 2014, the AGL held two more ‘Designing with Communities’ weeks,
involving a new cohort of students. The collaboration included a direct collaboration
with Bernadette Divilly,1 a local choreographer running a participatory art project
called ‘Walking Wisdom Woodquay’. The project was a result of the choreogra-
pher’s participation in the previous Designing with Communities weeks. Bernadette
Divilly’s response was informed by discussions about the research of the AGL, which
revealed a predominance of older women living in the area. The students participated
in investigative walks as a way of learning about how people move and engage with
their public space in the area using the methodologies of the dance artist. There was
a particular emphasis on the needs of the elderly female residents.
At a public critique session held at the local theatre in November, the students
presented proposals for interactive street furnishings that could ‘instigate the cultural
and economic performance’ of the place. The potential incorporation of measurement
platforms (sensors, counters) into the fabric of the urban realm was an issue raised by
the participants. From the perspective of the local authorities and of research groups
from the local university, such interventions could assist decision-making by making
1 http://BernadetteDivilly.com.
106 R. Webb et al.
the city more responsive to its citizens and enabling local actors to influence how
their shared spaces develop.
The opportunity to imagine specific changes to public spaces collaboratively with
community groups is a luxury few city officials can afford. One of the factors that
mitigates against the practice is the fear of raising expectations of improvements that
cannot be delivered due to a lack of funding. Funding for long-term improvements
often comes with strict time frames for completion, which, once the statutory planning
permissions and regulatory procurement procedures are adhered to, leave minimal
time for public consultation. The year-long process of design thinking and community
coalition building described above would need to be substantially compressed. Even
with the most dedicated participants, most communities suffer from consultation
fatigue when such a high level of commitment is required. Notwithstanding this
issue, the cost of not engaging with community groups in the design and creation of
public space forms a much greater risk to the success of public realm projects which
may suffer from lack of distinctive local character and lack of local ownership of the
space in terms of both its future adoption and local caretaking.
The second factor that inhibits Council officials who wish to engage in this process
is the perceived role of the officials. These are often reluctant to express a personal
opinion that may be at odds with an official position of which they may or may not be
aware. They are also often expected by the community to solve issues that may not
be within their remit. Local authorities that can have projects progressed to a point of
‘shovel readiness’ are best placed to avail of funding when it is announced. Asking
for long-term public engagement requires a high level of trust, and no guarantee can
be provided that the effort will have a direct impact on improving life in the area.
That level of trust can often accumulate where local authority design professionals are
engaged at local level as ‘town architects’, but such a role is rare in today’s local gov-
ernance structures. Occasionally funds become available for short-term consultancy
contracts for ‘artists in the community’ or ‘community design facilitators’ through
arts and cultural funding mechanisms, but these are limited in scope and duration
by their nature, and not supported as long-term initiatives. The trust must be con-
nected to the ongoing build-up of intelligence about places and the visibility of that
information, analysis and consensus building, rather than being personality driven
or connected to any one individual within or without the governance organisations.
In Woodquay, after the extended collaboration period, it was important for the co-
design process to lead to a quick, visible and substantial intervention in the area. The
decision was made in the spring of 2015, together with the community, to implement
one of the student-envisaged interventions. The stakeholders chose a parklet as the
most appropriate temporary intervention for Woodquay. The parklet was designed
and built by summer bursary students in 2015.
The AGL teamed up with the Fab Lab Limerick and the Interaction Design Centre
at the University of Limerick to design and fabricate the parklet over a 6-week
period during the summer for a demonstration project in the autumn of 2015. The
plan was to have the parklet in place for a trial period, to allow the community to
engage directly in the design of their public space and to provide feedback in real
time. It was intended that the information gathered and the lessons learned from the
demonstrations would influence future permanent changes in making Woodquay a

more liveable place and assist the community and local authority in collaboratively
identifying funding opportunities from public and semi-public sources, as well as
alerting potential industry and commercial partners to worthwhile projects.
Some of the ideas for interactive installations discussed with the stakeholders
were: sensitive ‘musical’ plants included in the parklet that would react to move-
ment/proximity, sensitive light installation triggered only by the presence of more
than one person, a hyperlocal website and newspaper, a dedicated radio/podcast
station. Other ideas discussed were: collecting oral histories from locals during ded-
icated events or through a temporary audio booth, providing free Wi-Fi and having
a landing page dedicated to the project, having a geocache hidden in the parklet, the
creation of an Ingress portal, a foursquare venue, etc.
The summer project engaged the stakeholders in the co-design, fabrication and
installation of the parklet installation in the public space of Woodquay. Through the
‘Designing with Communities’ process, and in particular, through the presentation of
emerging design proposals at weekly public critique sessions held alternatively in the
local theatre in Galway and in the Fab Lab in Limerick City, the installation’s shape,
size and functionality were debated and negotiated with local actors, its location
and placement were agreed and facilitated by Council officials and nearby business
owners and residents, its design was supported, developed and refined by industry
partners, maker community collaborators and university researchers, its operational
and maintenance protocols were clarified, assigned and accepted by willing partici-
pants, as well as being rejected by those more reserved in their engagement.
A team of potential collaborators, including Bernadette Divilly, the choreogra-
pher who ran the participatory art project and Ed Devane,2 sound artist, declared
their availability to run and curate events around the parklet installation. The design
project and the participatory design process allowed to connect the aspirations of
the community, to the imagination and innovation spirit of these socially engaged
artists and makers. Industry partners, including the DIY department of a local build-
ing supply merchant, supported the project by donating materials and expertise. An
international lighting company offered interactive lighting and sound installation
elements. Academic collaborators from Galway and Dublin engaged in the project
to provide research assistance in scoping pre- and post-occupancy measurement and
monitoring tools and performance parameters. All this interest was in line with the
AGL intention of making the parklet structure open and ‘hackable’, allowing the
addition of new uses and functionalities.
In the autumn of 2015, AGL ran two more ‘Designing with Communities’ weeks
in Woodquay, where new streets layouts and installations were imagined, discussed
and proposed. The first week was timed to coincide with the European Culture Night
and Global Park(ing) Day in September and addressed the theme of ‘Street Culture’
in Woodquay. The second demonstration week was held in October during Social
Inclusion Week and fed into a Universal Design workshop week facilitated by the
City Council.
2 http://EdDevane.com.
108 R. Webb et al.
Fig. 3 Parklet in place and open critique in Woodquay
The parklet was installed in Woodquay, reclaiming a space previously used by

cars for people (see Fig. 3). The plan was to go through a further iteration of the
hackable parklet installation during those demonstration weeks, to discuss the need
for developing a parklet licensing procedure and to develop a new urban prototype
aimed at enabling accessibility to premises in the area.
However, due to the lack of a project champion at senior management level within
the local authority as the director who commissioned the work had moved on and fol-
lowing the job transfer of the person who initially coordinated the AGL involvement,
these intentions did not materialise. After these events, the parklet was dismantled
and put in storage. Nevertheless, the social capital created during the 3-year span of
the project remains. The Woodquay residents and business owners, as well as the
wider community got a glimpse of what is possible and how can it be achieved. Busi-
ness owners state that the footfall in the area has risen, students of the local university
often choose the area as site for their projects, and the locals’ sense of pride appears
to have been restored. The conditions are now ripe for other interventions (tactical
urbanism or others) in the near future.
It is worth noting that the chair of the AGL straddled the academic and local author-
ity project champion roles, holding simultaneously a position in the City Council and
teaching at the University. During the process, this situation was perceived as both an
advantage and a challenge. The privilege of access to information and understanding
of the structures of local government were often outweighed by the responsibility of
continually reiterating the position from which one was operating.
This demonstrates that while the individual hacker attitude and the collective prac-
tices remain with the community, the ‘hackability’ of the institutions was temporary
and depended on the presence of specific actors. The future years will hopefully
bring more openness and appetite for collaboration, as communities start putting
pressure on the local authorities bottom-up, and the top-down legislation encourag-
ing co-creation emerges at national level.
3.2 The ‘Designing with Communities’ Framework
An analysis of the work undertaken with the business and residents group in
Woodquay, the local authority officials in Galway City and with the various commu-
nities of interest and local businesses who engaged in ‘Imaginative Neighbourhood
Woodquay’ project, has led to this presentation in context of the Designing with
Communities framework. Here, we will try to abstract and distil the essence of this
framework, making it available for further appropriation and adaptation. These are
the main characteristics of the framework:
The Time Frame
The Designing with Communities framework is conceived as a meaningful medium-
to long-term (9–18 months) intervention as part of a continuous, cyclic engagement
process. Based on our experience, targeted community engagement weeks lasting
3–5 days should occur 4–6 times per year, while tactical urbanism interventions
should be in place for 3 months to 1 year. Feedback should be collected, analysed
and changes implemented continuously during this time.
The Actors
• The ‘network weaver’: the process has to be led by urban design leadership (a
person, an organisation, an academic research group) with good connections with
and authority within the local institutions, connected with businesses and local
communities; the network weaver has to be there for an extended period of time,
so that he/she/they can gain the trust of the community.
• Local authority official engagement to develop and coordinate licensing/permitting
approvals processes if required.
• Local community groups working together (Tidy Towns, heritage preservation
groups, environmental protection groups, community gardeners, etc.).
• Education institutions—universities, technical institutes, schools, primary and sec-
ondary.
• Communities of interest, interested in DIY (such as Fab Labs, makerspaces, Men’s
sheds), arts and performance (socially engaged artists, radical empathy groups,
etc.), special interest groups (Access for All, Smart Aging Groups, Friends of the
local Park, etc.).
• Professionals (possibly as a pro-bono exercise, or as continuing professional devel-
opment).
• Urban innovators (from local industry or local small and medium enterprise com-
panies, start-ups, etc.) (Fig. 4).
The Methods and Techniques
• During Community Engagement Weeks, we found the following formats to be
working well.
• Learning Days—using formats like PechaKucha style lighting talks from local
actors, civic conversations with presentations and panel discussions with ‘experts’
and strategic and operational policy makers.
110 R. Webb et al.
Co Design
ve
Pl
ti
tia Local
an
Authority
Ini
Education
n
ing
Institutions
Local
Community NETWORK
Groups
WEAVER Communities
Plac
of
ng
Professionals Interest
ypi
mae
t
Urban
to
ki
g Innovators
ro
P
n
Testing
Fig. 4 Time frame and actors
• Field days and tours—led by local interest groups and officials.

• Community mapping and auditing events—crowdsourcing local and less known
information, visions, aspirations, things that people treasure and things that they
dislike.
• Community design workshops—exploring specific proposals, ideally with diverse
and intergenerational groups (hands-on and interactive, ideally involving physical
and digital modelling, drawing and narrative development). These could work with
proposals for the area or specific proposals for interventions.
• Open design critique sessions—bringing together analysis of information collected
about what exists currently and making proposals for tactical urbanism interven-
tions about what could exist, to address the needed change to the built and/or
natural environment in the area.
From the point of view of local government, it is increasingly difficult to find a

structure within which urban designers/network weavers can operate. The lack of
time and bureaucratic constraints are making long-term collaborations with local
communities a difficult challenge.
One of the challenges to placemaking today is the absence of a coordinating frame-
work for design activity. That absence is felt both at the top and from the bottom.
Top-down, it is increasingly difficult to find a place for urban design professionals
within local government structures. Simultaneously, local, amateur and professional

amateur input (bottom-up contribution) are being disabled, due to increasingly oner-
ous statutory and regulatory systems.
The Designing with Communities framework described in this chapter attempts
to improve both of those situations, by defining the role of designers within a new
process, which could parallel or even align with statutory local planning processes.
It proposes a co-design process in which professionals and local designers can both
engage. Lastly, it aims to connect these actors to each other through digital media
and tools.
The Designing with Communities framework focuses on community engagement
events (no comma) and the design of tactical urbanism interventions which can be
imagined, refined and realised within a relatively short time period (3–6 months),
with little funding (under 5,000 euro) and which, (comma added) crucially, are (not
is) flexible enough to be hackable, programmable and open to be curated by others
who engage in the process.
This design work must be supported by a participatory platform that would include
learning days, workshops and importantly, community open critiques, which have
to happen locally and, ideally, within the public space they address. The platform
involves both face-to-face meetings and digital- and social media-mediated resources
and conversations. The changes or design options being considered have the aim of
improving the shared public spaces, safety and liveability of the area, but neither their
physical nor their operational aspects can be predetermined. Therefore, flexibility is
required in developing the options as they emerge. In a truly participatory approach
to design, solutions must be allowed to evolve with local input and with an explicit
agenda to facilitate change.
Advantages and Disadvantages
There are obvious advantages resulting from the application of the framework. A
main advantage of the process that has been carried out to date has been its capacity
to move public consultation from a broadcast mode to a genuine conversation about
the design of shared public spaces. Through the period of engagement in the co-
design process, the conversation in Woodquay changed from ‘Reasons why a public
bench will adversely affect locals by attracting antisocial behaviour’ to ‘Where can
we place a public bench to get the most benefit for all and how should it be designed
to make the place more attractive, provide for the most vulnerable users and to attract
pro-social behaviour?’.
The process created a valuable platform to allow socially engaged actors to emerge
and to have a voice regarding the use of public spaces. Co-creation provided opportu-
nities for cooperative direct action. The incremental change facilitated by the ‘Design-
ing with Communities’ process makes the actors feel more comfortable with the
environmental changes, due to their perceived reversibility, and to accumulation of
an evidence base to either reject or support the interventions for the future.
There is also a potential risk of using the process as an urban management tool: if
consensus cannot be reached, there is a danger of leaving public realm improvements
in a perpetual temporary state. Another risk is that the co-design process produces a
112 R. Webb et al.
poor-quality outcome, as a result of ‘design by committee’. Sound design leadership

should mitigate against these risks.
Replicability
For the ‘Designing with Communities’ framework to fit into the developing commu-
nity participation structures of both academia and local government, there is a need
for cross-institutional governance structures, detailed time frames and multi-annual
funding mechanisms. The citizen innovation and urban prototyping exercises need
to engage directly with local small and medium enterprises for the products and
services imagined to develop real value for the community.
The process is outgrowing its current format, which is situated within the academic
term schedule and allows for only two of these design weeks with the same group of
junior designers. It is expanding both in terms of the time commitment to encompass
year-long participation, and in terms of the skill base of the participants, opening out
to related disciplines (interaction design, digital fabrication, applied electronics).
The AGL is increasingly committed to making, as well as designing, and is work-
ing intimately with digital fabrication experts and interaction designers in the areas
of digital local manufacturing, digital platform design, digital mapping processes
and environmental sensors. The AGL is finding a lot of common interest in Living
Labs networks dedicated to co-design and citizen innovation and is positioning itself
in this field of expertise. We are now working towards finding ways in which the
framework we have developed could be adapted to fit into the developing commu-
nity engagement structures of local government in Ireland. We hope that by doing
this, a strong link between community planning and official governmental planning
processes can be created.
4 Implications and Recommendations on Conditions

for Governance
Flexibility is the aspect that makes the process so difficult to fit into governmental
and political systems in particular, as far as capital works programmes are concerned.
The process is continuous and iterative, involving a 1½–3-year cycle to make pro-
posals, develop strategies and enable their realisation. This time frame, in a context
of capital funding regimes which, to a large extent, happen within a one-year time
frame, requires an extended commitment from all those involved on a provisional
basis, where no guarantee can be given for the availability of funding mechanisms
as consensus develops on agreed areas for development. The fact that funds for
projects and for making physical alterations are available only to the local author-
ity operational teams through sectoral/departmental funding mechanisms (i.e. roads,
housing, access, parks), rather than being allocated on a place-based approach, is
also an obstacle to coordinated cross-departmental commitment. Alternate funding
sources for interventions can come from other types of projects, donations and even
bottom-up crowdfunding.
The local authority itself must be comfortable with exposing the current opera-
tional systems and solutions to public critique. Citizens and communities must also
be willing to operate in a climate in which the results of their time and energies
investment cannot be predetermined, nor can outcomes be guaranteed. The involve-
ment of universities is also constrained by the structure of the academic year, and
any type of activities involving students as junior urban designers has to be carefully
planned and executed.
An approach to solving complex urban problems centred on facilitating, enabling
and supporting smart citizenship involves primarily an investment in time and human
resources over monetary investment. In fact, the biggest dangers to participatory
design processes are the imperative to spend money quickly, without sufficient time to
allow co-design solutions to emerge, and the underinvestment in supporting dedicated
‘network weavers’ to facilitate and coordinate community involvement.
Just setting up a co-design framework or programme to facilitate bottom-up input
is not enough. This needs to be matched to institutional processes and managed by
designers working from within the structures of government, forming relationships
at a local level directly with local residents, businesses, artists, craftspeople, activists,
as well as with academia and representatives of other public services and bodies.
The co-design process is primarily concerned with facilitating democratic
decision-making. Although focused on the design of temporary installations, it
equally and significantly involves supporting meaningful interactions with places in
general, and the street furnishings in particular as an integral element of the design.
Such interactions are situated in the overlapping areas of concern for people, place
and technology and are the object of study for urban informatics (Foth et al. 2011)
and Urban Interaction Design (Smyth et al. 2013).
The devised process involves a concerted attempt to attract and engage local
artistic and creative expression, from Urban Prototypers to socially engaged artists,
from Craftivists to Community Cultivators. During the process, designers draw upon
already established networks of their own, as well as reaching out to established and
emerging groups in the local area. Through the design of the installations, the coordi-
nation and curation of the programme and content for their use, the identification of
partners and the producing of the events associated with their collaborative design,
fabrication and installation, the projects provide the opportunity to advance a public
discussion about the participatory design and making of public space, and its potential
to promote social capital, social cohesion and social equity. The co-design process is
centred on the goal of making the urban management structures, and in particular the
allocation and treatment of the public realm, more transparent, participatory, more
inclusive and as a result, more democratic and equitable.
5 Conclusion
The case presented in this chapter emphasised the value of design processes in facili-
tating, managing and enabling systemic change. Also, our ‘Designing with Commu-
114 R. Webb et al.
nities’ framework proposes one specific type of intervention as a means of initiating

place-based networks. The interdisciplinary nature of development and the increas-
ingly bottom-up functioning of democracy has brought about a new model for urban
management which involves, at its heart, cooperative design methodologies to guide
the shift from the institutional to the collaborative model of decision-making and to
facilitate the cooperative development of the built environment of places.
The value of small experimental prototyping as an operational tool for city man-
agement is well reflected in the process we followed. The most important outcome,
we believe, are the networks and trust that were built through this process, allowing
local authorities’ representatives, urban designers, representatives of the residents
and businesses in the area to have an extended public conversation about the future
of the area. The conversation was also open to civic activists, artists, makers, indus-
try partners and anyone interested. The ‘Designing with Communities’ participatory
design process acted as a framework to connect the aspirations of the community
to the imagination and innovation of these other local actors. It offered a concrete
example of making the city hackable, where top-down and bottom-up were com-
bined through ‘network weaving’, facilitation and animation, linking the needs of
the community to high-level, official objectives.
The AGL played an important role in the process, scheduling events, inviting
people, involving everyone in the conversation. As mentioned before, the chair of
the AGL straddled the academic and local authority project champion roles, situation
that gave her access to people, information and resources and allowed her to act as
an authentic network weaver. Through this process, local residents, business own-
ers, artists and hackers came together and began collaborating, building what Holley
and Krebs (2002) call smart communities—interconnected, emergent, dynamic and
long-term. This also created the conditions for the emergence of peer-to-peer dis-
tributed networks (De Lange and De Waal 2013), e.g. via mailing lists, Facebook
groups and Twitter. Fundamentally, the co-design process is about enabling a shift in
decision-making from hierarchical institutions to these smart, self-organised, coop-
erative communities.
Our conclusions on the processes carried out to date and the unexpected continuing
length and commitment of that engagement aligns with the observations regarding
Participatory Action Research as expressed by Foth and Brynskov:
This leads us to a first conclusion about urban interaction design of civic technologies: They
need time and resources to develop and mature in a specific cultural context. They cannot
be developed and figured out in a vacuum, they need to be grown, as it were. Organicity is
impossible to plan. We have known for a long time that community development is about
‘human horticulture’ rather than social engineering. (Foth et al. 2015)
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Rosie Webb is the Senior Architect at Limerick City and County Council and Head of Urban and
Village Renewal. She leads programmes of work to stimulate and consolidate the historic centres
of Limerick City, its towns and villages. She provides strategic vision and plan implementation
using projects, programmes and initiatives dedicated to placemaking and physical development.
She is a Member of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, a Registered Architect in the State
of Illinois, and is accredited in historic building conservation. She lectures at the School of Archi-
tecture at University of Limerick and founded the Adaptive Governance Lab at SAUL in 2010.
Her research at the AGL focuses on testing new ways to build strong community networks for
greater citizen involvement to influence the design and operation of shared public spaces. Rosie
is Lighthouse City Manager for Limerick’s joint 2018 application to the H2020 Smart Cities and
Communities bid ‘+CityxChange’, and she acted as the Limerick Manager for the URBACT III
‘Techtown’ Project from 2016 to 2018 and participated in the EU Transport and Urban Develop-
ment COST Action Network ‘People Friendly Cities in a Data Rich World’ from 2013–2017.
Gabriela Avram is Lecturer in Digital Media and Interaction Design, senior researcher at the
Interaction Design Centre of the University of Limerick (Ireland) and an active member of the
Adaptive Governance Lab. Building on a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Knowledge
Management background, her current research focuses on the design and development of tech-
nologies for civic engagement in urban communities. In parallel, she is also working on design-
ing interactive technologies for cultural heritage settings with an emphasis on co-design. Gabriela
has worked on numerous international research projects on topics such as adult learning, cultural
and social aspects of collaboration, distributed work practices, open-source communities, and the
adoption and uses of social media for work-related purposes in various environments. Currently,
Gabriela is the chair of the COST Action CA16121 From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-
Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy that she initiated in 2016. Gabriela has published
extensively in international conferences and journals. For a complete list of publications, check her
personal website at http://coniecto.org.
Javier Burón García is Lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Limerick and the
director of Fab Lab Limerick. In 2012, founded Fab Lab Limerick, a digital fabrication laboratory
part of the School of Architecture. His research focuses on the role of the creative industries in
local socio-economic development, the use of personal digital fabrication in architecture, and the
impact of open-source technologies and participatory processes in design. He is a member of the
Limerick URBACT Local Group, member of the Digital Leaders Network for Limerick Digital
Strategy, member of the board of directors of Fab Foundation Ireland and Irish ambassador for
the European Maker Week. He has collaborated with the EU Policy Lab of the Joint Research
Centre of the European Commission. He is also co-founder of Colaborativa.eu, a creative studio
exploring new ways of making digitally, new ways of working creatively and new ways of sharing
collectively.
Aisling Joyce graduated from the School of Architecture, University of Limerick in 2012. In
2014, she began her involvement with the Adaptive Governance Lab and has been actively
engaged as a Teaching Assistant ever since. Aisling holds a keen interest in collaborative urbanism
and has explored this subject area in number of European Cities during her time as a European
Researcher with COST EU under the Action ‘People Friendly Cities in a Data-Rich World’. She
currently works as an Architect in the Office of Public Works while concurrently undertaking a
postgraduate diploma course in Project Management at Trinity College Dublin.
Economic Resilience Through
Community-Driven (Real Estate)
Development in Amsterdam-Noord
Matthijs Bouw and Despo Thoma
Abstract 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.
Keywords Economic resilience · Commons · Community-driven planning

Public–private partnerships · Urban planning · Urbanism · Resilient design
Bottom-up · Top-down · City-making · One Architecture
In the fall of 2015, on an improvised camping ground in Amsterdam-Noord, more

than a hundred caravans and tents were set up, and their owners were willing to
camp out for more than three weeks in order to sign up for a plot of land in the
area, called Buiksloterham, on which they could build their own house or with a
group of like-minded people, a small apartment building. While in line, the campers
talked enthusiastically with each other about their individual dreams and speculated
about the communal efforts that might be undertaken to lower costs or to increase
M. Bouw · D. Thoma (B)

One Architecture & Urbanism, 35 E Broadway #5C, New York, NY 10002, USA
M. Bouw
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_6
120 M. Bouw and D. Thoma
sustainability. Quite a few on the camping site were local architects who had, from
2008, during the prolonged real estate crisis that was just ending, been leading
small development efforts in what had always been an unloved industrial area. They
had built houses for themselves and for friends, nicely lined up in one unorthodox
street, brought groups together and designed small apartment buildings for them,
and experimented with soil remediation, sustainability, and circular economies
(Reimerink 2016). These pioneers had made Buiksloterham an exemplary case of
urban resilience in face of a real estate crisis.
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. 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.
Our analysis of this phenomenon in this chapter will start with framing traditional
urban practices in opposition to resilient systems, address the role of social systems
and shared resources (the commons) therein and work toward a generally applicable
model for such a commons-based economically resilient urban planning that utilizes
new technologies and digital tools.
Over the course of the last decades, urban planning has been formed by the need
to accommodate pressures for development while avoiding chaotic accumulations
and conditions that had led to the rise of the ‘master plan’, often considered as a
blueprint for the future city or neighborhood. In light of establishing basic rules for
accessibility and sanitation, master plans have evolved into hyper-detailed recipes for
city development that seem to operate under the understanding that social systems
are predictable, simple, and controllable (Moroni 2010). As such, planning strategies
include a set of concrete and directional rules that often lack the flexibility and
adaptability more organic and resilient systems appear to have. To counterbalance
the rigidity of the master plan, self-organized activities are nowadays welcomed by
planners (Savini et al. 2015) for their ability to engage with a variety of uses, scales,
and audiences, allowing room for creativity and innovation. However, these bottom-
up city-making initiatives are still understood as activities of individuals that need to
be controlled by the ‘master’ city-maker, and by themselves are not enough to foster
resilient urban growth.
We would like to define resilience here as ‘the ability to deal with shocks and
stresses, and the ability to transform itself within critical thresholds’ (Martin-Breen
and Anderies 2011). Urban development models that are based on the idea of the
master plan often fail to account for potential shocks and stresses and exacerbate
initial triggers due to their inherent rigidness in scale and time. During periods of
economic distress, large urban projects are often halted or permanently cancelled
in the face of an increased risk, leading to a decline in urban development. When
projects have halted, we can observe the rise of more resilient social and economic
systems, indicative of new modes of urban thinking. In a ‘risk society’ (Beck 2006),
an antidote of the master plan can be found in the field of resilience, which arises
as a focal point and an indicator of systematic, iterative urban thinking. In times
where risk is omnipresent in some capacity and failure starts to be embraced as
Economic Resilience Through Community-Driven (Real Estate) … 121
a possible outcome, engaging the ever-changing nature of systems and allowing

flexibility become a new direction for urban planning.
The district of Buiksloterham, in Amsterdam-Noord, can be seen as exemplary for
this new approach to planning. In a development process driven mostly by individuals
and groups of individuals, rather than professional developers, simple financial mod-
els fostered bottom-up urban development and have pointed to a new more resilient
mode of city-making. After the 2008 economic crash, it became clear that the Dutch
real estate sector was not very resilient. Bloated and uncompetitive after decades
of ever-increasing liquidity because of tax policies and easily available mortgages,
housing prices collapsed (Scanlon and Elsinga 2014). This led to an extended eco-
nomic downturn. Projects were cancelled, and no new projects were undertaken,
leading to a radical decline of the construction industry (CBS 2015) and the virtual
disappearance to the real estate developer (Hentenaar 2015), who was unmasked to
be not much more than a ‘mister ten percent’ in the real estate value chain.
In Buiksloterham, as in a few other areas in the country, such as Almere (Feary
2015) and Deventer (Welovethecity.eu 2015), citizen-driven real estate development
proved to be an alternative economic model. Unlike the traditional development initi-
ated by cities, developers, and housing corporations, in which integral and ambitious
plans were proposed (only to be either cancelled or value engineered at a later stage),
this development was based on simple urban plans in which individuals, or groups
of individuals, could build their own houses or apartment buildings. The reason this
type of development continued on pace during the prolonged real estate crisis was
perhaps because of the simplicity of the development model, and as a result of the
simple financing model, which bypassed to a large extent, project finance loans, risk
management committees, credit board reviews, and other manifestations of financial-
ization. We earlier described this as ‘real people building real houses for their families
with real money’, sometimes with help from family or from the local architects (Hill
2016).
While the traditional real estate sector proved largely unable to deal with the shock
of the crisis, this more organic mode of development has proven to be much more
resilient. In fact, it can even be argued that this way of development has—what the
former Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin calls—a clear ‘resilience divi-
dend’, in which communities become stronger, more prosperous and more connected
in the process of building resilience (Resiliencedividend.org 2016). The neighbor-
hoods are much more diverse than those that have been developed by ‘professionals’
with regard to the variation of housing types. A study assessing the first self-developed
apartment buildings in Buiksloterham demonstrated that for instance, the quality of
the architecture is higher, with higher quality materials, higher ceilings, and more
outside space, in part because a large part of the total investment sum is actually
spent ‘in stone’. Also, the energetic performance of the buildings is better, probably
because a period for earning back an investment of more than 10 years is still con-
sidered worthwhile. The projects were innovative in their use of new technology to
achieve this and had floor plans that are more flexible. The communities have orga-
nized themselves around the ‘circular economy’, with the reuse of local resources,
understanding that natural and cultural resources can be shared and be collectively
owned. People felt more involved in the development process and in the community,
which results in more loved neighborhoods (Van de Klundert 2017).
Many of the characteristics of the Buiksloterham brownfield transformation in
Amsterdam-Noord, which is the most prominent of these organic developments in
the Netherlands, can be understood in terms of resilience. Resilience proposes to
engage complex systems, such as a city, or the city-making process, through multi-
functionality, redundancy and modularization, embracing (bio and social) diversity,
and by connecting multi-scale networks in such a way that the systems becomes adap-
tive (Ahern 2011). Adaptability in systems implies a responsive and observant mode
of governance. Understanding that rules of governance for shared urban resources
appear to be more flexible when they arise as a collective effort from the community
allows innovation in the way urban development is enabled and controlled. Although
it has become priority for urban planners to include methods of co-creation with the
community, the tension between the need to establish future goals and the neces-
sity to allow physical and cultural flexibility remains in most planning processes
(Savini et al. 2015). In Buiksloterham, planning methods indicate a shift from a set
of permanent and fixed rules to a process that fosters and advocates for the creation
of community-tailored guidelines and appreciates the value of shared natural and
cultural resources.
The notion of the commons has resurfaced as a lens to understand social, eco-
nomic, and political developments of this century. The commons were addressed in
the last century by Garrett Hardin in 1968 in his paper the ‘Tragedy of the Com-
mons’ (Hardin 1968). Commons were defined as social systems in which resources
are shared by a community of users and producers. This community also defines the
rules of production, distribution, and circulation through democratic and horizontal
forms of governance. Hardin believed that individuals inevitably end up overex-
ploiting and degrading common resources. Based on this paradigm, it is no surprise
that policy makers have since interpreted individuals and their interests as potential
threats to the resources that communities share. The conflicting interests between
the individual and the collective have led to the establishment of new rules for social
and economic behavior during the past century, to allow private growth and mitigate
its collective effects. The commons, and more specifically their relationship with the
individual, are influencing social and economic activities (De Angelis and Harvie
2014), and as such are essential in urban transformations.
Elinor Ostrom in her study ‘Governing the Commons’ (Ostrom 1990) attempts to
refute Hardin’s basic assumption that individuals are incapable of self-governing their
resources. She puts forward the idea that current private and governmental modes of
regulating are based on generalizations and as such are blind to the capabilities of
individuals. Ostrom argues that communities can create their own institutions, rules,
and enforcement mechanisms which ensure the sustainable use of their resources.
As she states, if certain conditions are met, there is no need for top-down regulations.
Ostrom summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: (1)
clearly defined boundaries; (2) proportional equivalence between benefits and costs;
(3) collective-choice arrangements; (4) monitoring; (5) graduated sanctions; (6) fast
and fair conflict resolution; (7) local autonomy; (8) appropriate relations with other
tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance) (Ostrom 1990, 90). Under-

standing the co-relation between the sense of collectiveness and the empowerment
of the individual becomes a critical viewpoint of urban thinking. It is at this point
where Ostrom’s basic principles can be revisited and reiterated to be applicable to
urban commons (Foster 2017) in order to resolve the tension between ‘governing
urban shared resources’ and ‘allowing flexible urban transformation’. Contra Hardin
and in line with Ostrom, we argue that self-organized collective commons-based
self-building may indeed constitute a very resilient form of urban planning.
The scale of development in Buiksloterham is small. Each project is principally
driven by each own logic. There is little need for coordination. When one project
stalls, the development of the neighborhood can just continue. There is a focus on
flexibility in program and space, especially since the building groups realize that
group processes are inherently dynamic. And, through this piecemeal development,
builders learn from each other and connect to each other to see if things can be
shared, such as a heat pump or the drilling of the piles. As such, the social fabric of
the future community continues to strengthen, knowledge and resources are shared,
and common values are adapted. The self-builder who constructs his houses from
building material auctioned off from bankrupt contractors has much in common with
the young architects who experiment with cleaning up contaminated soil with the
use of plants (Reimerink 2016).
Out of these initially individual experimental projects slowly an ethos or a cul-
ture has emerged, in which early collaborations solidified themselves over time,
and institutional actors became part of this ecology. A manifesto for a ‘Circular
Buiksloterham’ was signed by some 20 different stakeholders, from self-builders to
housing corporations to utilities. The architects who have worked with the ‘building
groups’ jointly promote the area and themselves under the title ‘Beleef Buiksloter-
ham’, Experience Buiksloterham (Buiksloterham.nl 2015). And One Architecture
has teamed with the research group The Mobile City and three universities (Uni-
versity of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and Utrecht
University) in an action-based research project ‘Buiksloterham Hackable City’, with
the goal of exploring how digital technology can facilitate commons-based collective
self-building as a kind of resilient hacking of the city, and how this becomes more
accessible for individuals and collectives (Savini and Dembski 2016).
Slowly, the institutional actors started to develop projects with a distinctly Buik-
sloterham vibe. Housing corporation ‘De Alliantie’ is developing ‘Cityplot’ as a
diverse, mixed-use area with room for self-development and a high, circular ambition
(Cityplot-buiksloterham.nl 2015). Waternet, the water utility company, is working
on a ‘biorefinery’, a decentralized waste management system (Waternet.nl 2017).
And the architects have united in order to explore collectively if the lessons learned
in Buiksloterham can be repeated at a larger scale, with potential future Buiksloter-
hammers, in a way that value can be re-invested locally.
If building resilience necessitates adaptive planning and design, the continuous
prototyping of solutions makes city-making at Buiksloterham an iterative process.
And while there is no master plan and no master planner, local designers such as
Studioninedots, Delva Landscape, and One Architecture ‘lead from behind’ by orga-
nizing the collective efforts such that new prototypes and projects more advanced
and often at a larger scale than earlier iterations, can be developed. Taken together,
these different efforts combine into a networked model of area development, in which
government is not so much leading the process but merely an actor in it.
One Architecture, for example, was first involved as architects and codevelopers
with a few building groups in Buiksloterham, which are now also Waternet’s consul-
tant on the biorefinery. In addition, the ‘Hackable City’ (Thehackablecity.nl 2017)
research project (that they are part of) explores and utilizes digital tools in order to
organize individual actors in learning collectives, and to advocate in favor of institu-
tional change through collective action. Subprojects of the ‘Hackable City’ include
a system for sharing information and experiences by the individual self-builders
(such that the valuable knowledge they develop in the process is a common resource
and can be used by others), a ‘water game’ that generates community awareness
of and solutions for water issues, a decision-making system that defines when to
approach infrastructure development decentrally, and when centrally, a monitoring
system for the performance of the built environment such that the metrics can be used
to argue for institutional change, and a version of ‘Play the City’, a ‘serious game’
for engaging the various stakeholders. While developing tools for city-making and
with that researching the possibility for ‘hackable’ city-making processes, the project
also makes a strong case for Buiksloterham as a continuous ‘living lab’, in which
‘lessons learned’ can be applied to future projects, and knowledge is appreciated as a
common resource that, contrary to other common resources, is not scare and actually
profits from being abundantly circulated. These learning processes help strengthen
this resilient way of city-making.
In that sense, the prolonged real estate crisis, in which Amsterdam was bypassed
by global capital and in which the traditional actors have been passive or absent,
has given rise to a unique new way of city-making; Buiksloterham has had enough
time to develop a building culture and community that now makes it one of the most
attractive and desirable Amsterdam neighborhoods.
Now that the local real estate market is bouncing back rapidly, and global real
estate capital has landed in Amsterdam too, the Buiksloterhammers have a huge
challenge ahead. The Amsterdam municipality is inclined to ride the wave and go
back to the ways of old, selling the area in large plots to big developers and, in the
process, reducing sustainability requirements, with the argument that houses need to
be build fast to follow demand (and with the added benefit of generating revenue for
the municipality) (Vastgoedmarkt.nl 2017). Now the local actors have to show that
the organic way of development can adapt to booms, claim their continuous role in
Buiksloterham, and argue that their way of ‘hackable’, ‘circular’, and ‘commons-
based’ city-making is an essential ingredient of a resilient city because it brings
more resilience dividends than Amsterdam’s strategy of filling their coffers in order
to withstand another crisis.
If Buiksloterhammers manage this new reality and find ways to establish their
way of city-making, it will not only provide Amsterdam with the instruments to deal
with the inevitable bust, it will also establish a powerful way of city-making that can
not only deal with real estate cycles, but can be especially useful for those mid-size
cities or real estate markets that are bypassed by global capital in the first place. It is
often there that the activation of local (social) capital through ‘hackable’ city-making
is crucial to liveability and economic development.
Through the example of Buiksloterham, economic and social resilience escapes
the level of abstract ideas and transforms into an implementable set of guidelines to
allow commons to revive in a new form in the twenty-first century. The role of new
technologies in the formation and long-term sustainability of the neighborhood can be
seen as evidence of the potential of new platforms of communication. The necessity
to foster the growth of small local investments and to empower individuals within
their communities arises as a prominent aspect of urban thinking. Buiksloterhammers
can be seen as potential citizens of the future city, able to invest and help sustain
social and economic growth in their neighborhoods, and by extent, allowing urban
planning to move from a totalitarian practice to a practice of enabling and fostering
in search of the commons.
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Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and founder of One Architecture (est 1995), which focuses on
urban design and resilient architecture. He currently serves as the Rockefeller Urban Resilience
Fellow for Penn Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Bouw has been a guest professor at,
a.o., TU Delft, Berlage Institute, TU Graz, University of Kentucky College of Design and Sci-Arc,
and was professor I.V. of ‘Gebaeudelehre und Grundlagen des Entwerfens’ at the RWTH Aachen.
A leading voice on Resilient Design, he has published several dozen papers and given numer-
ous talks to both students and professionals on incorporating resiliency into design practice.
Bouw’s own practice is known for its unique approach in which programmatic, financial, tech-
nical and organizational issues are addressed, communicated and resolved through design. Bouw
has been a pioneer in the use of design as a tool for collaboration, for instance through the devel-
opment of ‘Design Studios’ as an instrument to support the Netherlands’ Ministry of Infrastructure
and the Environment with its long-term planning, and in community-development projects.
Despo Thoma is a Cypriot urban designer at One Architecture & Urbanism (ONE) in New York,
and a registered architect. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Architecture from the
National Technical University of Athens and a M.Sc. in Architecture and Urban Design from
Columbia University as a Fulbright Fellow. At Columbia, Despo was awarded the GSAPP Prize
for Excellence in Urban Design for the most outstanding body of work. Despo has spent time as
faculty member at Columbia GSAPP and NJIT, as Design Research Fellow at the Institute of Pub-
lic Architecture, and as guest critic at Parson’s New School of Design, City College of New York,
and NYIT. At ONE, Despo is acting as project manager and lead urban planner for the Resilient
By Design Bay Area Challenge and Lead Urban Designer for the Water as Leverage Program in
Semarang, Indonesia. Thoma has contributed to RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan: The Triboro Corri-
dor, and the two coastal resiliency projects that came out of the Rebuild By Design winning pro-
posal ‘BIG U’ that reshape the future coastline of Lower Manhattan. Despo’s personal research
focuses on congested territories and conflict resolution, and embodies her belief in moving away
from the notion of design as a tool for object-production and toward a more collaborative process-
oriented use of design.
This Is Our City! Urban Communities
Re-appropriating Their City
Gabriela Avram
Abstract 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.
Keywords Civic technologies · Digital media · Hybrid communities · Hacking

Hackable · Scaffolding
1 Introduction
The extensive presence and availability of digital technologies that underline the
smart city concept (omnipresent Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, various sensors
connecting data, actuators for implementing changes in real time) have, at the same
time, underpinned changes in the way citizens perceive, navigate, and act in the city
and have increased the opportunities for people with similar interests to congregate.
Urban communities worldwide make use of technology to solve local problems
and become more resilient, complementing the work of local authorities. Many of
G. Avram (B)
Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_7
130 G. Avram
these communities emerge online, through social media, before meeting face to
face and moving to action out in the city. The digital platforms made available in
various domains have led to the rise of the “platform society,” where, according to
Ampatzidou et al. (2015), “it may become easier to ‘hack’ the existing fabric of our
cities and appropriate it for our own uses.” Some of these platforms, built by activists,
entrepreneurs, and civic hackers, create mechanisms for data sharing and assemble
collaborative networks, creating “interfaces for people to see, touch, and feel the city
in completely new ways” (Townsend 2013).
The urban communities I refer to here are communities of interest that are at
the same time physically colocated in a particular geography and enabled/supported
by digital technology that come together to address a perceived need of their city.
This case presents a specific urban community that emerged in the aftermath of
the recession in Ireland, following an example promoted by a TV show on national
television.
Various communities with global reach, formed around specific activities or inter-
ests—like maker spaces, Transition Cities, OpenCoffee, CoderDojo—have spread
worldwide via the Internet and social media. These communities make use of global
resources to innovate, hacking the original models and finding solutions to local
problems.
Here, I will focus on a particular aspect of active, collective civic engagement:
participation in a community-based organization. I am primarily interested in how
the existence and free availability of a template (or model/example) for a specific
type of association/community facilitated the rapid creation and establishment of
the organization in this case study (a mechanism I will label as “scaffolding”). By
scaffolding in this context, I refer to building on an existing, known, available orga-
nization model, adopting its modes of interaction, roles, tools and functions, ideas
and values. Thus, scaffolding has the advantage to provide a shortcut and introduce
shared success criteria that are understood and adopted by all the active community
members as part of the initial model. Here, scaffolding facilitates adapting solutions
that have worked elsewhere to hack the design of the city, where hacking takes the
meaning of using digital media platforms to mobilize citizens and share informa-
tion, allowing them to contribute to the restoration of the city’s social fabric and
resilience at a moment in time when the economic situation appeared desperate and
the municipality was seen as inactive.
The model for Hackable city-making proposed by de Lange (2016) includes three
levels: an individual hacker attitude, characterized by a “do-it-yourself ethics and
professional amateurism,” a collective set of hacking practices (open innovation,
collaboration, and sharing of knowledge and resources), and the hackability of insti-
tutions, (defined as “the structural affordances at the level of organizations and public
governance to be open to systemic change from within or outside”).
In this case, the individual hacker attitude and the collective set of practices
are easily recognizable; however, the institution perceived as hackable was not a
local organization, but an existing TV show, the template of which was reused and
adapted for attempting to change the city’s current situation while bypassing existing
mechanisms and institutions.
This Is Our City! Urban Communities Re-Appropriating Their City 131
Our case of “city hacking” from a medium-sized city in the west of Ireland goes
beyond short-term interventions and shows how citizens can step to contribute their
time and skills to provide alternative solutions to problems cities are confronted with.
As phrased by Hill, “in the face of institutional collapse, active citizens are knitting
together their own smart city, albeit not one envisaged by the systems integrators and
technology corporations” (Hill 2013).
The case study involves an urban community from Limerick, Ireland. It takes its
name—Limerick Local Heroes—from a TV show titled Local Heroes. The commu-
nity initially came together in the autumn of 2011 through an online conversation
facilitated by a Twitter hashtag, with the purpose to do something to reverse the
downward economic and social trend caused by the recession affecting the city. An
initiative group of 10 people was joined by approximately 50 others in the course of
2 months. At the outset, the general level of morale was low, since the local author-
ity was stripped of resources in a country struggling to reduce public expenditure.
Building upon an already established formula known to the general public via public
television, the initiative tapped into an existing pool of local expertise, creativity,
and solidarity. The campaign aimed at bringing people together to turn the situation
of their city around. Everyone involved considered it a success, and it served as
inspiration to a wide array of citizens. For many years before that, national media
had promoted a negative image of the city, focusing on crime and unemployment
and turning a blind eye to any positive stories. This bias generated a lot of grief
locally. The Local Heroes initiative was seen as an opportunity to show the world the
“true face” of the city—especially if they were to appear on national TV. A detailed
description of the emergence of Limerick Local Heroes community and its evolution
are given in the third part of this chapter.
The author joined the initiative group in early December 2011 as a volunteer. As
a scholar with an interest in civic engagement and social media, she volunteered to
support the group during the preparation and execution of the planned public events.
The author’s approach was to build technology around the community requirements
and to support its IT and communication needs to suit the digital skills level of the
members.
In parallel with the design, implementation, and adoption of off-the-shelf tools and
applications that members were already familiar with, the author undertook ethno-
graphic observation and informal interviews, as well as documenting the develop-
ments as they took place.
The current chapter sets to present this case of civic activism, discussing the role
of digital media in its development—with an emphasis on social media channels. Of
special interest is the role of existing models, templates, guidelines, and principles
that are available to urban communities to appropriate and use to scaffold their
immediate civic action, like, in the case of maker spaces. Adopting such a model
combines innovation (the model has to be adapted to local conditions) with becoming
part of a global (or national) community. Inspiration and lessons learned are widely
shared on social media, triggering conversations and connections between similar
communities worldwide.
132 G. Avram
2 Background
2.1 Augmented Cities and Hybrid Communities
The setting of this study is the city—traditionally seen as “a dense ecology of imper-
sonal social interactions occurring within recognizably public spaces” (Williams
et al. 2009). Drawing on contemporary urban scholarship, Williams et al. (2009)
advocate a perspective that is based on the users’ experience, rather than on the spa-
tial view of the city. In this view, “users become actors embedded in global networks
of mobile people, goods, and information, positioned in a fundamentally heteroge-
neous and splintered milieu” (ibid). People get involved in local communities that
are connected to global communities via digital media platforms.
With the emergence of location-based media, a new dimension has been added
to the physical city. The citizens’ movements and interaction with urban spaces are
nowadays augmented with an “additional digital overlay” (Ciolfi et al. 2008) that
has become part of the city canvas. The physical routes and their representation
in the digital realm are intricately interwoven, and the “perceptions of and social
behaviors in urban spaces” (Gómez de Llarena 2013) are altered by digitally mediated
conversations.
The new urban infrastructure almost implicitly assumes an “Internet infrastructure
overlaid onto the city” (Hill 2013). The connection between online social networks
and the physical world is made seamlessly following the shift from static to mobile
computing, and new layers of information are added to our surrounding spaces,
reshaping them (Pucci and Mulder 2013). Rather than a new, separate layer, this
represents an augmentation of spaces and interactions with information, forming a
hybrid type of urban space. The urban social networks “borrow the dynamics, modes,
and functionality of social media” without necessarily relying on them and prefer “a
form of public, physical engagement with urban fabric” (Hill 2013).
Bringing into discussion the overlap of communities of place and communities of
interest, Pucci and Mulder (2013) use the concept of “hybrid communities,” referring
to the landscape of new social aggregations made possible by social and mobile
technologies “appearing in the blur between physical and digital spaces, between
online and offline interactions, as well as between global and local communities.”
2.2 “Hacking the City” Initiatives and What Makes a City

Hackable
In a world where the top-down smart city discourse is still dominating mainstream
media, the emphasis is on efficiency and effectiveness and citizens are seen mainly
as producers of data and beneficiaries of the improved efficiency. The alternative
approach argued for, among others, by Gurstein (2014) favors a “focus on social
inclusion, enabling citizens, supporting communities”—what he calls “a community
informatics model.” Putting the emphasis on “smart communities” rather than on

“smart cities” would “enable and empower citizens and support their individual and
communal quests for well-being” (Gurstein 2014). The focus on citizen initiatives and
potential tools that can support their attempts to improve city livability, rather than
on technology, is characteristic for research coming from a variety of disciplines:
community informatics (Carroll 2012), CSCW (Ciolfi et al. 2008), participatory
design (Bødker and Zander 2015), urban informatics (Foth et al. 2011a, b), and
urban interaction design (Smyth et al. 2013), to name just a few that inspired this
work.
“Hacking the city” initiatives are often characterized by punctual and short-lived
alterations brought to existing urban practices and places. It usually means doing
things differently, in a clever manner, with less resources and making things work.
Some of these initiatives fully rely on digital technologies, while others are using
these solely to look for information and inspiration or to communicate with peers.
Individuals, groups, networks, and communities are nowadays experimenting with
digital technologies, enabling urban interventions of varied nature and coverage.
The Hackable City Manifesto by Ampatzidou et al. (2015) suggests a classification
of these initiatives in three categories. The first category of projects is aimed at a
more sustainable management of resources. In the Irish context, a whole range of
such projects are concentrating on growing one’s own food (GIY—Grow It Yourself
network), urban beekeeping, using the energy of the wind or waves, personal weather
stations, and so on.
The second category of projects aims to improve social cohesion by bringing
people together and encouraging them to interact. In the Irish context, community
gardens, maker spaces, and cultural heritage community initiatives involving exhibi-
tions and performances—to name but a few—would all fit under this category. How-
ever, citizen initiatives like Transition Cities and CoderDojo that focus on bringing
people together to better manage existing resources (from energy to knowledge) are
a crossover between the first and second categories.
A third category of projects seeks to improve the livability of specific locations
in the city (Ampatzidou et al 2015). Tactical urbanism interventions are “intentional
actions changing their places” (Saitta 2014), where technology often plays a signifi-
cant role. According to Saitta, sometimes intangible interventions (intangible because
they often work with data and projections—rather than bricks and mortar) can cre-
ate new affordances in the city. City games, augmented reality used as “functional
graffiti,” mapping initiatives, media facades, and a wide range of public events can
“relieve social pressure, draw attention or change how people see problems” (Saitta
2014). Material interventions in space like Park(ing) Day, pop-up parks, yarn bomb-
ing, food markets have the purpose to introduce temporary changes. While most of
these initiatives are approved by the local authorities, unauthorized interventions like
guerilla gardening, guerilla grafting, and seed bombing are also gaining momentum.
The organization of hackathons is an attempt to bring volunteers with design and
coding skills together with representatives of local authorities in order to build new
software applications and platforms that could address city problems by making use
of Open Data (Haan and Höffken 2015). Hackathon events inspire the creation of
134 G. Avram
new digital tools (e.g., the HitTheRoad1 application that used Open Data to build
the first aggregated metropolitan transport live schedule for Dublin) or can serve to
design and build material interventions in place.
Many of these interventions are short lived and not part of a wider strategy. They
allow citizens to get involved in city-making in a punctual, short-term way, to try
things out.
In their Hackable Cities Manifesto, Ampatzidou et al. (2015) introduce the idea
of opening the city for and encouraging changes, in other words, making the city
“hackable.” Such a strategy would allow for successive incremental changes initiated
by various stakeholders, aimed at making the city more resilient and more livable,
with the direct involvement of its citizens. Using digital technologies, citizens would
“open up urban institutions and infrastructures to systemic change in the public inter-
est. It combines top-down smart-city tech-nologies with bottom-up ‘smart citizen’
initiatives” (ibidem).
As mentioned earlier, this would involve the presence of individuals interested in
city-making, of collective “hacking” practices (that can range from contributing to
crowdsourced data on potholes to building street furniture), and open institutions,
willing to share data and collaborate with other stakeholders (de Lange 2016).
3 Inhabiting the Augmented City
3.1 Global and Local Communities
Limerick is a city with over 100,000 inhabitants in the west of Ireland. The city, situ-
ated on the boards of the River Shannon, has a great natural position, a rich historical
past, and a good reputation for gastronomy, sports, and culture. Between 2009 and
2013, Limerick was severely affected by business closures—especially by that of a
Dell factory that was at the center of a whole ecosystem of local small companies.
The region suffered acutely from the lack of jobs, unemployment reaching higher
rates than in other parts of the country.
The wide availability of the Internet connectivity, mobile devices, and social media
applications made it possible for several local hybrid communities to emerge—some-
times inspired by other national or global movements. I will introduce a few here, in
order to provide more local context to the central topic of this chapter.
The local maker space, miLKlabs (made in LimericK labs), was inspired by similar
groups worldwide. It came into being in 2010, following the creation of a mailing list
for gauging interest, that progressed to face-to-face meetings after a couple of months.
The central Web site Hackerspaces.org, containing a list of worldwide hackerspaces
and advice on how to start and run them, as well as support received from similar
groups in Dublin and Galway, provided the necessary inspiration. The group worked
1 https://hittheroad.ie/about.
on a series of projects organized workshops and tutorials and maintained a public-

facing Facebook page, Google Group, and own Web site. The activity ceased in 2014,
the year when a Fab lab opened in the city and paying for maintaining an own space
became less attractive.
The Limerick OpenCoffee Club started to organize monthly meet ups in 2007; the
@LOCC Twitter account and the #LOCC hashtag provided the main communication
channel. The community was inspired by the global OpenCoffee model, offering a
face-to-face meeting place for entrepreneurs, developers, and investors. The com-
munity formed around a specific venue—the lobby of a local hotel—and a fixed
day—the first Thursday of the month. A Facebook page, a YouTube channel, and a
Google Community were added one by one later. In 2013, the community migrated
to a different venue and moved to an evening meeting time, rebranding as Start-up
Limerick.
CoderDojo,2 a global network of free, volunteer-led, independent, community-
based programming clubs for young people, was initiated in June 2011 in Cork. The
movement was consequently open-sourced. The Limerick-based Midwest Coder-
Dojo group started in September 2011; it uses Twitter, Facebook, and a mailing list
and has its own Web site. Parents register their kids for various programming work-
shops taking place almost every Saturday via the Web site. The community around
these weekly events continues to grow, and the movement has spread worldwide.
This is the only community still in existence and flourishing at the date when this
chapter was written.
There are a few characteristics that these groups held in common: (a) a regular
meeting place in the city, (b) regular dates and times, and (c) one or more digital
media communication channels that allow them to coordinate and keep in touch and
also to attract new members. Membership of such groups is usually loose—people
show up if they are available and interested, and newcomers are always welcome.
The digital media platforms they use (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, WordPress)
were all readily available, free to use, low threshold. In the case of OpenCoffee, for
more than a year, the only platform used was Twitter, with conversations revolving
around the #LOCC hashtag. In the case of miLKlabs, an individual interested in the
creation of a local maker space created a Google Group, and people interested in
this conversation joined and got involved. The initiator of the list left the city before
the face-to-face meetings even started, but due to the nature of the platform, this
did not affect the group. CoderDojo Midwest started with a Google Calendar, solely
signaling the dates when meetings were going to happen. This way, troubleshooting
and maintenance were kept to a minimum. The people who initiated these groups
chose the tools they were familiar with, and whoever was interested had to flock
to that channel. In time, the groups developed a more elaborated media presence
(Twitter, Facebook pages or groups, WordPress Web sites)—when it was deemed
necessary, and when specific members volunteered to take care of this.
For the majority of them, several administrators/moderators were appointed, to
allow the community to grow and function whenever the initiators were not available.
2 https://coderdojo.com.
136 G. Avram
Fig. 1 Backchannel Twitter conversation during Local Heroes TV show broadcast
The digital media platforms employed emphasized the openness of these groups
to new people and new initiatives. As these were highly informal structures, they
allowed for a lot of flexibility and made specific things happen, only to disappear
when a more formal organization appeared to fill that need, or the need simply ceased
to exist. All these local examples demonstrate how digital media is used by different
groups to appropriate (“hack”) the city and its infrastructure.
Having described the context, I am now moving to presenting the case study that
constitutes the focus of this chapter.
3.2 Limerick Local Heroes
In 2011, RTÉ, the Irish national radio and television broadcaster, created the Local
Heroes show, in order to encourage local initiative (at national level) in “fighting back
against the recession.” The first series, broadcasted in the autumn of 2011, focused
on Drogheda, a town in the Boyne Valley (Fig. 1).
While the show was being broadcasted in November 2011, a number of individ-
uals based in Limerick triggered a conversation on Twitter about starting a similar
initiative in Limerick. A hashtag (#limerickurmylady) was spontaneously chosen for
the conversation, inspired by a local anthem by Denis Allen titled “Limerick, You’re
a Lady!”3 .
The idea of the television show was to empower local communities to take their
fate in their own hands, reinvent themselves, and create jobs. The RTÉ Web site
offered a set of step-by-step instructions meant to help any community to replicate
the actions seen happening in Drogheda: setting up a Town Hall meeting, finding
hub, creating a team, running an Ideas Summit, creating a jobs buddy scheme, and
a mentoring program for start-ups.4
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Allen_(singer).
4 http://www.rte.ie/localheroes/.
The Limerick group came together inspired by this shared goal: encouraging the
locals to think outside the box and bring changes to the almost desperate situation by
mobilizing local volunteers. These were people who shared the belief that complain-
ing and blaming the local authorities and the central government were not going to
lead to any positive change in the economic and social situation of the city. They had
every intention to do it themselves.
While taking the successive steps recommended by the RTÉ guidelines, the group
expected to gain national visibility by being the next city profiled in the show in 2012.
However, as it took RTÉ time to find a new sponsor for the show, a call for new groups
was only issued in December 2012, when the Limerick group was already in full
swing, had hacked the template provided by creatively adjusting it to local conditions,
and had created its own flavor of “local heroism.”
3.2.1 The Preparatory Phase
A small initiative group first met face to face in October, after having conversed
on Twitter during the TV show. They continued to meet every Tuesday in a public
city center venue. In the space of a few weeks, the group grew from 10 to more
than 60 members. A date—30 January 2012—was set for the Town Hall meeting,
recommended by the RTÉ guidelines as a first step for going public and getting the
citizens’ support.
The group contacted RTÉ staff working on the show, inviting them to get involved
in filming or broadcasting the Limerick Town Hall meeting. The answer was encour-
aging, but funding and show planning matters led to the suggestion to approach the
issue in a DIY manner. The local group then invited the same film crew involved in
the filming and production of the RTÉ series “Local Heroes—A Town Fights Back”
in Drogheda, hoping that the footage could be broadcasted later on. RTÉ contacts
committed to publish the video online on the RTÉ Local Heroes Web page and
promote it through the show’s Facebook page and Twitter account. A local media
company also volunteered to record the meeting and shared the edited footage on
YouTube5 after the meeting, facilitating transparency and public awareness.
Four working groups (Logistics, PR & Marketing, Event Management and Net-
working) were formed, to focus on detailing responsibilities and assigning punctual
tasks. Through their personal and social media networks, the members spread the
word, inviting more locals to join the organizing team.
In a press release issued in preparation for the Town Hall meeting, the spokesper-
son for the Limerick Local Heroes Steering Group explained the motivations and
goals of the group:
“Limerick Local Heroes was born out of a frustration amongst genuine Limerick people
drawn from the arts, business, sporting & community sectors who believed their voices
haven’t been heard in developing a future vision for Limerick, particularly in terms of job
5 http://youtu.be/GN9Bl_PC84o.
138 G. Avram
creation.” Press release, Public Meeting to kick start Limerick Local Heroes Initiative, 20
Jan 20126
The Town Hall meeting was intensely promoted through local media channels,
digital media platforms, and through volunteers who distributed flyers in popular
weekend venues throughout the city. Rather than trying to hack existing structures,
the group used the template provided by the TV show to build a new, open structure,
making extensive use of digital platforms, but also targeting directly those who, for
a reason or another, are not active on such platforms.
3.2.2 The Public Events
The preparation of the public events presented here was the focus of the Limerick
Local Heroes initiative group ever since its emergence. The fourth section of this
chapter will present in detail the role of digital media in the organization and running
of these events. The initiative group followed a ready-made template that involved
specific steps and events that proved successful somewhere else. This systematic
approach was never questioned, and although the group added a local flavor and
roles to the approach, the steps were strictly followed.
The Town Hall meeting took place on January 30, 2012, in a city center hotel that
provided the facilities for free. The Eventbrite platform was used for registration, in
order to keep a count of the tickets, but a lot of people just showed up on the day.
The number of attendees exceeded 400. Short opening speeches were followed by
interventions from the floor. The meeting facilitator, a well-known TV personality,
made sure that the interventions were short and to the point. According to the brief he
received, he welcomed any ideas for improving the current situation of the city, but
emphasized that the proposers should be ready to assume responsibility for working
toward them. Complaining about the current state of things was simply not on the
agenda (Figs. 2 and 3).
More than 60 ideas were recorded during the night. Attendees who wanted to
share ideas but did not manage to present them at the meeting were encouraged to
submit them via the Web site. The open list of ideas was published online in the form
of a spreadsheet.7 The ideas ranged from down-to-earth organization of festivals and
major cleanup initiatives to more adventurous ones—like creating a boat bus line or
building a monorail to connect the city with the university.
The date of a second meeting, titled The Ideas Summit, set for 2 weeks later was
announced at the Town Hall meeting. During the following week, the echoes gener-
ated by the meeting and the positive reactions in the city led to an offer of a vacant
shop unit in a central shopping center, to serve as hub for the Limerick Local Heroes,
the offer that was accepted immediately. The hub was refurbished and brought to a
high standard (modern lights, furniture, separated in three multifunctional spaces)
with the help of a wide range of volunteers. Two weeks later, more than 300 people
6 http://limericklocalheroes.ie/publicmeeting/.
7 http://tinyurl.com/LmkLHIdeas.
Fig. 2 Preparing the Town Hall meeting
attended the Ideas Summit. The Summit was “designed to gather together a diverse
group of people with a shared interest in Limerick’s future. The process aims to create
a climate of possibility, a forum to help participants converse, think well together,
share points of view and develop new ideas with a view to creating unifying and very
realistic solutions” (excerpt from the Limerick Local Heroes blog post8 ).
The venue chosen for this meeting was Thomond Park Stadium, an iconic venue
for Limerick. A well-known public personality accepted to be the event’s main facil-
itator, while 30 other local facilitators, coordinated by a Local Heroes local profes-
sional facilitator, took the responsibility of moderating the discussions at each table
and communicating the ideas that came out of the discussion to the plenary. The
attendees were seated at tables, in groups of 10. The 2 hours of intense discussions
lead to some great ideas being put forward, most of them aiming to bring positive
changes in Limerick.
Notes were taken on the sheets of paper that covered the tables. The content of
these sheets was later on harvested, and the new ideas were added to the already
existing list available online by the 30 facilitators (Figs. 4 and 5).
8 http://limericklocalheroes.com/ register-for-the-idea-summit/.
140 G. Avram
Fig. 3 Town Hall meeting
3.2.3 The Long-Term Run
For the following month, the efforts were focused on opening the central hub to the
public and working with the citizens. The local business association found resources
for financing a full-time project manager position for a year, to ensure that the hub
would have dedicated staff. Four working groups called “pillars” were formed: Retail,
Tourism, 3Es (Enterprise, Employment, and Education), and Community. These
pillars coordinated the initiatives in each field and liaised with each other (Figs. 6
and 7).
During the previous phase, the regular weekly meetings in a local hotel were
extremely important for coordination. After the launch of the hub, the activity of the
group shifted to networking mode—members were available when needed and still
met regularly, but coordination was delegated to the project manager. Two journalism
students joined as interns for the summer, promoting and recording events organized
with the support of the Limerick Local Heroes group. The role of the hub was to
help people with initiative to access adequate support and find other volunteers who
could make things happen.
A whole series of initiatives that were first brought up at the above-mentioned
meetings developed and contributed—if not to an economic revival, to a sense of
empowerment, hope, and confidence in the ability to change things through city-
Fig. 4 Ideas Forum
wide collaboration. To mention only a few, an annual film festival dedicated to

Limerick-born actor Richard Harris, a series of lunchtime theater performances, and
the participation in a national Tidy Towns competition were made to happen by the
wide network formed around the Local Heroes group.
The successes of the Limerick group were the object of a RTÉ1 “Local Heroes
Christmas Special” TV show in December 2012. The announcement of a new series
of Local Heroes on RTÉ was made on that occasion. At this point, the Limerick
initiative had taken a course of its own—maybe less telegenic, but more attuned to
the realities of the city.
Between 2012 and 2013, the hub provided a meeting point for various groups and
initiatives in Limerick city. Career counseling and CV writing sessions for the unem-
ployed citizens were organized, job seekers were put in touch with local employers,
and various initiative groups used the hub for their meetings.
After the funding made available for the project manager and the rental agreement
for the hub ran out, the hub had to close its doors. The digital channels (Web site,
Facebook page, and Twitter account) owned by the group, however, were active for
another year, preserving the same ethos—supporting positive change in Limerick.
In September 2015, the Facebook page had over 2,000 likes and the number of fans
was still growing. The Web site went offline in 2014, and the Twitter account was
rebranded in 2014 as @limerickcity.
142 G. Avram
Fig. 5 Drafting ideas
4 Digital Technologies for Civic Action
Various digital technology platforms were adopted ad hoc by the Limerick Local
Heroes initiative. The #limerickurmylady Twitter hashtag played a major role in
the formation of the group. It provided transparency and awareness, sharing the
information about meetings and objectives with the group members and with the
public at large, and proved to be an excellent coordination mechanism for the first
steps.
Once the group started meeting weekly in November 2011, email exchange among
the members of the group became the second major communication channel. A list
of emails kept on evolving—for sharing details about the upcoming meetings and
events, and the minutes of the meetings. The mechanism was not ideal, but it was
favored as it allowed each member to select the recipients according to the subject of
her message. Occasionally, some addresses were accidentally left out from messages
intended for the whole group, creating coordination problems. The decision to use
email was natural. An attendance list was circulated at every meeting, and one person
took responsibility for adding every newcomer’s address to the existing list of emails.
A Facebook page was created immediately after the first meeting. A Twitter
account representing Limerick Local Heroes was set up by one of the members
Fig. 6 Getting the hub ready
(@LMKLocalHeroes), as well as a self-hosted WordPress Web site.9 Besides the

three community members working in IT (the author included) and volunteering
their time and services, several other members of the group volunteered to act as
content editors once the channels were set up. The login details for the Twitter
account were widely shared with the group, and all the members were encouraged
to use it and to interact with it from their personal accounts using the dedicated
hashtag, #limerickurmylady. All the members of the group who requested this were
given administrator rights for the Facebook page, so that they could post promptly
and answer to comments.
Eventbrite was used for free registration for both the Town Hall meeting in Jan-
uary and the Ideas Forum in February 2012, as preregistration allowed to capture
participants’ details. A newsletter was initiated in January 2012 and sent to all the
members of the public who came to either of the public meetings and indicated they
wanted to be kept up to date by leaving their email address or signed up for it later on
the Web site. The digital media channels were complemented with announcements
in the local press and radio broadcasts, posters and flyers, in order to reach out to the
member of the public who were not online. A group of volunteers was present every
Saturday in January and February at the Milk Market, one of the busiest spots in the
city, offering leaflets and engaging in conversations with citizens.
9 http://limericklocalheroes.com (gone offline in September 2014).

144 G. Avram
Fig. 7 Meeting with volunteers
An innovative touch was entering the ideas contributed during the Town Hall
meeting into a Google spreadsheet and making it accessible from the Web site,
for awareness and coordination purposes. At the Ideas Forum, some of these ideas
were discussed at tables and new ones were added to the list and posted to the
Web site via the spreadsheet. Starting with May 2012, the project manager and the
two interns took responsibility for maintaining the Web site and the social media
channels conversation, as well as the newsletter. Contributions from other members
were always welcomed.
Reflecting on the choice of digital media tools, they were each suggested by mem-
bers and accepted without resistance by the community. Each choice was discussed
in plenary meetings, and because the majority of the members were well versed
in using Facebook and Twitter, no training was needed. The face-to-face meetings
insured that everybody was up to date with the short- and long-term objectives of
the group, and taking turns using the Twitter account and posting to the Facebook
page presented a consistent image to the outside world. On some occasions, a few
members confessed that they refrained from posting when they were not sure they
were striking the right note and passed the messages to the chairperson instead.
The previous experience of some of the members and the free availability of these
digital platforms allowed the group to quickly set up a presence on several digital
media platforms and to maintain the dialogue with the general public. Although this
might not look like “hacking,” the fact that no approvals were needed, nobody had
to be hired, and all the platforms were set up in 1 week demonstrates the affordances
of digital media platforms for civic engagement. However, this would not have been
possible without the associated colocated practices and without the backing of media
organizations involved.
These digital platforms served as an enabler for organizing the public events and,
later on, the activity in the hub. They gave visibility to the initiative, allowed the group
to ensure transparency for its activities, and supported open and flexible membership.
The use of these platforms also magnified the collective effort, keeping the initia-
tive in the public attention.
Public awareness and support were important, so lurkers were always welcomed.
These uninvolved spectators were made aware that if, at any point in time, they felt
able to contribute something to the initiative, their contribution will be welcomed.
The variety of media channels used allowed the group to reach a significant part of
the local population. Multiple social tools were combined: a dedicated Web site/blog,
Twitter, Facebook, a Tumblr blog from a complementary perspective, as well as being
accompanied by a mailing list, a newsletter and print media. Although some content
was shared across all channels, most of the times content was purposely created for
each channel. The social media channels complemented each other and allowed the
group to reach its target audience. In the economy of the project, specific “digital
objects” (Crivellaro et al. 2014) like the #limerickurmylady hashtag, photographs
from events10 , and the list of ideas shared online played a very important role: They
were used in online conversations, shared extensively across different channels, and
in a way allowed those who were only marginally interested to witness what was
going on.
Decisions for specific matters to be made public or kept inside the coordination
group were made by the plenary. The members maintained close awareness of each
other’s actions via email, Twitter, or phone, and all activities were well coordinated
through the member’s self-organization efforts and without a formal hierarchy.
As the members of the initial group were coming from all paths of life and were
motivated by the idea of changing things in their own city, they brought in their
family members, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances and the enthusiasm of doing
something instead of passively waiting for things to change touched many locals. The
public events and the further developments captured the attention of local journalists,
bloggers, artists, and so on. The following comment is an excerpt from a post by a
very popular local blogger after the Town Hall meeting:
Ideas are not only good, but necessary. Without ideas, we’re nothing, but ideas in turn are
nothing without a guiding framework and that’s something we desperately need to do before
we go any further. We need vision. We need to identify the top-level issues and work from
there. If we don’t do that we’ll be condemned forever to throw out random, and doomed,
suggestions like monorails. (Bock the Robber 2012)
10 http://tinyurl.com/LLH-photos.
146 G. Avram
5 Discussion
The case I presented is not a typical city hacking endeavor. The intervention was
inspired by an official discourse promoted by the national television: In dark times,
the citizens should get together and help turn their town around. While the initial
motivation was to show the whole country that Limerick was a city capable of change,
in time this shifted inwardly, and the main goal became connecting people who were
willing to do something positive to improve resilience and livability in the city. It
was a response to a problem the city was confronted with, and the solution was not a
technological one. While activism took the front seat, technology and design played
more of a supporting role. Involving a variety of individual local actors, the Limerick
Local Heroes initiative avoided to associate itself with any political party or local
institution. The initial group was made of business people, artists, unemployed, aca-
demics, and others, listening to the voices of their families, colleagues, and neighbors
and bringing their stories to the fore. The aim was to support everyone in the city,
irrespective of their social, professional, or ethnic backgrounds.
The local authorities watched the initiative unfolding, as their role and authority
were not challenged. After a prolonged period of resource scarcity, they had come
to recognize and appreciate the contributions the citizens could bring. When invited,
public representatives came on board and supported the Limerick Local Heroes’
actions. The local business community fully embraced the initiative and supported it
(both morally and financially) throughout the whole period, as they were well aware
that a change in the economic climate would benefit them too. As noted by Williams
and her colleagues, these were “social actors positioned within flows of capital that
structure these spaces, negotiating their circumstances via independent processes of
mobility.” The social settings were indeed “rich and familiar,” and the environment
was “already thick with information technologies and infrastructures, full of mobile
people using mobile technologies” (Williams et al. 2009).
The steps followed fit well those described by Ampatzidou et al. (2015) in The
Hackable City Manifesto.
The initiative started with the definition of the issue: “The local economic situa-
tion is dire; let us try to do something to change this.” Rather than a single actor, a
loose group of people who were simultaneously watching the same TV show were
inspired to come together and follow the template of the TV show. The issue at
hand was communicated through both digital media platforms and traditional media
(local radio and newspapers) to the general public. Additionally, word of mouth and
printed leaflets and posters were used in the city. Attention was paid to the graphical
identity—the TV show logo was altered to read Limerick Local Heroes, offering
a connection to something well known to the public and a specific local character.
Group photographs including local VIPs (from rugby players to small business own-
ers) helped people connect with the group and its values. This way, a larger public
became engaged with the issue, through the online and offline campaigns, with many
of the members of the public volunteering to help.
The platform for collaborating with the public started with the two public meet-
ings: the Town Hall meeting and the Ideas Summit. The Web site played a similar
role online. When the hub opened in spring, it became the main venue for meetings
and activities. The platform allowed the gathering, categorization, and transparent
sharing of ideas for local initiatives. During the two public meetings, and later in the
hub, community members and volunteers were able to discuss the feasibility of var-
ious initiatives and the resources needed. Several of the initiatives formulated were
put in practice by citizens who found each other due to the group’s intermediation.
Some of these initiatives took a life of their own and were continued by those who
founded them. Some others disappeared after a year or two. Although the Limer-
ick Local Heroes group ceased its existence, several of its former members are still
collaborating in other local initiatives.
Ampatzidou (2013) critiqued the “widespread rise of active citizens” and the per-
ceived lack of efficiency, representativeness, and accountability of such initiatives,
showing that “self-organizing systems are quick and direct, but they are also tempo-
rary and have no real impact on legal structures.” Although the case presented here
had, indeed, no impact on legal structures, I argue that it had an impact on weaving
the social fabric and created trust, a precedent and opened the way for other citizen
interventions. The quick and direct self-organizing system described was in existence
for about 18 months, achieved its strategic goals and left a lasting impact on the city
as a whole, and on the local authorities’ appetite to partner with local organizations
and communities in the future.
Saitta (2014) suggests three ways of evaluating the quality of alterations brought
about: How they “change people’s understanding of the city”; how they “create or
help affordances”; and how they “help make spaces more human and alive.” In
this case, the Limerick Local Heroes initiative has triggered a significant change in
understanding the city, moving the balance toward a proactive attitude and taking
pride in the city. Valuable communication and action affordances were created, and
the city center gradually came back to life. Social media played a paramount role
in this direction, contributing considerably to the transformation of a desolated and
unfriendly space into a familiar place (Avram et al. 2013).
Saitta (2014) also showed that informality plays a vital role in urban interventions,
making them possible “outside of sanctioned spaces,” but in many situations this
is accompanied by a direct social cost. In this case, no permission was sought or
obtained. Using a logo and a name created by the national television and following
a pre-established formula and course of events, nobody questioned the legitimacy of
the group. Its openness and lack of hierarchical structure led to decisions being taken
by consensus in most of the situations. In this case, the informality of the group’s
work was complemented by formal elements taken from the formula of the TV show
and later on by setting up a proper structure for the initiative. Rather than being
the urban backdrop for designing and developing a technological intervention, like
in many research-through-design approaches, or the field for experiments “in the
wild,” in this case the city played the role of the object the community attempted to
remodel, without the involvement of urban planners, just by mobilizing, connecting,
and coordinating existing resources—mainly human actors.
148 G. Avram
6 Scaffolding—Potential Templates for Civic Activism
I defined scaffolding earlier in this chapter as building on an existing, publicly known,

openly available model of community and adopting its modes of interaction, roles,
tools, functions, ideas, and values. I showed how scaffolding inspired and facilitated
the emergence of local communities such as miLKlabs (the local maker space),
Limerick Transition City, Limerick OpenCoffee, and Midwest CoderDojo. While all
these movements found their inspiration primarily online, the civic activism initiative
presented here was triggered by a formula used in a national TV show (supposed to
present a different Irish city every couple of months), before emerging and developing
with the support of digital media platforms.
Scaffolding offers the advantage of providing a shortcut and introducing trans-
parent goals and success criteria. Rather than trying to create a community from
scratch, which involves at some point formulating a mission statement and goals
(in any shape or form), embracing a ready-made formula that is open and hackable
already implies adherence to the values exposed by the model. Scaffolding facilitates
adapting initiatives that have worked elsewhere to hack the design of the city. It also
provides communication with and support from a national/global community.
Building on an existing, known template for creating a community involves adopt-
ing and adapting its:
• Modes of interaction: face to face and/or online, frequency of, and preferred loca-
tion for interaction;
• Digital tools, ranging from Google Calendars and mailing lists, through own Web
sites to Facebook pages or groups and Twitter hashtags or accounts;
• Specific roles: champions, initiators, chairperson, founding members;
• Functions: providing a hub for facilitating networking, creating an own space,
knowledge sharing facilitation;
• Goals and values: from providing free computer training to kids to creating jobs
or supporting new entrepreneurs.
Scaffolding has the advantage that it gives those participating the feeling of being
part of something bigger, putting the community on the map. Eventually, many of
these communities outgrow their initial model and disappear. Such endeavors can
have a remarkable impact on local communities. The social fabric is woven, and the
network continues to exist when one community is gone; new initiatives are built on
existing networks.
7 Conclusions
In this chapter, I examined a citizens’ intervention that can be regarded as “hacking”;

the initiative empowered citizens to organize themselves around a communal issue
and enact urban interventions at economic, social, environmental, and cultural levels.
Starting from a formula created for a TV show that provided scaffolding and brought
the community together in a very short interval of time, 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. In recent years, initiatives like “Limerick City of Culture 2014” and
“Team Limerick Clean-Up” have built on the former experience and networks, offer-
ing hackable, purpose-designed formulas and a social media platform to the public
to organize their own events. Demonstrating trust and openness for partnership, this
development provides an example of top-down curation of bottom-up city-making
initiatives, opening the way toward hackable institutions.
References
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Gabriela Avram is Lecturer in Digital Media and Interaction Design, senior researcher at the
Interaction Design Centre of the University of Limerick (Ireland) and an active member of the
Adaptive Governance Lab. Building on a Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Knowledge
Management background, her current research focuses on the design and development of tech-
nologies for civic engagement in urban communities. In parallel, she is also working on design-
ing interactive technologies for cultural heritage settings with an emphasis on co-design. Gabriela
has worked on numerous international research projects on topics such as: adult learning, cultural
and social aspects of collaboration, distributed work practices, Open Source communities, and the
adoption and uses of social media for work-related purposes in various environments. Currently,
Gabriela is the chair of the COST Action CA16121 From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-
Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy, that she initiated in 2016. Gabriela has published
extensively in international conferences and journals. For a complete list of publications, check her
personal website at http://coniecto.org.
Removing Barriers for Citizen
Participation to Urban Innovation
Annika Wolff, Daniel Gooch, Jose Cavero, Umar Rashid and Gerd Kortuem
Abstract The potential of open data as a resource for driving citizen-led urban inno-
vation 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 Our MK initiative provides sup-
port 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 prob-
lems. 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
A. Wolff (B) · D. Gooch · J. Cavero · U. Rashid

Department of Computing and Communications, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
D. Gooch
J. Cavero
U. Rashid
G. Kortuem
Design Engineering Department, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of
Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_8
154 A. Wolff et al.
large complex data sets. Through our two approaches, we illustrate some of the barri-
ers to citizen participation in urban innovation and detail our solutions to overcoming
those barriers.
Keywords Big data · Data literacy · Citizen participation · Citizen engagement

Smart cities
1 Introduction
Citizen-led smart city innovation is increasingly considered to provide an important

counterbalance to the more traditional official-led planning. This shift from ‘citizens
as users’ to ‘citizens as active participators’ and finally to ‘citizens as innovators’ is
partially driven by the increasing number of open data sets that can be used to drive
urban innovation (Anderson and Rainie 2012; Janssen et al. 2012). The expectation
that citizens are able to first identify and then carry forward solutions to local problems
is based on the premise that citizens have sufficient understanding of big data, smart
city technologies and how open data can be used to drive urban innovation. While the
average citizen is relatively comfortable in the use of technologies and the Internet
for daily activities, big data and smart cities are new phenomena and therefore less
familiar. As a consequence, the ability for citizens to use the available data and
resources may be limited to those in society who already have good technical skills
upon which to draw, such as those who would typically sign up for the wave of city
Hackathons and Appathons that have been seen in recent years, the target audience
for which is unlikely to reflect a good cross section of society.
This chapter will describe how we are aiming to remove barriers for citizen par-
ticipation to urban innovation within the MK:Smart project (http://www.mksmart.
org). This project is developing smart technologies for the city of Milton Keynes
(MK), UK, in three key areas of energy, water and transport. Central to MK:Smart is
a data hub which is aggregating both specific project-related data sets and other open
data sets. The data hub, in turn, is available for businesses to develop applications,
for citizens to create citizen projects and as an educational resource to teach data
skills in schools. This chapter focuses on the latter two uses, through three related
initiatives within MK:Smart.
The first initiative is the Community Action Platform for Energy (CAPE) project
which has a focus on enabling bottom-up community energy projects. The second
initiative is an ideation and innovation platform called Our MK (www.ourmk.org).
The platform allows the crowdsourcing of ideas from citizens to change the city,
some of which are funded to turn their idea into a reality. The third initiative is the
Urban Data School (UDS) which is a school engagement programme, teaching data
skills in schools using some real Milton Keynes data sets in the domain of energy.
This is given focused attention within this chapter as the work with the young citizens
becomes important when considering how to address some of the barriers revealed
through the first two initiatives in terms of engaging citizens with data.
Removing Barriers for Citizen Participation to Urban … 155
Based on an analysis of these related projects within MK:Smart—CAPE, Our MK

and Urban Data School—we highlight the role of professionals and intermediaries
in the process of making a city hackable due to their ability to help the public engage
and organise around issues and provide them with skills, in particular data literacy
skills. In the remainder of this chapter, we will describe each of these projects in
detail before identifying a number of barriers to creating hackable cities.
2 MK:Smart
Milton Keynes is one of the fastest growing cities in the UK. Its population is expected
to grow from around 230,000 today to over 300,000 by 2026. Such growth cre-
ates unsustainable pressure on key local infrastructure, particularly transport, energy
and water. Each of these resources is already operating close to full capacity. The
MK:Smart project is developing technology solutions aimed at addressing these
issues and making Milton Keynes more sustainable in future. To support the tech-
nological innovation, MK:Smart is putting in place a data hub1 through which all of
the project-related data sets are aggregated along with additional open-source data,
such as from the Milton Keynes Observatory (http://www.mkiobservatory.org.uk/)
that contains data specific to Milton Keynes, open government data (such as cen-
sus data), weather data and crime data. MK:Smart has put community engagement
activities at the heart of its strategy through instigating three separate initiatives. This
choice was made as it was felt that the citizen-centric activities would provide an
interesting and important counterbalance to the more traditional ‘top-down’ activi-
ties that were also happening within the project, such as devising apps and services
for improved energy efficiency, water use and transport.
3 Citizens as Innovators
There are both philosophical and practical reasons for promoting citizen participation
in smart city projects. From the philosophical perspective, the argument is clear;
those people that live in a community should have a sense of control over how that
community is run. From a practical perspective, there are benefits to both individuals
and city at large. For those who engage with civic affairs, benefits include increases in
self-esteem, acquiring new skills and making new friends (Clary and Snyder 2002).
Additionally, it has been noted that areas with ‘good citizenship’ get a better quality
of service from their local government than areas with poor citizenship (Pattie et al.
2004). From the city perspective, by improving engagement and interaction, local
authorities will become more aware of citizen needs and can better serve the public
(Torres et al. 2006).
1 http://www.mksmart.org/data/.
156 A. Wolff et al.
Recognising these benefits, some of the MK:Smart project activities have focused
on engaging with citizens. Participatory Design approaches highlight how innova-
tion can be amplified and citizen involvement prioritised (Carroll and Rosson 2007)
through bringing together a variety of stakeholders. While citizen engagement is
key, intermediaries have a significant role to play in achieving this through providing
expertise and scaffolding the hacking process.
3.1 Community Action Platform for Energy
The Community Action Platform for Energy (CAPE) project will develop a platform
to enable bottom-up social action through fostering the development of community
energy initiatives, which can make a better use of energy, reduce CO2 emissions and
moderate citizens’ fuel bills. This platform will connect citizens with a number of
energy-related data sets and will provide them with a range of analytic capabilities.
Citizens will in turn provide their energy information, which will help to understand
how energy is consumed in Milton Keynes, identify the factors influencing this
consumption and highlight opportunities and potentials of future energy projects.
In addition to data provided by citizens, data sets provided by the platform will
comprise a mix of open and licensed urban data, including, but not restricted to, satel-
lite and aerial imagery-derived data sets (such as ground source heat pump poten-
tial), socio-economic data (such as selected census data) and energy data sets (such
as domestic electricity consumption data). Analytics will comprise basic statistics
values such as average, median and standard deviation to characterise features under
inspection, and more advanced statistics and inference mechanisms such as cluster
analysis to group together householders with similar characteristics. The platform
will also support the representation and exploration of spatial data in the form of a
queryable map, which will be useful to represent satellite and aerial-derived data.
Citizens will be able to use the platform in different ways. Individual householders
can use the platform to explore their consumption patterns, their insulation levels and
their potential to install solar panels, compare them with general trends in Milton
Keynes and with other people and learn from the experiences of others. With this
information at hand, they can decide if there is potential to improve the use they make
of energy. The platform will connect householders to users with similar interests and
to existing communities they could be interested to join. In case a user would like
to lead a new project, the platform will provide them with information about how
to start a community energy initiative, funding opportunities, existing technologies
that could fit their initiative and advice and good practice examples from existing
projects.
Existing communities will be able to share their projects and experience within the
platform. This will allow them to gain visibility amongst potential new members and
to foster the growth of the projects. Additionally, they will benefit from the data sets
provided by the platform and the data provided by users about their consumption
patterns, measures they have taken to lower their bills and energy infrastructure
they have in place, such as solar panels. Communities will also use the analytical
capabilities provided by the platform, which could help them to make better informed
decisions and find potential householders interested in their initiative. Therefore,
this platform will support active collaboration amongst communities and individual
users, facilitating the collective identification, analysis and interpretation of data sets,
inspiring and guiding collective action that will empower communities to collectively
decide how they want to consume energy. Communities will then play a key role to
maintain energy security, tackle climate change, save money for citizens and help
those in fuel poverty.
3.2 Our MK—Supporting Citizen Innovation
In addition to researcher-led innovations such as CAPE, in which researchers choose

the domain and frame the space of possibilities for engagement within it, the
MK:Smart project adopts a user-centred approach and has set aside resources to
support the development of citizen projects that ‘hack’ Milton Keynes. These citizen
projects are conceived, designed and implemented by citizens with support from
the MK:Smart team. We have developed an online platform (www.ourmk.org) that
facilitates this process, capturing the ideas of citizens, from which the project team
select a number to be realised.
To support the citizen projects, an online platform has been developed (www.
ourmk.org). The Our MK initiative captures citizen ideas for changing the city for the
better. Citizens have been able to apply for funding and support from the MK:Smart
project to turn their idea into a reality. There have been 13 successful projects realised
this way. Our MK acts as a starting point for dialogue around which projects are of
interest to the citizens, are feasible to create and are likely to make a difference
to the city. Those projects that fulfil these criteria are being funded and supported,
thereby helping citizens to hack their city. Key to the success of this platform is
the involvement of Community Action MK (CAMK), an organisation who support
communities within MK, in particular engaging with the more disadvantaged and
lower socio-economic regions to speak with citizens and discover their concerns.
CAMK provide valuable insight into how to engage the public with the ideas of
MK:Smart and to further elicit project ideas. CAMK act as mediators, first learning
themselves the key ideas and then working out strategies for community engagement
and knowledge exchange.
To help bootstrap the platform and encourage citizens to post their ideas, CAMK
have utilised their ten Community Mobilisers. Community Mobilisers are individuals
whose role is to support people to have a voice in their community. The Community
Mobiliser approach is based on the premise that residents are the experts about what
they need and want and should be supported to play an active role in decision-making.
Mobilisers visit areas within Milton Keynes that are identified by the council as being
most in need of community support and engage with citizens through a range of
one-to-one conversations, group discussions or hosting stands as part of community
158 A. Wolff et al.
events. Mobilisers have expertise in engaging citizens and eliciting their issues and
concerns, which are recorded, actioned and followed up. As such, these individuals
are key intermediaries in organising and mobilising citizens, helping to achieve cities
that are hackable.
In addition to the work of the Community Mobilisers, we have also been engaging
citizens through targeted workshops and roadshow events. Six workshops were con-
ducted between April and September 2014, attended by a total of 104 Milton Keynes
citizens (with 33 citizens attending multiple workshops). From these workshops, we
collected 198 dialogues related to sustainability concerns in Milton Keynes. Sub-
sequent dialogues have been collected as part of ongoing roadshows which started
in October 2014 and have visited 22 locations so far, with many more planned in
the coming months. This process has so far elicited 591 dialogues. These can be
loosely categorised according to the main smart city topic they address: 43.7% of
conversations related to transport issues, 34.2% to energy and 22.1% to water.
Ideas alone are interesting but where we deviate from previous crowdsourcing
approaches (e.g. Schuurman et al. 2012) is that these ideas are then refined into
viable projects that have both a strong plan of action and a team of volunteers to
carry them out. Since the Our MK website went live at the beginning of July 2015,
over 3,500 people have visited the site, viewing nearly 17,000 pages of the site. Fifty-
one ideas have been posted to the site of which 14 are being considered for support.
The ideas we have received are extremely diverse ranging from promoting low-cost
solar installations to drilling water bore holes, from installing digital signage on cycle
paths to developing a scheme to promote locally grown food. Details on the ideas
we have received, and the projects we are supporting, can be found on the Our MK
website (www.ourmk.org).
4 Challenges to Facilitating Citizens as Innovators
Through developing our approach to facilitating the ability of citizens to hack their
city, we have identified a number of open questions. We have had to produce answers
for some of these questions such that the MK:Smart project can progress; we note
that these answers are not optimal and remain open to discussion.
The first important issue that needs addressing is that of governance and con-
trol—who has control over what projects are encouraged and realised? Within the
programme, we have outlined the provision of funding and expertise is still governed
by MK:Smart meaning that ultimately we as researchers have control over which
citizen-led projects are realised. The majority of citizen hacks will require some
form of resources—be that money, time, technical expertise or access to organi-
sational policies—that are not always easily accessible to groups of citizens. An
important issue then remains of determining who should control the hackability of
cities? While city councils have democratic legitimacy, ‘hacking’ can be understood
as attempts to circumvent official interventions or to demonstrate a need to demo-
cratic institutes. Should citizens be able to hack their cities without interventions
from research projects, councils or businesses? Where do the required resources

come from and how do you form groups around particular issues without a single
central authority? These are significant and complex questions which need to be
considered if we want to open up innovation to ordinary citizens.
This is particularly complex when we consider how long-term strategic impact
is engendered. Long-term success necessitates that projects have stable sources of
money and a commitment from citizens to be involved in the project over a long
period of time. The MK:Smart project plans on helping successful citizen-led projects
become sustainable through using our contacts with the business community and
CAMK’s experience of creating charities, co-operatives and community enterprises
to ensure that any project which has had a positive impact can continue to benefit the
local community. While this approach is inherently unscalable, due to the resources
committed by the research team, as far as the authors are aware no other project has
attempted to create sustainable projects and developing a mechanism to facilitate
such projects remains a challenge.
An additional issue we continue to grapple with is the dissemination of results to
other smart city projects. Many of the findings or issues we have uncovered are of a
practical rather than academic nature and are not necessarily suitable for discussion
within academic publications. How then do we discuss, experiment and improve upon
our methodologies for engaging and supporting citizens in developing innovations?
Furthermore, it is not yet clear how transferrable results are from one city to the next.
Each city has its own governance structure, sense of community and set of challenges.
Sharing best practice is key to ensuring that cities become hackable without repeating
the mistakes of others; how that is best achieved is not yet clear.
One approach to facilitating citizens’ innovation is to simply release data sets to
the public (Williams 2015). However, releasing this data and expecting city-level
hacks to occur organically are relatively optimistic. The UK government has opened
up its non-personal, non-sensitive data sets for other people to reuse through the
data.gov.uk website. At the time of writing, there are 24,992 different data sets and
only 372 apps. Generating 372 apps is a big achievement but is orders of magnitudes
smaller than what could be achieved using these data sets.
The idea of ‘hacking’ a city or developing a city-centric app requires not only
a host of technical skills but also an appreciation of data as a resource for change.
This ties into the idea that citizens need to have a certain level of data literacy to
be fully empowered. Big data and smart cities are new phenomena and therefore
unfamiliar to many people. For example, the dialogues the MK:Smart project has
gathered from citizens have been processed into 101 ideas around improving the
local community which do not focus on the use or generation of data. These range
from Segway hire schemes to heated bus shelters, from better lighting on the cycle
network to community-funded water butts.
The idea of ‘hacking’ a city has got to account for the issue of the digital divide
(Norris 2001). The digital divide is instantiated in three forms across smart city
projects—who is producing the hacks, who is using the hacks that are produced and
160 A. Wolff et al.
also who is producing the data used for the hacks. In each case, at the moment the
answer is technologically aware users—a small segment of the population as a whole
and, arguably, the citizens who are least likely to need help in improving their local
communities.
5 Addressing the Digital Divide Through Data Literacy
The digital divide essentially faces two challenges. First, in the short term, we need
to develop approaches to open up the possibilities that data gives in terms of hacking
cities. But while increasingly a large amount of data is accessible to a large segment of
population, only a few people are at home with the interpretation and analysis of data.
This disparity between data access and data literacy may add to digital inequality,
thus hampering the empowerment of citizens and contradicting the purposes behind
the openness of data (Anderson and Rainie 2012). Therefore, in the longer term we
need to tackle the problem by raising the general level of data literacy amongst school
leavers such that they can become more informed citizens.
Data literacy is typically defined as the ability to explore, interpret, analyse and
contextualise data. It may include a wide and diverse range of skills such as ‘the ability
to: formulate and answer questions using data as part of evidence-based thinking;
use appropriate data, tools and representations to support this thinking; interpret
information from data; develop and evaluate data-based inferences and explanations;
and use data to solve real problems and communicate their solutions’ (Vahey et al.
2006). This implies that teaching and improving data literacy would require a cross-
disciplinary approach.
There have been some previous projects that have focused on improving data
literacy of school children. These tend to incorporate activities both inside and outside
the classroom. Lee and Drake (2013) made use of students tracking and reflecting on
their own physical activities to learn concepts such as the impact of outliers on means
and medians. The City Digits project of Williams et al. (2014) aimed at teaching data
literacy skills to school children by encouraging them to investigate social issues in
local, urban context. While these projects no doubt present interesting approaches
for teaching specific data skills with small, personally collected data sets, they do
not address the particular challenges of data literacy related to asking questions,
analysing and drawing conclusions from large externally sourced data. The Urban
Data School project focused specifically on how to engage young learners with large
data sets they had not collected themselves.
6 The Urban Data School
The Urban Data School (UDS) is an initiative designed to improve data literacy
amongst 8–18-year-old school students. The UDS aims to create a next generation of
Fig. 1 Urban Data School—connecting schools to real urban data
school leavers who are comfortable in asking and answering questions from data, who
can critique data, use it as evidence to tell stories and who can recognise opportunities
for using data to their own benefit or the benefit of their community. The UDS will
connect schools, teachers and students to real, urban data sets and provide support for
students to get hands on with data and begin to ask and answer their own questions.
The MK:Smart data, as provided through the data hub, provides a starting point for
testing the approach, providing local schools with data sets related to their local
area. The eventual aim is to integrate additional data to make the UDS a national, or
possibly international, resource (Fig. 1).
6.1 Conducting Inquiries with Real Urban Data sets
An approach has been developed for teaching data literacy using real-life urban data
sets based on the principles of data inquiry and using PPDAC (Wild and Pfannkuch
1999) as a starting point for structuring tasks from urban data sets. The approach
is designed to prompt students to use their interpretation of a ‘snapshot’ of a larger
data set as a starting point for understanding how to frame further questions around
the same data set or to bring in new data to the inquiry. Thus, students improve
their ability to formulate and answer questions from data. Students are supported in
learning how to create answers to questions which use data as evidence and to present
these as stories. Tasks use real data that has been used as part of smart city research.
While on the one hand students replicate to some extent the existing research, there
is the possibility that students can find novel questions from the data and potentially
produce some really innovative outputs. There are no correct questions to ask of the
data, but the aim is to ensure that students present an answer that is backed up by
evidence.
162 A. Wolff et al.
6.2 Data
Several energy-related data sets have been identified for use in schools. One is smart
meter data from a number of Milton Keynes homes that can be used to ask and
answer questions related to home energy consumption across one or more houses, to
investigate individual appliance use or to find how much energy is produced by solar
panels at different times of the day or year. Another is aerial-obtained data relating to
the potential for houses in Milton Keynes to have solar panels, which can be used to
ask and answer questions related to whether or not all buildings are suitable for the
placement of solar panels. Finally, a heat loss aerial survey can be used to ask and
answer questions around thermal efficiency of different houses, or types of building,
across different estates in Milton Keynes.
6.3 School Trials
Lesson plans based on these data sets have been trialled in four schools—one primary
school (year 5–9/10 years) and three secondary schools (2 with year 9–13/14 years,
1 with year 7–11/12 years)—in Milton Keynes. What follows is a high-level analysis
of some of the results. Feedback from these trials indicates that schools have a
clear interest in using real data sets, especially those related to the local context.
Teachers report good engagement in sessions using these activities. Observations of
students in both age groups reveal good competence in interpreting graphs of energy
consumption (Fig. 2) and generation (from solar PV) and a good ability to interpret
map-based visualisations and cross reference to other sources of data in a table. Both
students and teachers have—on some occasions—been seen to ask novel and valid
scientific questions (questions that were testable through the data) that was not part
of the original teaching or student materials. This indicates that the materials can
support this type of reasoning. Secondary school students further demonstrated that
they were able to construct and execute their own queries and visualisations of data
to begin answering some of their questions.
In addition to lesson plans based on existing data, students in two schools have
been asked to design their own mobile phone app for smart city innovation. The
app design sessions were run competitively. Student worked in groups and presented
their ideas to everyone at the end.
The goal was to gain a better understanding of the conceptual difficulties students
might face when thinking how to design solutions for their homes and communities.
One group were given an open-ended task in which they could identify themselves a
potential source of data to drive the mobile phone application to address some local
issue. The other group were asked to assess their own home energy consumption by
effectively being a ‘smart meter’ and recording usage of individual appliances. This
group then was asked to find a novel way to visualise energy use in a home and to use
this visualisation somehow within a mobile phone app for monitoring home energy
Fig. 2 Primary school children interpreting energy consumption graphs
Fig. 3 Visualising energy as a tree
use. Students worked in groups and were tasked with thinking how a collective data
set across a number of homes could be used as part of the app design.
These design sessions reveal that, without prompting any ideas, students find dif-
ficulties in creating novel data visualisations that are beyond their normal experience
with graphs and charts. However, with support students can begin to imagine new
ways to create visualisations. One example of energy visualisation is shown in Fig. 3.
164 A. Wolff et al.
Fig. 4 Judging the Walking Wardrobe app
Students also seem to have difficulty in comprehending how data that is collected
from across a geographical area—e.g. from people or sensors—might be reasoned
across to find knowledge to drive a smart city application. Students tend instead to
think of collected data as a very localised resource that can be used as a ‘lookup’ to
address an individual’s need. As an example, students might propose to collect data
from people about their clothing size and shopping habits. This was the idea behind
the ‘Walking Wardrobe’ app shown being judged in Fig. 4. Instead of thinking how
this collective data source could be used to identify clothing trends in Milton Keynes
or inform shops about sizing of the population to better stock appropriate quantities
of stock in the right size and style, students want to use this data to match individuals
clothing requirements against the database of clothing shops in the Milton Keynes
area so they can find where to go and shop for clothes.
Through working with teachers to prepare lesson materials and observing their
use in the classroom, it is clear that teachers themselves can have some problems
with working with these types of data sets. This can cause teachers to be reluctant to
bring the materials into the classroom and teach something that they themselves are
not familiar with. It is possible to overcome this barrier with a small group of teachers
through individual discussions around the teaching materials and lessons. The goal
of the UDS is just not to educate students but to engage the teachers themselves in
learning more about working with and from these types of data sets.
7 Discussion and Conclusion
In this paper, we have described three distinct projects, linked through a common
theme of urban innovation from city data. They each reveal some of the difficulties
that citizens, who are not expert in smart cities and data analysis, face when engaging
with complex urban data and in framing solutions to problems around it.
The CAPE project presents a researcher-led approach to innovation, in which
the problem space is mapped out by researchers and an infrastructure built within
which citizens can then identify common areas to start discussing community energy
initiatives. This mitigates against many of the problems that citizens face in engaging
with data by doing a lot of work ‘upfront’ to constrain the possibilities and support
much of the interaction with data through easy to access visualisations. However,
this facilitated approach, while it has obvious benefits, has the effect of reducing the
space for creative innovation from the citizens themselves. The Our MK approach, on
the other hand, is completely unrestrained, at least initially. Citizens are free to frame
problems and solutions in any way they choose. However, this freedom is currently
short-lived as only a few selected projects are taken further, and these are selected
by the project team. Similar to CAPE, the realisation of the ideas is facilitated by
researchers. The main difference is that in CAPE, the researchers choose the domain
and in Our MK this is sourced from citizens. In both cases, the citizens themselves
are part of implementing the solution. Our MK has also revealed that citizens find it
difficult to frame problems around complex data and may miss some of the benefits
that this data, as a resource for civic hacking, can bring.
Thus, through our work on the MK:Smart project, we have identified a number
of substantial barriers as to how to encourage citizens to first identify the types of
problems that can be addressed through data and then how to organise citizen projects
to implement sustainable solutions. Specifically, we have identified that:
1. The majority of citizens are not data literate. We have proposed the Urban Data
School as a solution for ensuring that the next generation are more data literate.
However, it will be many years before they form the bedrock of a city’s citizens
and we must continue to explore mechanisms to educate older generations about
how to use data effectively.
2. There remain open questions with respect to governance and control regarding
citizen-led projects. Currently, all of the MK:Smart citizen initiatives remain
under the control of the project. For us to enjoy truly hackable cities, we have to
construct policies and governance models which allow citizens a greater degree
of freedom in their hacking activities.
3. Financing and resourcing hacking projects remain a challenge. While a variety
of options are available (crowd-funding, philanthropy, corporate sponsorship to
name a few) until hackable city initiatives can highlight that they have led to
meaningful change within the city, accessing these sources of funding remains a
challenge.
166 A. Wolff et al.
4. Sustaining and scaling citizen initiatives are essential if hackable cities are to
become effective at generating real change. However, identifying the mechanisms
to do this is not easy and is not the typical focus of most research-led projects.
5. Sharing best practice is essential to the success of making cities hackable. How-
ever, the practical nature of much of this practice, and the unique challenges each
city faces, means that how to effectively share these practices remains an open
challenge.
These barriers are huge challenges to citizen innovation. We have overcome some
of these barriers within the MK:Smart project, utilising community engagement
techniques and long-term planning to develop solutions to unlock the potential of
the citizens of Milton Keynes.
We do not want to conclude with a statement of doom and gloom. Early class-
room trials have demonstrated the effectiveness of the UDS approach in eliciting
novel questions and developing data literate students. Similarly, the Our MK ini-
tiative has highlighted the innovativeness and creativity of the citizens of Milton
Keynes in developing ideas to address the sustainability challenges the city faces.
This chapter and the work reported highlight the importance of researching how to
overcome barriers to citizen innovation to ensure that citizens are fully aware of their
environment and the possibilities they have to shape the cities they live in.
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Williams, Marie. 2015. Open data or closed doors? Centerforcities. http://www.centreforcities.
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Annika Wolff is a researcher at Lappeenranta University of Technology and a visiting Research

Fellow at the Open University. Her research interests lie at the intersection between complex data,
machine and human learning. Her main research focus is on human data-interaction. She is also
interested in using urban data for revealing cultural narratives across a city. Other research inter-
ests include learning analytics as well as the use of tangible technologies, games and narratives to
motivate learning.
Daniel Gooch is a lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications at the Open Univer-
sity. He is principally a human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher. His research interests are
motivated by wanting to understand how we can best design technology to fit within, and where
necessary change, peoples practices and behaviour. The work he does is interdisciplinary cutting
across computer science, psychology, information science, design and education. He has led the
Citizen Innovation strand of the MK:Smart Smart City project, focussed around the Our MK ini-
tiative, investigating how to facilitate citizen-led innovation within Smart City projects. His other
research interests include the design of interpersonal communication technologies and educational
technology. He can be found online at http://www.danielgooch.co.uk.
Jose Cavero is Research Assistant: Computing and Communication Department, Faculty of

Mathematics, Computing and Technology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. He has
worked on the projects MK: Smart and CAPE: the Community action platform for Energy.
Umar Rashid did his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. His research
interests lie in software engineering and human-computer interaction with mobile and ubiquitous
computing systems. The broader goal of his research is to explore the design and evaluation of
intelligent interactive systems that can facilitate novel ways of collaboration among people and
improve their quality of life. He has worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Open Univer-
sity, University of Kent, University of Lincoln.
168 A. Wolff et al.
Gerd Kortuem is Professor of Internet of Things at the Design Engineering Department, Fac-
ulty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. He also holds an asso-
ciate professorship at The Open University in the UK, where he was deputy-director of the Milton
Keynes smart city project MK:Smart between 2013–2016. His research focuses on the Internet of
Things, Smart Cities, Human Computer Interaction and Data Science and explores the design of
connected products and services for a sustainable future.
Part III
Hackers and Institutions
Working in Beta: Testing Urban
Experiments and Innovation Policy
Within Dublin City Council
Fiona McDermott
Abstract 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.
Keywords Urban governance · Citizen engagement · Experimentation

Urban innovation · Scalability
1 Introduction
Beta testing is rarely done in the field of placemaking, which is ironic considering that the
longest-lasting products we create are the places in which we live. (Ermacora and Bullivant
2015, p. 76)
While the means, and degree to which citizens participate in urban development
projects has been under scrutiny at least since the late 1960 s when Arnstein cate-
gorised the levels of citizen participation in A Ladder of Citizen Participation (1969),
over the past decade, local governments and city authorities around the world have
come under renewed pressure to open up their processes and investigate new and
F. McDermott (B)
CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and Communications, Trinity College, University of
Dublin, Dunlop Oriel House, Fenian Street & Westland Row, Dublin 2, Ireland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_9
172 F. McDermott
alternative models for citizen engagement. A combination of factors that incorporate

the shrinking budgets of local governments (Forlano 2013), a growing perception
of declining social inclusion and cohesion (de Lange and de Waal 2013) and the
rejection of traditional consultation processes in urban design projects (Beebeejaun
2016) have all contributed to a growing public appetite for alternative modes of
citizen engagement in urban decision-making processes. Advancements in digital
and networked media technology have also played a significant role in increased
expectations from citizens for public engagement in matters pertaining to their local
environment (Ermacora and Bullivant 2015). This includes the significant role of
social media as a tool for facilitating citizen engagement and collaborative design
in urban design projects (de Lange and de Waal 2013; Saunders and Baeck 2015),
the emergence of social platforms that allow communities to form around concepts
and causes (Ratti and Claudel 2016), as well the availability of new platforms for
hosting dialogues between citizens and local government (Ermacora and Bullivant
2015), which have collectively contributed to ‘a new definition of the urban public
sphere’ (de Waal 2014).
As a result of these changes, both citizens and city authorities have started to look
for new ways to include citizens in urban decision-making and planning in more
empowering, democratic and meaningful ways. The concept of parklets (Merker
2010)—the conversion of parking spots or other underused public space into tiny
parks, complete with greenery and seating—illustrates a citizen-led initiative that
has since been adopted as an official city programme. Parklets were originally a
public space hack by the artists and urban interventionists group ‘Rebar’ in San
Francisco in 2005, which allowed the group ‘the freedom to experiment with our
chosen medium—public space—without the risks inherent in public bureaucracy’
(Bela 2015). When the city saw that they could create an avenue for businesses and
residents to apply for a permit to convert underused street space into an amenity that
served the community better, they adopted the strategy as an official city programme.
Similarly, initiatives such as New Lots Triangle Plaza (New York City Department
of Transportation 2011) in New York—a community requested public space project
to enhance streets and support local businesses—also demonstrated this new collab-
orative approach to city-making, as it was implemented through the government in
collaboration with a non-profit organisation and the local business owners.
Attempts by city governments to open up their processes have contributed to the
emergence of urban innovation labs in different cities around the world (Crawford
and Walters 2013; Saunders and Baeck 2015; Townsend 2013). Commonly, these
labs have a direct connection to the public sector (city council, local government)
and have been developed to challenge complex public issues that more traditional
governmental structures seek to resolve. With the general aim of developing innova-
tive solutions to urban problems, the labs are typically made up of designers, public
officials, and local business and community members. An example of one such lab is
‘New Urban Mechanics’, an initiative based within city government in Boston that
experiments with new designs and policies with a strong emphasis on civic engage-
ment (Townsend 2013; New Urban Mechanics 2016). Lauded as a successful case in
its ability to facilitate collaborations between various city government departments
Working in Beta: Testing Urban Experiments and Innovation … 173
and the public (Crawford and Walters 2013), New Urban Mechanics has also man-
aged to expand into a network of civic innovation offices, whereby individually, each
civic office builds partnerships between internal agencies and outside entrepreneurs
to pilot projects that address residents’ needs and then as a network, lessons are
shared so that good practice can be scaled more rapidly (New Urban Mechanics
2016).
The above examples of citizen engagement originating from both citizen-
led and government-led resources can be understood to exhibit some impor-
tant common lessons and challenges. For example, the approach of implement-
ing trial projects ‘on the street’ and seeking public opinion as exemplified by
both the parklets and the urban innovation labs could be seen as viable alter-
natives to traditional citizen engagement measures. Indeed, in terms of the key
outputs of urban innovation labs, citizen engagement is sometimes perceived
to be as important if not more important than the actual innovation itself.
This is illustrated through the case of the aforementioned New Urban Mechan-
ics, for which the co-chair Chris Osgood has described the public engage-
ment factor to be more important than the innovation itself, stated that the
new offering ‘should be a distant second, relative to improving new models of
civic engagement or adding value to the lives of constituents’ (Townsend 2013,
216).
But while the examples of implementing parklets and plazas illustrate the poten-
tial of hacks to the city’s public space and demonstrate public engagement on a local
level, there is debate as to whether a localised approach such as this diminishes the
possibility of achieving cohesive city design. In ‘The Fall of Public Man’, Richard
Sennett argues that contemporary design for community has been based on an inabil-
ity on the part of urban planners and designers to deal with the city as a whole. He
debates that designing for small-scale community can undermine the city at large
and encourage the establishment of isolated fractions. This splintering can make the
city difficult to govern and can hinder participatory planning processes. He laments
that ‘…today planners have largely given up hope on properly designing the city as
a whole—because they have come to recognise both their own limits of knowledge
and their lack of political clout’ (Sennett 1977, 294). On the other hand, in describing
the preferable scale for rolling out smart technology innovations, Anthony Townsend
comments that historically a local scale has been the best approach for policy inno-
vation as this scale makes it ‘easier to engage participants and identify problems, and
the impact of new solutions can be seen immediately’ (Townsend 2013, 10). Clearly,
there are outstanding questions concerning the systemic application and viable scal-
ability of citizen and local government-led initiatives such as those mentioned here,
as well as questions concerning the role of physical interventions themselves.
In this chapter, the case of Dublin City Council (DCC) Beta will be explored as
a concrete instantiation of one such local government-led initiative. Stemming from
the identification of a need for the city council to be able to innovate through the
use of experimentation and to engage more actively with citizens, DCC Beta was
initially proposed as a ‘10% Innovation Time Project’ by a staff member of the City
Architects’ Division in 2012 and later became a formalised City Architects project
174 F. McDermott
in 2015, before being discontinued in 2016. During that intervening time, DCC Beta
was developed for the purpose of experimenting, innovating and quickly testing ideas
directly ‘on the street’. The next section of this chapter will explain the origins, the
guiding principles and the general operations and processes of the DCC Beta. This
will be followed by a section dedicated to describing three individual DCC Beta
Projects as detailed case studies and finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion
of the outcomes, successes and shortcomings of the DCC Beta platform.
2 The Story of DCC Beta
The need for city governments to rethink their processes and investigate alternatives
to citizen engagement resulted in the emergence of local government-led initiatives
such as the urban innovation labs. But within this type of initiative, there was also a
need for new mechanisms to allow for experimentation with new ideas outside of the
traditionally restrictive operations of local government. This challenge of overcoming
commonly arduous planning hurdles and red tape led to the initiation of a new model
for trialling small-scale projects in the city.
2.1 The Origins of DCC Beta
Conceived of as a means of bypassing the normal lengthy and bureaucratic process

of implementing trial projects, Dublin City Council (DCC) Beta operated from 2012
to 2016 as part of the City Council’s Architects’ Division as a live mechanism to
trial, assess and implement test ideas directly in the city. According to the DCC
Beta website, ‘Dublin City and Dublin City Council need to be able to easily and
regularly freely discuss ideas and to innovate—and to innovate you need to be able
to experiment and to then learn from those experiments, and which in turn enables
greater discussion’ (DCC Beta 2014).
The initiative was instigated as an individual response to the realisation of how
difficult it was to trial ideas in the city council, and also the lack of personal motivation
that results from the hierarchical structures in the institution. DCC Beta was also
prompted by the observation that certain previously realised public realm projects
by the city council that were described as trials (i.e. projects to be implemented on a
temporary basis) but were in effect irreversible without major disruption. New ideas
receive a cautious reaction in the city council, so a need was identified for a platform
that allowed experiments to happen independently from other formal projects. In
addition, DCC Beta also sought to find a place to discuss new concepts and not the
specific location that prompted them.
In January 2012, DCC Beta was proposed as a ‘10% Innovation Time Project’ by
a staff member of the City Architects Division, the division of approximately thirty
members of staff, which is responsible for promoting design and providing architec-
tural, urban and conservation design services to Dublin City Council (Dublin City
Council 2016). DCC Beta operated on two primary levels. Firstly, it developed so-
called Beta Projects—individual physical projects for testing micro-scale solutions
to problems in the city that were usually supplemented by a high level of citizen
and local business involvement. Secondly and in parallel with the development of
Beta Projects, DCC Beta developed the Beta Model, as an approach to develop an
‘innovation ecosystem’ within DCC which would enable city council staff to become
accustomed to the idea of experimentation and evidence-based learning within the
city council.
The first Beta Project went live in March 2012. DCC Beta was primarily led by a
single staff member from the City Council’s Architects’ Division while other mem-
bers of staff had also been self-selecting themselves and getting involved with various
Beta Projects as required. These ‘diagonal slices’ (i.e. not adhering to hierarchi-
cal structures) across the organisation formed non-grade-based teams with different
competency staff addressing different parts of the problem and solution.
According to the DCC Beta Report (2016), the initiative had run fourteen projects
in total, six of which were scaled to a certain degree and one that had become a
formalised stand-alone project. Examples of the types of projects include the imple-
mentation of novel forms of bicycle parking solutions and hangars, the design and
implementation of parklets, the trialling of rain box planters and the creation of
platforms for public art initiatives. In addition, the Beta Projects had supported and
informed the development of the Beta Model. This model was an attempt to establish
an innovation ecosystem within the city council which would improve the capacity
of city council staff to innovate and provide them the capability and road map to
do so in a controlled environment. The Beta Model also aimed to improve the sys-
tematic accumulation of internal knowledge so that this knowledge could be shared
efficiently across innovative projects and teams within the council.
2.2 Key Principles of DCC Beta
As part of its operation, DCC Beta relied on a number of key elements and principles
which included using lean techniques, leveraging public feedback, adhering to deci-
sion classification and measuring itself. A dominant influence on DCC Beta was the
Lean Startup, an influential book in start-up culture which promoted experimenta-
tion, iterative testing and validated learning as aspects of a successful methodology
for developing businesses and products (Ries 2011). Techniques and elements of this
Lean Startup process were adapted and tweaked by DCC Beta in order to better suit
their use with the complex issues and opportunities that cities and local government
tend to face. For example, one of the techniques was to use ‘Lean Resourcing’, which
meant trialling projects only for as long as was required to test assumptions and to
only make solutions as big as they need to be to effectively test the idea. Another Lean
Startup technique borrowed by DCC Beta was to follow a ‘Build-Measure-Learn’
loop when trialling projects. This technique focuses on rapid iterations of product
176 F. McDermott
development whereby emphasis is put on quickly building a product or prototype,

measuring its effectiveness in the real world, and then learning from that experiment.
While approximately half of the Beta Projects originated as a result of suggestions
from city council staff internally, the other half were made up of those suggested by
the public via the DCC Beta website and social media channels and so public input and
feedback played a pivotal role for both the origin and development of the individual
Beta Projects. Social media channels were very active, and regular blogposts on the
project website were designed to communicate the processes being developed as part
of DCC Beta and to update the public on the status of specific Beta Projects. Through
these media, public feedback was actively encouraged and commonly questions are
asked of the public, for example, ‘What do you think of the idea?’ or ‘How could you
see the idea being used or changed?’. The use of project-specific hashtags on social
media was also encouraged in order to generate debate and to aid people in following
the conversation. Because Beta Projects were trialled ‘in the real world’ as soon as
possible, this enables DCC Beta to see how an idea was actually performing in real
life, and it also allowed the public a chance to give feedback and suggestions during
the early stages of a project while it was still relatively easy to change direction.
As part of drawing up the process for DCC Beta Projects, one of the issues that
emerged was the need to have a more coherent mechanism for prioritising project
suggestions and defining which projects would be developed. For example, when the
issue of on-street dumping was initially explored under DCC Beta, it became appar-
ent that it was potentially a popular project with multiple high-quality suggestions
coming from the public and city council staff, of how to address the problem. It also
became clear that on-street dumping represented a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Web-
ber 1973), i.e. a highly complex problem with multiple feedback loops, which would
require multiple different Beta Projects. In order to be able to deal with a complex
challenge such as on-street dumping, DCC Beta would need to develop a mecha-
nism for concurrently managing and prioritising multiple Beta Projects. Therefore, a
framework was proposed by DCC Beta that enabled individual larger challenges (e.g.
on-street dumping, housing) to be defined as a result of input from senior manage-
ment of the city council, as well as elected officials and DCC Beta staff. Then, below
each of these larger challenges would fall the individual Beta Projects by per sugges-
tions from citizens and DCC Beta staff. This framework would allow for projects to
be prioritised succinctly and transparently while communicating (internally and for
the public) what projects were being undertaken. The framework also enabled senior
management input into larger challenges while maintaining a hands-off approach to
individual projects.
Arising from ‘Build-Measure-Learn’, another Lean Startup technique, a metrics
system was also developed by DCC Beta and applied as a means of assessing Beta
Projects once a trial had lapsed. In doing so, the metrics system provided evidence of
the impact of individual Beta Projects, allowing DCC to make actionable decisions
about each Beta Project and justifying requests for additional DCC resources to spe-
cific Beta Projects. This wide set of metrics was defined based on the experience
of developing the individual Beta Projects in order to reflect both the experience of
the public and the council. They included a number of hard metrics (e.g. cost, time
and resources, demand and transferability) as well as soft metrics (e.g. perception,
engagement, sustainability and resilience). These soft metrics were based on qualita-
tive feedback from the public as collected during the trial, for example, questioning
how the project impacted on their perception of the area where it was trialled or what
impact a project had on their sustainable travel choices.
2.3 The Process for Beta Projects
Beta Projects followed a rigid A–F process, as devised by DCC Beta staff for the
purpose of applying a systematic methodology to each of the individual Beta Projects.
Below is a brief description of the individual steps.
• Step A: Awareness—What is the issue or opportunity that needs looking at? Aware-
ness of an issue can come in three different ways: ‘bottom-up’ (based on sugges-
tions from citizens), ‘middle-out’ (based on everyday awareness of an issue or
opportunity by Dublin City Council’s staff) or ‘top-down’ (based on issues raised
by Dublin City Council’s management or Central Government/EU policy changes,
etc.).
• Step B: Baseline—What’s the situation around it as of today? How much is spent
on the current solution? Are there other issues that directly or indirectly result out
of the issue?
• Step C: Create Knowing—A + B above, what are all of the various ways this could
be solved?
• Step D: Decide—Prioritisation of the various solutions.
• Step E: Effect, Evaluate, Evolve—Prototyping of solutions in order of priority
to test all of the assumptions around it and application of evaluation metrics. As
necessary, evolution of the idea over multiple iterations.
• Step F: Formalise—Once a solution has been found, it is formalised, usually in
the form of an open report. In some cases, formalisation will also require that
policy arrangements are adopted in order to formalise the idea, for example, to
resolve any planning issues, financial/staffing/departmental issues, legal issues,
procurement and council policies.
At the end of a Beta Project, a ‘Beta Project Report Card’1 is compiled, the objec-
tive of which is to let people know how the Beta Project went, what was measured,
how feedback and suggestions were taken into account and what the outcomes of
the project were.
By employing the above described metric system, the intention was that it would
reveal a simple, clear, decision for DCC Beta staff at the end of each Beta Project. The
decision would then fall under one of the four following classifications, as originally
devised by DCC Beta:
1 For an example of a ‘Beta Project Report Card’, see https://dubcitybeta.files.wordpress.com/2015/
11/beta-project-report-card-public-full-bike-hangar-version-1-1.pdf (accessed 01 June 2017).

178 F. McDermott
• Pull (wouldn’t appear to be a good solution in any way, time to pull it);
• Pivot (use what has been learned in order to make a major change in direction);
• Persevere (on right track, need to learn more);
• Policy (would appear to be a good solution, formalise as necessary—e.g. planning,
hard infrastructure).
For example, a Beta Project might undergo three iterations before a good solution
is found. The first two Beta Project Report Cards (as compiled and evaluated by DCC
Beta staff) could report the need to ‘Persevere’ and then the final Report Card would
report the need to move to ‘Policy’. While on the one hand, this classification system
ensured the provision of a clear and definite decision, it was also acknowledged by
DCC Beta staff, that the system was not without its own limitations, in that there was
often internal disagreement amongst DCC Beta and city council staff on which was
the correct decision to take and who should have the executive power to decide.
3 Beta Projects
This section will detail the cases of three Beta Projects—the Bike Hangar, the Street
Parklet and the Traffic Light Box Artworks—as examples of how the DCC Beta
process was applied. These three examples serve to illustrate different cases that
have undergone varying degrees of scaling and formalisation. The Bike Hangar is an
example of a Beta Project that had completed a single iteration and the Street Parklet
an example of a Beta Project that had undergone multiple iterations, while Traffic
Light Box Artworks is a former Beta Project that has become part of a formalised
policy. The case studies demonstrate a number of details including how the decision-
making processes evolved, how the Beta Projects were assessed and the varying
degree to which the public and external stakeholders had an influence on the project
outcomes.
3.1 Case Study 1—The Bike Hangar Beta Project
The origins of this Beta Project stemmed from the identification by city council staff,
of a need to better support people in storing their bicycles near their homes in a safe
and convenient manner. Addressing this need also aligned itself to the Dublin City
Council 2011–2017 Development Plan, which prioritised promoting cycling as a
sustainable mode of transport in Dublin. The need to address this issue was further
reinforced when in October 2013, DCC Beta held a public workshop in collaboration
with ‘City Intersections’, an urban forum for the city of Dublin. The workshop gave
people a chance to come up with their own Beta Projects by asking them three
questions. The questions included: ‘What is the problem or opportunity you see?’,
‘Why is it a problem for you personally?’ and ‘How might this issue be addressed?’.
Afterwards, members of the public explained their ideas and potential solutions and
the idea of providing bike hangars emerged as one of the top items that people would
like to have had addressed.
Subsequently, DCC Beta began to explore the idea of on-street bicycle hangars
as a solution for residents to better store their bicycles. Because this was a city-wide
issue, the focus of the research was around policy and if/how it should be done.
Another major focus for the Beta Project was to test public reaction to the idea.
A public call looking for a household to trial the proposed hangar was issued via
social media in Autumn 2014. In addition to the call, a set of discussion points were
published in relation to the proposed hangar, in order to provoke public discussion.
In January 2015, on choosing a household and location for the Beta Project, a single
Cyclehoop hangar was installed on John Dillon Street in Dublin’s south inner city.
This specific location was chosen on the grounds that the street generally had a low
occupancy of its car parking provision and had a low rate of through traffic, as well
as the fact that it was in close proximity to the relevant Dublin City Council staff.
Six individuals from four households took part in this trial of a single bicycle hangar
at this one location.
Following the installation, news reports on local and national media reiterated
the call for feedback on the hangar from the general public. At a very early stage, a
spokesman for the council stated that 100 submissions of feedback had been received
since the first hangar was installed last week, and that ‘almost all’ were positive.2 In
addition, tours of the hangar were offered by DCC Beta staff to the public via social
media during lunchtimes and evenings on three occasions. The bicycle hangar was
removed at the trial end (as per the Beta plan), after 5 months.
The evaluation of this first iteration of the Bike Hangar Beta Project showed
that the trial participants reported that using the hangar was a generally positive
experience. It also showed that there would appear to be a large demand for this
solution ranging from the city centre to the inner suburbs but that distance to the
nearest hangar and aspects such as pricing could be expected to have an impact on
this.
After submissions have been evaluated and discussed internally amongst the var-
ious city council departments, a decision of ‘Persevere’ was made with the scheme.
This means that while the first iteration of Beta Project was successful, further learn-
ing is required as to how the hangar might work in alternative locations and another
iteration of the trial would be developed before it would be considered as a policy.
2 Sam Griffin, “Public asked to get behind new bike ‘hangars’ in Dublin”, http://www.independent.ie/
irish-news/public-asked-to-get-behind-new-bike-hangars-in-dublin-30949725.html (accessed 01
June 2017).
180 F. McDermott
3.2 Case Study 2—The Street Parklet Beta Project
As a result of a suggestion from a member of the public, this Beta Project began to
look at the ‘Street Parklet’ concept—an idea which involved converting a parking
space into a ‘mini-park’, very often to act as an additional resource space for a
nearby business. In preparation for this Beta Project, the key staff member behind
DCC Beta spoke to the organisers of Park(ing) Day Dublin3 (a one-day festival that
hosts parklets around the city) and also to a number of business proprietors who
had expressed interest in the idea. It was decided to locate the first iteration of the
Street Parklet Beta Project on a parking spot outside of a pub on Capel Street, a
busy mixed-use street in the north inner city of Dublin. In selecting a site for the
parklet, there was specific criteria including that the trial site would be reasonably
visible/busy, that it wasn’t too busy from a traffic and parking point of view, that the
site would be watched over by an interested party and that a need for a parklet would
be reasonably realistic—i.e. somewhere where people might like to be able to sit
outside. This location was partly chosen as there was a lower level of pressure for
car parking there than surrounding areas and through traffic was relatively low. As
part of Park(ing) Day Dublin, a local landscape architect had previously proposed
a one-day parklet at this location, and so he was chosen to design and install the
parklet as a Beta Project.
The parklet was popular with the business management, and their customers and
noncustomers appeared to have also felt welcome to sit at the parklet. The staff at the
pub were very supportive of the parklet (both in seeking out its installation and also in
its maintenance). Each night at closing, the pub staff removed the temporary seating
and replaced it upon opening the following day. This first iteration of the Street
Parklet Beta Project was in place for two weeks. Much of the feedback received
indicated that it had a positive effect on the immediate area and that there was an
unmet need in the city and opportunity for the city council to further explore policy
on long-term parklet provision in the city. In terms of changes to the public realm,
parklets appear to have the capacity to provide a more interesting street experience
as they animate both sides of the footpath, in a way that pavement chairs and tables
cannot. According to recommendations as set out in the Beta Project Report Card, ‘as
a result of observations, and conversations with, parents and children at the parklet,
there may be ways that such a policy could find ways to encourage city-living by
families or encourage parents to visit the city centre with their children, or as a
draw for specific businesses in the city. This option should be further explored’.4
In conclusion, it was decided that a series of longer trials in diverse locations and
scenarios would be beneficial to better assess the potential impact of parklets on the
local residential and business community.
Following this, in May 2015, a second iteration of the Street Parklet Beta Project
was temporarily installed next to a cafe on South William Street, in the south inner
3 ‘Park(ing)Day’, http://www.dublinparkingday.org/parking (accessed 01 June 2017).

4 ‘Report Card Street Parklet’, https://dubcitybeta.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/report-card-street-
parklet (accessed 01 June 2017).
city of Dublin. The second iteration, which was in place for three months, featured a
new parklet design that was designed, fabricated and installed by the city council’s
own joinery workshop and while in operation the parklet, was tended to (swept it in
the mornings and watered the plants as necessary) by the nearby cafe. The parklet was
designed to have a basic, generic, design so that the debate would be primarily about
the concept rather than being overly focused on the aesthetics. Both iterations helped
DCC Beta see what practical issues or opportunities might arise from parklets and
inform any possible related policy. In terms of impact on the city, it appeared that the
parklets were popular in both locations and that there was a certain level of demand
from other businesses. Following subsequent evaluation of the second iteration, a
decision was again made by DCC Beta staff to ‘Persevere’ with the parklet scheme,
meaning that the idea was worth pursuing further but would require further iterations
with trials in alternative locations before being considered as a city-wide policy.
3.3 Case Study 3—The Traffic Light Box Artworks Beta

Project
This Beta Project was seeking to solve an ongoing maintenance issue due to tagging,
graffiti and stickering of traffic light boxes and the ongoing need to repaint with
associated costs. A secondary aim was the improved visual amenity and creation of
locally referenced talking points. The solution proposed was that by putting artworks
onto the boxes we could remove or alleviate the need for maintenance, while improv-
ing the public realm experience. The first iteration of this Beta Project took place
in the Markets Area of Dublin as here there were eleven suitable traffic light boxes.
There was an open call for expression of interest in painting these boxes with art and
a defined brief was given. This Beta Project only looked at artworks on the boxes, and
not any forms of commercial work or advertising. Once submissions had qualified
(i.e. fit the criteria—which all submissions incidentally did), they were voted on by
those who had participated and those with a stated interested who were invited to
an open meeting. Eleven designs were selected from fifteen submissions. The boxes
were then painted over an agreed period of time to maximise affect and the trial ran
for twelve months from June 2012 to July 2013. Commentary on social media and
from local business and residents was very positive. Some pieces were favoured over
others, but this is naturally subjective.
On evaluation of this Beta Project, it was verified that the objective of reducing the
amount of graffiti/tagging and the associated costs of removal which is a significant
direct cost saving to Dublin City Council had been achieved. It was also evident
that the Traffic Light Box Artworks were successful in adding to the visual amenity
of streets and were very popular with both locals and tourists. In the light of this
being a proven solution to addressing the maintenance issue of traffic light boxes,
the decision taken was ‘Policy’, as per the DCC Beta decision classification, and
plans were made to develop the necessary policy. The traffic light boxes Beta Project
182 F. McDermott
was the first and only Beta Project to progress to this stage, an achievement which
DCC Beta staff attributed to the fact that it was a positive and quite easily defined
project.
However, it is worth noting that the decision to formalise the project and roll it
out on a larger scale posed a new set of challenges for DCC Beta as the question now
arose as to who should run the fully-fledged initiative. In the end, ‘Dublin Canvas’5
an independent community art project with a particular interest in the traffic light
boxes artworks, volunteered to manage the project but the shift from a trial to a
formalised project, demonstrated that DCC Beta still had a lot to learn in terms of
scaling up initiatives and adopting appropriate business models.
4 Discussion
In discussing the outcomes of DCC Beta, the reasons for which DCC Beta could be
seen as an approximated form of ‘City Hacking’ will be elaborated on. Additionally,
the discussion features a summary of the valuable lessons that the experiences of
DCC Beta can offer to other city governments who wish to develop a culture of
innovation and experimentation. In conclusion, some of the notable shortcomings of
the project are outlined and finally, further associated development and research for
the institutionalisation of hackable city practices are suggested.
4.1 DCC Beta as an Approximated Form of ‘City Hacking’
In the context of a conservative and risk-averse institution, the instantiation of both

the Beta Model and the Beta Project suggests an attempt of developing an unconven-
tional approach to traditional city-making from within the city government itself and
so it could be argued that DCC Beta is a form of ‘urban hacking’. More specifically,
through the individual Beta Projects, DCC Beta is seen to embrace trial projects and
to leverage the collective intelligence of the public in order to develop micro-scale
solutions to urban problems, while the development of the Beta Model itself is seen
as a genuine attempt to develop an ‘innovation ecosystem’ within the city council
and therefore introduce a systematic methodology which enabled city council staff
to cut through the institutional silos and to become accustomed to the idea of exper-
imentation and evidence-based learning. By providing staff with the capacity and
clear road map to innovate in a controlled manner, the Beta Model has the potential
to overcome barriers to change while also ensuring the resilience of solutions that
are being developed.
5 ‘Dublin Canvas’, http://www.dublincanvas.com/ (accessed 01 June 2017).

4.2 Lessons from DCC Beta
DCC Beta demonstrated that it was possible to temporarily implement projects in the
city with an alternative approach in order to support iterative testing, better public
engagement and to better manage risk through the use of the beta testing method.
Whereby the traditional approach to testing out ideas and implementing projects
can be costly and long drawn out (as every eventuality is attempted to be worked
out in advance of implementation), DCC Beta allowed the city council to test new
ideas in a different way that emphasised learning through small-scale experiments
with the potential to scale up. This approach enabled a process of continual learning,
reflection and evaluation which resulted in better insights and data on which a later
project brief, or a tender, could be based.
In addition, DCC Beta leveraged the diverse wealth of local and expert knowledge
that existed outside the city council through engaging with citizens and organisations
in the development of the individual Beta Projects. The strong focus on maintaining a
public discussion around the Beta Projects via on-street reports cards, blogposts and
social media, allowed DCC Beta to tap into the collective intelligence inherent to the
wider public while also making it easy for the public to have a say on the individual
Beta Projects. Equally, by creating physical on-street prototypes, each Beta Project
developed as a talking point between the city council and the public. And while Beta
Projects were not classified as conventional or direct public engagement initiatives,
by their very physical and visible nature, they were noted as being one of the council’s
most successful examples of citizen engagement.6
4.3 Potential Future Development and Research
Although the advantages of sourcing ideas from the public and greater citizen engage-
ment are clear, one of the issues that emerged over the course of DCC Beta was the
need for a coherent mechanism for prioritising projects. So, although on the one hand,
the described framework for prioritising projects (which organised individual Beta
Projects suggestions under large city-wide challenges) added a welcome structure
to the hierarchy of projects and demonstrated how the city council were working on
several large issues with short- and long-term solutions, on the other hand, it opens
up significant questions about the decision-making behind the Beta Projects. And
while DCC Beta placed a strong emphasis on taking into account suggestions, input
and feedback from citizens, as well as the development of a metrics system (some
of which were based on public feedback) to evaluate the Beta Projects, the decision-
making processes around Beta Projects are firmly dictated by senior management or
staff members of the city council. This restrictive level of participation inherent to
DCC Beta is also noted by Cardullo and Kitchin, whereby they suggest that this type
6 ‘Some Councillors want DCC Beta Projects Back’, www.dublininquirer.com/2016/12/07/some-

councillors-want-beta-projects-back (accessed 01 June 2017).
184 F. McDermott
of participation is ‘often instrumental rather than empowering in a political sense’

(Cardullo and Kitchin 2017). Further development of DCC Beta might thus seek
to incorporate a more transparent, open and democratic system for the purpose of
decision-making connected to DCC Beta.
Another important issue that warrants further investigation as part of any future
development of DCC Beta concerns scalability as arguably the real challenge in
urban innovation and governance is providing a solid framework that allows ideas
to take hold and grow. As Anthony Townsend acknowledges, ‘the grass roots may
be a source of new ideas, but what they need is someone who can design and deliver
a robust infrastructure that is centrally planned to be safe, efficient, and reliable at
a reasonable cost…Scaling up things that work at the grass roots is a challenge few
have overcome’ (Townsend 2013, 165).
The failure to scale DCC Beta is inevitably dually linked to the modest resources
behind the project while in existence and the fact that in December 2016, a decision
was made to discontinue DCC Beta. According to the City Architects Divisions, the
official reasons for this discontinuation were due to the lack of resources and finance,7
which is understandable considering the undeniable pressures on the City Architects
Division in the context of the severe ongoing housing crisis. Since the discontinuation
of DCC Beta, a subsequent pilot project called ‘Framework’ has been initiated as
a joint initiative of Dublin City Architects Division and the American Institute of
Architects to empower ‘communities to improve their built environment through
an open, collaborative and systematic approach’.8 A subsequent report published
as part of the Framework pilot presents a set of recommendations and while the
pilot approach is arguably more integrated and holistic approach to one defined area
of the city centre than that of the single intervention approach of DCC Beta, it is
interesting to note that many of the ‘lighter, quicker, cheaper’ recommendations9
include interventions which mirror those of the DCC Beta Projects, including the
provision of parklets and low cost public art.
The conclusion of these recommendations is strong evidence that there is indeed a
genuine need for the type of solutions as those which had previously been developed
and trialled by DCC Beta. While it remains to be seen how and when these proposed
recommendations would be implemented as per the Framework project, it does raise
the question as to whether it is productive for local government to seek to reinvent
the wheel in this way or instead, to commit adequate resources to and continue to
invest in the development of existing mechanisms such as DCC Beta. On this note,
the short-lived case of DCC Beta points to a need to further examine the broader
factors of democratic decision-making in local government and institutional support
for alternative urban innovation initiatives.
7 Some Councillors want DCC Beta Projects Back. www.dublininquirer.com/2016/12/07/some-

councillors-want-beta-projects-back (accessed 01 June 2017).
8 Framework Pilot Project http://www.pivotdublin.com/projects/framework-pilot/ (accessed 01 June
2017).
9 Reimagining Dublin One. http://designframework.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Reimaging-
Dublin-One-Document.pdf (accessed 01 June 2017).

Acknowledgements This research is informed by interviews with Shane Waring of Dublin City
Council Architects Division, and the author would like to thank him for his generous contribution.
I would also like to thank the editors for their invaluable suggestions on how to alter and improve
earlier versions of this chapter. This chapter has emanated from research conducted with the finan-
cial support of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and is co-funded under the European Regional
Development Fund under Grant Number 13/RC/2077.
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Fiona McDermott is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the CONNECT Research Centre for
Future Networks and Communications at Trinity College Dublin, where her research broadly
focuses on networked forms of urbanism and the ways in which Internet of Things (IoT) tech-
nologies are restructuring urban spatial design and politics. She is also a founding member of the
Orthogonal Methods Group, a transdisciplinary research group focusing on creative practices and
technology at CONNECT. Previously, she has worked as a researcher at the University of Limer-
ick on the FP7 project ‘Material EncounterS with digital Cultural Heritage’ and before engaging
in academia, she worked professionally as an urban designer in the UK, Germany and Denmark.
Reinventing the Rules: Emergent
Gameplay for Civic Learning
Cristina Ampatzidou
Abstract Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social
interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate dur-
ing 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 play-
ers 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 play-
ers 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.
Keywords Board games · Energy policy game · Emergent gameplay

Civic learning
1 Introduction
Within the field of urban planning and policy, games have been employed as early as
the 1950s (Abt 1969; Duke 1975) and are still a popular medium, particularly in the
areas of participatory and interactive policymaking (Mayer 2009; Poplin 2012). In
contrast with other methods of citizen participation that are based on information and
consultation, games can be appealing both to citizens and policymakers, because a
major part of control is placed on the players, providing them with a sense of agency
(Sweetser 2006). Games are usually conceptualized as rule-based systems, where
C. Ampatzidou (B)
Department of Spatial Planning & Environment, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of
Groningen, Landleven 1, 9747 AD Groningen, The Netherlands

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_10
188 C. Ampatzidou
players try to achieve given goals by overcoming set obstacles (Abt 1969; Juul 2011;
Parlett 1999; Suits 1979). However, games have also always been collective activities
and social experiences that allowed players to relate to one another. This social aspect
adds a layer of complexity to the rule-based gameplay, which is associated with
several benefits, such as improving interpersonal relations between players (Fang
et al. 2016), increasing the fun aspect (Gajadhar et al. 2008) and contributing to
learning (Abdul Jabbar and Felicia 2015; Dahlgren 2009; Whitton 2011).
Energy Safari is a serious board game about the energy transition in Groningen, the
Netherlands. The energy transition is a large-scale structural policy change towards
the increased use of renewable energy sources, the introduction of energy saving
measures and the significant reduction of dependency on fossil energy (Hauff et al.
2014). As the success of the energy transition depends both on centralized policies,
corporate responsibility, and on a widespread application of local energy initiatives
from the side of citizens, Energy Safari can be considered as a tool for hackable
city-making (Ampatzidou et al. 2015) that engages players in an open and inclusive
process of addressing the nuances of energy planning and policy. The goal of Energy
Safari is to make players familiar with the regional policy vision for the energy
transition, with a focus on the province of Groningen and instigate interest in local
energy initiatives. It aspires to achieve that in two distinct ways. First, it aims to
encourage civic learning; that is, to facilitate a process of learning about the social,
political and economic reality of the community (Shaffer et al. 2005) represented in
local energy projects. Civic learning comprises the knowledge of institutions, ability
for deliberation, and personal interest for common affairs (Raphael et al. 2010), a set
of conditions deemed essential to hackable city-making. The second goal of the game
is to enable collective efficacy, that is, to stimulate the capacity of the group to realize
collective, as opposed to forced, goals (Sampson et al. 1997) by providing players
with ideas about the variety of potential projects that can be part of decentralized
energy saving and production.
Early applications of games for urban planning were influenced by systems think-
ing and focused mainly on modelling and simulating urban dynamics, in areas such
as transportation, land use and natural resources management (Abt 1969; Duke
1975; Mayer 2009). However, following developments in planning theory, there
is a reorientation in thinking of cities as systems to be designed and controlled
towards cities as systems that evolve based on social processes and behaviours
(Batty 2010). So even though simulation and modelling still have a strong pres-
ence in urban planning and policy games, the focus seems to be shifting towards
the potential of games to create environments for negotiation, deliberation and col-
laboration among players (Gordon and Baldwin-Philippi 2014; Poplin 2012). The
research project described in this chapter contributes to this debate by examining
whether gameplay that emerges from the spontaneous social interaction among play-
ers in a co-located game setting can contribute to the instigation of civic learning.
The exploitation of inexactitudes in the rule set of Energy Safari by the players,
in order to define their own rules and enhance their playing experience, is framed
borrowing the notion of emergent gameplay from game studies. This study analy-
ses seventeen game sessions of Energy Safari and the ensuing debriefing conver-
Reinventing the Rules: Emergent Gameplay for Civic Learning 189
sations, that took place over a period of one month in various locations in the city
of Groningen. The analysis documents emergent behaviour in the ways the play-
ers came up with new rules, and locates civic learning in the connections players
made between their in-game behaviour and their real-life experiences. Finally, it
reflects on the possibilities for hackable city-making, as games utilize the uncer-
tain and unpredictable manifestations of emergent gameplay to reveal the under-
lying rationalities of actors and encourage them to undertake new pathways to
action.
2 Civic Learning: A Condition for Hackable City-Making
Civic learning is a process of learning about the social, political and economic reality
of the community (Shaffer et al. 2005) and is a central requirement for appreciating
social responsibility, justice and personal freedom (Lee et al. 2013) and for effective
and reliable participation in civic life (Raphael et al. 2012). Civic learning is a com-
plex process that is influenced by a person’s community, education and participation
and requires collective reflection and trust building (Gordon and Baldwin-Philippi
2014). For Raphael et al. (2010), civic engagement is connected to three practical
attitudes, which set the desired goals of civic learning: first, encouraging citizens to be
familiar with the institutions and legal frameworks that orchestrate civic processes;
second, fostering the cultivation of skills that allow citizens to express themselves
and articulate their interests and concerns, also through tools such as petitioning,
advocacy and protest; and finally, instigating a personal interest in community life
and public affairs. That means that civic learning is a condition for a hackable city
in that it enables citizens to understand and engage with existing institutions, per-
haps encouraging them to open up their administrative processes to new ideas and
frameworks. Through civic learning, citizens also develop the skills to explore new
solutions and ideas on on-going urban processes and communicate them and pursue
their collective interests through coordinated action and efforts that also contribute
to hackable city-making.
Games are ever more considered a significant educational resource as they com-
bine entertainment and learning (Abdul Jabbar and Felicia 2015; Boyle et al. 2012;
Whitton 2011) found at the balanced amount of progressing challenges, the feed-
back loops and rewards offered to the players, the social interactions that develop
among players and replayability (Gee 2005). Benefits associated with the use of
serious games as learning technologies to improve both cognitive and social learn-
ing encompass increasing literacy on specific topics, raising awareness, develop-
ing (complex) problem-solving skills, increasing media literacy, enhancing visual
thinking and spatial sense, and building networks and coalitions (Crookall 2010;
Erhel and Jamet 2013; Gee 2005; Granic et al. 2014; Shaffer et al. 2005). Harteveld
and Bekebrede (2011) separate between direct transfer learning, which consists of
concrete, predefined and measurable objectives and open-ended learning, which is
abstract and difficult to measure. Unlike in simulations and models, real people
190 C. Ampatzidou
can discover new knowledge during the gameplay (de Caluwe et al. 2012) and can
experience both direct transfer learning on the level of the game content and open-
ended learning from the behaviours that emerge out of the social interactions of the
players, while, for example, negotiating strategies, sharing knowledge or resources.
Even when players play competitively, learning still happens in a cooperative way
(Oertig 2010), and positive social interaction among the players during the game
has also been connected to increased learning (Padilla Zea et al. 2009). Particu-
larly, board games provide more fun and immersion (Gajadhar et al. 2008) and
can improve interpersonal relationships (Fang et al. 2016) leading to trust develop-
ment among players and possibilities for collaboration in contexts external to the
game.
Civic learning can be achieved when players reflect on their current civic practices,
conceptualize them within a wider context and are able to apply the skills they acquire
through the game in the real world (Dahlgren 2009). Raphael et al. (2010) also pay
attention to the transfer of knowledge from the game to the real world arguing that
games can “foster civic learning when they help players to develop knowledge, skills,
and dispositions that players can then apply to public matters in the world outside
the game.” (203). The authors have proposed a framework for understanding how
games can foster civic learning, arguing for a balanced integration between content
and gameplay, the linkage of ethical and expedient reasoning, and the facilitation
of connections between individual actions and collective or social structures. As
civic learning is a predominantly social and open-ended form of learning, turning
to the social interactions between the players of a co-located game setting can offer
valuable insight into how civic learning takes place.
3 Reinventing the Rules: How Emergent Gameplay

Happens
In complexity sciences, the term “emergence” is associated with the unpredictable

behaviour of dynamic systems that arises from the interaction of their parts (Casti
1997), with the whole being more than the parts (Holland 1998; Lissack 1999) and
to processes of self-organization (Holland 1998; Goldstein 1999). In the context
of games, emergence is used to describe the complexity of gameplay that cannot
be deterministically attributed to the simplicity of the rules (Juul 2002), and for
several scholars, such as Adams and Rollings (2007); Baterman and Boon (2006),
even gameplay is an emergent quality of the game (Doormans 2008). Emergence is
particularly important for game designers because it ensures that rules can be played
out differently every time. Emergence in games can include patterns that appear
because of complex programmed mechanisms within a game and the behaviour that
manifests on an experiential level, when complex social relationships form between
the players, during social play (Salen and Zimmerman 2004). As Jeremy Campbell
has put it “One can describe the rules but not necessarily all the products of the rules”
(Campbell 1982 cited in Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 159).
Emergence in games can happen either in the direction of narrative, as with role-
playing games, or of gameplay, as with strategy games (Sweetser 2006; Yap et al.
2015). Emergent behaviour can be implied (Vogiazou 2007; Juul 2002), as in the case
of chess or even be hardcoded (Sweetser 2006) in the rules of the game, for example,
by the use of algorithms that simulate actor behaviour or fluid movement in video
games, but it can also manifest itself in the interactions of players with game elements
(Yap et al. 2015) and with each other (Salen and Zimmerman 2004). In the last two
cases, emergent gameplay also denotes the use of a game by the players in ways
unintended by the designer (Sweetser 2006; Smith, n.d.), for example, in abolishing
or introducing rules and creating new strategies. In this sense, emergent gameplay
constitutes a form of playful reverting of the logic of the game, to make it do things
it was not designed for. Rule breaking in any form is a “natural extension of the
flexibility of the game structure” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 282). By cheating,
changing the rules and improvising new ones, players subvert the meaning of the
game in order to improve their playing experience. Salen and Zimmerman (2004)
attribute the various attitudes of rule breaking (cheating, workarounds, spoil-sport
hacking, etc.) in digital games to the anonymous and mediated nature of the gameplay
and the limited physical presence of other players.
However, rule breaking, cheating and hacking also happen in board games, which
are naturally co-located with a small group of players that usually know each other.
In addition, the social relations among players can greatly influence their in-game
choices. An obvious quality of board games is that they bring people together in the
same space, around the game board. Holland (1998) used board games as an example
of emergent behaviour in his definition of emergence as a whole that is more than
the sum of its parts. This is because in board games, individual player agency and
social interactions among players can expand the space of possibility of the game
well beyond the magic circle (Salen and Zimmerman 2004), which includes the finite
space of the board, objects such as tokens and the rule set. Rules in board games
are usually simpler than in computer games and are always explicit, which make
emergence in board games easier to study (Doormans 2008; Zagal José et al. 2006).
Harteveld and Bekebrede (2011) argue that multiplayer games are process intensive
and characterized by social rules. These conditions make board games a well-suited
case for observing emergent gameplay and evaluate whether the emerging behaviours
and social interactions between the players and the game, and among the players,
contribute to civic learning.
4 Playing with the Rules of Energy Safari
Energy Safari was created in the framework of the JPI Urban Europe program “Play-
ing with urban complexity: using co-located serious games to reduce the urban carbon
footprint among young adults”. The game was developed by a small team of urban
192 C. Ampatzidou
planning researchers through a series of co-creation sessions with local stakeholders

involved in the energy transition in Groningen. These included policymakers from
the local government, researchers from urban planning, sociology, architecture and
game design, members of citizen energy initiatives and employees of private utility
companies. The prototype that resulted from this process of co-creation was conse-
quently tested in a series of 17 sessions spread over the period of one month, in various
locations in the city of Groningen, including a cultural space, the premises of the
municipality, the university campus and the offices of private companies. The players
involved in these sessions consisted of students, members of citizen energy initia-
tives, policymakers and city officials, researchers of various disciplines and insti-
tutions, employees of local utility companies and lay people, which were recruited
using a variety of methods, such as direct invitation, social media announcements,
newsletters and snowball sampling. Playing sessions were mapped using participant
observation and were also audio recorded, coded and analysed. Players had to fill in
a before and after survey enquiring socio-demographic data, knowledge and attitude
towards the environment, energy and civic participation, player types and game pref-
erences, gameplay and strategy and learning impact. Each session concluded with a
debriefing session in the form of a focus group discussion.
Energy Safari is a six-player board game designed for a closed co-located setting
and played with the support of a game master, usually a member of the research
team. Players move their avatars across the board and seek to realize energy-related
projects by finding partners among other players, securing permissions and providing
the financing. The specific requirements to fulfil these three steps vary per project
and are described in project cards that players draw from a deck depending on their
position on the board (Fig. 1). Additional elements of the game include joker cards
that allow players to overcome certain steps of project realization, rising energy
prices and global events that take place at the end of each round, projects’ contingent
effects and interdependencies between neighbouring projects. The game attempts
to balance competition and collaboration among players. Players need to achieve
individual goals, but they need the support of their fellow players. Each realized
project provides three types of revenues to the contributing players, leading to three
possible winning conditions: a financial revenue in coins, a renewable energy output
measured in KW points and a community output, also measured in points, that
corresponds to the local social value of each project. It is in the three separate steps
of realizing a project where players most intensely competed and collaborated with
each other by establishing new rules and exploring the possibilities in the space
afforded by the ambiguous rule set of the game. Some instances of the specific ways
that emergent behaviours manifested during each step of realizing a project within
the game are described in the following sections.
Fig. 1 Energy safari board during a gameplay session. The colourful cards describe projects. Real-
ized projects are placed on the board, and each collaborator adds their own flag and keep track of
their revenues in the board
4.1 Project Selection
People participate in local energy initiatives for different reasons that may include
care for the environment, reduced energy bills, independence from big energy corpo-
rations, social cohesion (Boon 2012), adding local value and creating jobs (Rogers
et al. 2008). As such, during the game, the selection of projects was often subject to
personal experiences and ideological choices. Players often refused to participate to
projects that they deemed unsustainable in real life, even when that meant that their
in-game winning chances would be compromised. Upon picking a biodiesel related
project card, a player involved in an existing community energy project said: “Oh!
This is about biodiesel… No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t like biodiesel, I think
it’s the stupidest thing to do!” (G605-1). In several cases, players already involved
in energy initiatives in the city could answer quiz questions based on their practical
knowledge. “This is what we do!” (G614-2) explained to his fellow players, a player
faced with a question about energy cooperatives selling energy to consumers, after
answering correctly.
194 C. Ampatzidou
4.2 Forming Partnerships
Each project card requests from the player to find a specific number of partners in
order to realize the project. In order for another player to participate in the project,
they have to invest a small amount. Should the project not succeed at a later step,
this investment is lost. Should the project advance, each partner receives a one-time
revenue of energy and community points and a financial return in all consequent
rounds. As such, becoming somebody’s partner includes a risk, but the earlier on a
player invests the more profitable his investment could become in the long run.
As the exact mechanism of choosing one’s partners is not specified, in some cases,
players automatically adopted a first-come, first-served rule to forming partnerships.
Project initiators advertised their projects and the revenues that their partners would
receive, and players would chip in the requested amount. But as the number of
required partners was always lower than the number of total players, several occasions
of competition arose among players who wanted to participate. Sometimes players
would ask the project initiator to explain in detail the project at hand, and very
often they would bid their way to partnership by offering more than the requested
investment amount: “If you want, I can pay two coins to join.” (G614-1) Occasionally
players would contest that or check with the game master if that is permitted: “Is
that even allowed?” (G614-1), but most often, they would adopt this dynamic as an
emergent rule and play along with negotiating the exact terms of the cooperation.
In other occasions, partnerships were formed in terms of reciprocity. Players tended
to include fellow players that had previously included them in their projects and
exclude players that had excluded them. Collaboration based on reciprocity was
stronger among players that knew each other than among people who only met
during the game. A pattern that emerged in several sessions was that of excluded
players punishing their fellow players by blocking the projects they were left out
from: “I was not included, and I promised you were going to regret it.” (G615-1).
Blocking other players’ moves intensified towards the end of the game, when players
had a better overview of everybody’s points, so blocking was used as a tool to hold
back players that had collected several points and were closer to winning.
4.3 Knowledge Exchange
In order to secure permission for the projects, players have to roll the dice or answer
a quiz question. Depending on the project, sometimes they can choose which option
to use, and in rare occasions no permission is necessary but other conditions need
to be met, such as paying a higher price for the project. When the choice between
rolling the dice or answering a question was available, players were forced to choose
between basing their project on luck or trying out their knowledge. The questioning
mechanics indirectly provides players with some information about sustainability
goals and the energy transition in the Netherlands. In practice, the quiz questions
proved to be one of the most collaborative elements of the game. Despite the fact
that the question was addressed to the player currently playing, in almost all sessions
players, sometimes only the project partners and other times all the players, started
collaborating spontaneously in trying to find the correct answer regardless of whom
the question was addressed to.
Some of the joker cards featured in the game allow players to go ahead without
a permit or to learn the answer to the question and move on. An additional strong
element of collaboration was the fact that joker cards were often used as a common
resource. When the project initiator did not have a card that would allow her to
overcome the question, other players would offer their cards, to the advantage of the
group.
Player groups were mixed and included both people unfamiliar with and people
involved in energy initiatives, as well as researchers and employees of the local
government. That meant that some players were more knowledgeable than others in
answering the questions, and other players would expect them to be able to answer
the quiz questions correctly and wanted to use this to their advantage. As a player
said to another: “OK then let’s go for answering a question, because you work for the
municipality, so you should know.” (G605-2). From time to time, these expectations
also led to interesting negotiations, where players would exchange coins, joker cards
or the promise of priority inclusion in future projects. Often, knowledgeable players
would avoid showing off and would prefer to either provide some clues or help players
in other ways. On one occasion, a player not participating in a project preferred to
sacrifice a joker card that would allow her fellow players to bypass the question,
instead of providing the answer.
4.4 Bribing
A bribing mechanic also exists in selected projects. Players can choose to pay a few
coins extra to overcome a disadvantageous chance to get a permit by rolling the dice.
However, when they opt for a bribe they lose their community points revenue. This
forced players to adopt an ethical attitude and decide whether they would engage
in bribing and advance easier in the game or whether they would take the risk of
proceeding with unfavourable chances of success. The following excerpt (G605-2),
which brings together almost every manifested attitude towards bribing, demonstrates
that some players self-imposed a rule of not bribing and not participating in projects
that would involve bribing, while others agreed on the spot that bribing was not only
accepted but even essential in advancing, and others went as far as to withdraw their
participation from projects whose owner was not willing to be corrupted:
[Upon hearing that the project conditions allow bribing]
Player1: What? What? no… I ‘m out obviously!
Player2: If the project leader wants to corrupt, I ‘m in!
Player1: You are so corrupt all of you!
196 C. Ampatzidou
[…]
Player3: So if I throw the dice, you are all out?
Player2: I ‘m out. If you roll, maybe there is no project… So you have to be corrupt!
4.5 Attitude Towards Local Government
The municipality or the province is most often the institution that provides the permits
for the projects to go on. This reference to a real institution prompted players to share
their personal experiences from the difficulties they had to face in trying to realize
their own energy projects in real life, and to express their views on the role of these
institutions in facilitating or impeding local initiatives, as well as on broader issues of
policymaking. Some players referred to citizen initiatives being expensive to engage
in because so much time is wasted in negotiations with local institutions, while
others lamented their own difficulties in securing permissions and praised the game
for representing them realistically: “It’s too realistic!” (G605-1). Another a player
said characteristically: “The permit is really the most difficult part of all. It’s always
the municipality, isn’t it?” (G605-2). In another case, a question about the intended
reduction of CO2 emissions by the municipality triggered a long debate on the goals
of the local government which were perceived as unrealistic: “Yeah, that’s ridiculous,
but it speaks about how the municipality thinks. That they can save so much just by
energy saving.” (G614-2). The conversation ensued with players commenting on the
dependency on gas, the existing sources of electricity and potential solutions based
on their recent readings.
5 Civic Learning Through Emergent Gameplay?
Mapping the emergent attitudes and interactions that develop during gameplay is
a necessary step to identify any form of social or collective learning (Dörner et al.
2016; Medema et al. 2016; Wendel and Konert 2016), such as civic learning. In order
to transform the gaming experience into a learning experience for the players, both
individual and as a group, reflection, feedback and debriefing are crucial (Crookall
2010; de Caluwe et al. 2012; Harteveld and Bekebrede 2011; Lederman 1992).
Thus, the debriefing sessions allowed the players to revisit their in-game actions and
behaviours and link what is represented in the game with their real-life experiences
(Garris et al. 2002). From changing and inventing new rules to share their real-
life experiences and debating their opinions on current matters, civic learning has
manifested in different degrees in all three aspects defined by Raphael et al. (2010).
5.1 Bringing the Energy Transition One Step Closer
In terms of encouraging players to understand and engage with the institutions

involved in the energy transition, the participation of people with actual involve-
ment in energy initiatives, energy policy and corporate pilot projects in the field
of green energy contributed significantly to conveying both direct knowledge and a
sense of vicinity to the stakeholders actually involved in this process. De Caluwe et al.
2012 assert that it is wise to include participants with relevant real-life experience
in research-oriented games as these players bring their knowledge to the game and
enhance realism. In the case of Energy Safari, the players with practical experience in
the field of the energy transition were crucial in connecting the emergent gameplay to
the topic of the game. They did this on one hand by bringing in their content-related
knowledge and on the other hand by describing their real-life experiences to the other
players, unwittingly keeping the discussion focused on the topic of the game.
The project cards and the knowledge questions played the role of conveying infor-
mation related to the institutions and stakeholders involved in the energy transition,
policy sustainability goals and existing projects and technologies. The clear structure
of the project cards made the process of getting involved in a project more accessi-
ble to players with no experience in energy projects. Players with more experience,
sometimes contested this simplicity but in doing so, they had to explain to other
players the actual complexities that these projects involve, also indirectly contribut-
ing to building institutional capacity. Finally, the differences in players’ attitudes
towards bribing show that for some people, the game functioned as a mirror of their
reality and for others, it represented a magic circle within which they could adopt
behaviours that they would not adopt in real life. Games are considered safe envi-
ronments for testing out difficult scenarios (Dörner 1996) and as the players’ diverse
reactions to bribing imply, in the context of a game, players feel safe in exercising
behaviours that would be considered unacceptable or socially deviant outside the
magic circle. In addition, this particular mechanic triggered several discussions on
the actual existence of bribing and corruption in various levels of local government.
5.2 Negotiation, Deliberation and Collaboration
The second condition for civic learning according to Raphael et al. (2010) is the ability
of citizens to articulate and claim their interests. Within the gameplay of Energy
Safari, this was expressed both in the motivation behind selecting one project over
another, in the ways players pitched their projects to other players to find partners and
in how they handled cooperation and knowledge sharing. Some players chose their
projects based on what was most beneficial within the game world. Others based
their decisions on their actual ethical or ideological convictions in their decision-
making, particularly concerning the selection of projects to initiate or invest in. As in
actual planning processes, players had to negotiate with each other and find a balance
198 C. Ampatzidou
between their individual and collective interests. This level of interaction emerged
by the setting and the attitude of the players. With regards to collaborating with
one another, the game did not prescribe exactly how partners should be selected,
so players invented a variety of rules, namely rules of speed (the fastest one to
chip in is selected), rules of reciprocity (players exchanging partnership in each
other’s projects) and rules or bidding (including the players with the highest bid).
Each of these rules privileges a certain value of partnering. The first-come, first-
served rule was perceived as the fairest because it did not discriminate the players’
attitudes during the game, whereas the partnerships based on the highest bid were
disproportionately in favour of the individual gain of the project initiator. Reciprocity
rules were based on acknowledging other players’ in-game behaviour and rewarding
or punishing it.
Apart from serving a direct transfer of information, the questions also triggered
intense collaborative behaviours with regards to knowledge sharing and building
upon the information provided by the question cards. The game designers expected
that the player leading the project would answer the questions, but this did not occur
in any single occasion. On the contrary, several new rules came to effect with regards
to knowledge sharing among players. Firstly, there was a rule of collaboration among
project partners based on dialogue and negotiations. Secondly, when consensus about
the correct answer could not be reached, players would resort to voting for the correct
answer. Finally, players would share joker cards among partners to the collective
benefit of the project.
5.3 Reflecting on Community Dynamics
Participants to games, particularly ones for research, come to a game with the expec-
tation to learn (de Caluwe et al. 2012). During the debriefing, most players admitted
to have learned something on two levels: directly from the questions and indirectly
from the gameplay about regional energy planning more broadly. Additionally, sev-
eral players reported that they were inspired by the game to learn more about the
energy transition in Groningen, while others mentioned that the main lesson they
took out of the game was the complexity and interdependency of energy projects on
a regional scale. Others focused on the necessity of cooperation in order to realize
projects and win the game, a metaphor for a condition where a collective goal can
lead to individual gain. This reflection also offers important indicators of the values
that players assign to the different aspects of gaming, both content-wise and in terms
of rules and interactions. During the debriefing, players were asked among others
whether they were consciously following a strategy and whether they perceived the
game as collaborative or competitive. Several players reported that they were just
trying to get involved in as many projects as possible, without a real strategy and
played rather individualistically. There was, however, a general agreement that in
real-life contexts, people are also often willing to cooperate only for their personal
benefit and not because they are intrinsically motivated.
6 Conclusion
Yap et al. (2015) argue for the potential of intentionally and sufficiently ambiguous
game design to encourage players to construct part of the game experience them-
selves, outside of the hardcoded rules of the game. In the case of Energy Safari, the
institutional space that was left open by the loosely defined rules allowed players to
device their own schemes of interaction, which increased enjoyment but also helped
them reflect on their individual strategies, their position within the group and the
contingencies inherent in real-life endeavours. Reflection over real-life situations
consistently appeared in all groups and varied according to players’ familiarity to
energy-related topics. If the rule set was more strictly structured or the game master
behaved more rigidly with regards to adhering to the rules, a lot of this knowledge
exchange and consolidation would have been lost. Different initial conditions and
rules would have led to different negotiations among players and different emerging
rules. The potential of emergent gameplay does not lay with the exact outcomes of
cheating, modding or inventing new rules, even when patterns become recognizable,
but with its possibility to enable players to imagine new ways to appropriate, adjust,
extend or improve the social, cultural and economic processes involved in the citizen-
driven part of the energy transition. This inquisitive attitude has been connected to the
value of participatory governance and extensive accessibility to knowledge, particu-
larly through collaborative processes (Powell 2016) and is fundamental to a process
of hackable city-making.
Emergent gameplay seemed to have a significant contribution in players’ enjoy-
ment and learning by indirectly enhancing their breadth. During Energy Safari, rein-
venting the rules of the game made players more aware of the formal rules and
facilitated their experiential civic learning, at least with regards to reflecting on their
current practices and reconceptualizing them within a wider social context (Dahlgren
2009). However, a significant limitation of this study is that the ability and willing-
ness to transfer the acquired knowledge in the real world is only based on the self-
reported intentions of the players. But since most players played Energy Safari only
once because of the research design, there is little reason to assume that it will have
any long-lasting effects. At best, it can act as a trigger for deeper inquisition into
the topic of the energy transition. Games could lead to long-lasting civic learning,
when they are used in various stages throughout the planning process, during which
players can discover new forms of knowledge.
Mayer (2009) argues that games can be used in policymaking and public planning
because they can model the complexity of technical, physical and economic aspects of
policy-related issues as well as the social and political aspects by including human
input not as digital agents but as real people. This paper adds that while games
can indeed incorporate the technical and physical aspects of policymaking in the
hardcoded rules, player input alone can only partly account for the real intricacy of
social and political features. Observing and analysing emergent behaviour during
policy-related games can become productive for actual participatory policymaking,
making it more open to appropriation by the participating citizens. Games create an
200 C. Ampatzidou
environment where actors can still exchange information, while acting strategically to
advance their own interests and demonstrating actual, spontaneous social interaction.
Within the field of using serious games in urban planning, the study of emergent
gameplay can offer indications of how similarly difficult to simulate behaviours might
play out in the real world. Players bring into the game their irrationalities, assumptions
and unconscious, tacit knowledge; all hard to delineate aspects that surface during the
gameplay (de Caluwe et al. 2012). Through their genuine reactions and interactions,
players of Energy Safari have spontaneously revealed how they regard the current
energy policy as citizens. They have devised and implemented new rules in the game
that make evident parameters, values and behaviours that are at play in thinking about
and negotiating for a community project, such as a solar or biomass installation. Co-
located games, be they analogue or digital, could potentially be used as negotiation
and brainstorming tools to make urban policymaking more hackable, that is more
tuned to the uncertainties and unpredictabilities of citizen input.
Acknowledgements The project “Playing with urban complexity: using co-located serious games
to reduce the urban carbon footprint among young adults” is funded by the Joint Programming
Initiative Urban Europe. The author’s Ph.D. research is supervised by Dr. Katharina Gugerell and
Prof. Gert de Roo.
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Cristina Ampatzidou is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Groningen on the topic of gam-
ing and urban complexity in the JPI Urban Europe project ‘Playing with Urban Complexity’, and
founder of Amateur Cities. Her research investigates the affordances of gaming for collaborative
city-making and open dialogue among policy makers and citizens. She previously worked as an
embedded researcher for the Amsterdam Hackable Metropolis project, a collaboration of the Uni-
versity of Amsterdam, the Mobile City Foundation and One Architecture. Cristina has been a col-
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Data Flow in the Smart City: Open Data
Versus the Commons
Richard Beckwith, John Sherry and David Prendergast
Abstract 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.
Keywords Open data · The commons · Data stewardship
1 Introduction
This paper explores the complex relationship between cities and data or, more accu-
rately, the way that the citizens of a city want data about their community to be
managed. Openly accessible data is often argued to provide the best ways for cit-
izens to organize themselves around relevant issues and hold accountable those in
power. Our research into one community’s gathering of data about flooding not only
helped them to organize around the issue but also helped them to solve a recalcitrant
R. Beckwith (B) · J. Sherry

Intel Labs, Jones Farm, 2111 NE 25th Avenue, Hillsboro, OR 97124, USA
J. Sherry
D. Prendergast
Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University, Room 2.15, Rowan House, Maynooth,
County Kildare, Ireland

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_11
206 R. Beckwith et al.
problem. However, we also found that making this data available as open data would
lead to community impacts that were most unwelcome.
We will argue that in data governance for smart cities, the notion of ‘data as
commons’ is crucial because community data is best understood as a rivalrous good
that requires stewardship by the community. In addition, the notions of ‘datashed’ and
‘contextual integrity’ are presented as helpful in coming to a more nuanced strategy
for the management of data and understanding of the affordances provided by data
for communities. Simply put, we will argue that citizens of a smart city can find value
in collecting and sharing data, but that they may also find value in restricting that
data’s flow. Sharing and sheltering strategies will define data governance policies,
which will, in turn, define how people can use that data for ‘hacking the city.’ We’ll
close the paper with an argument that communities themselves must act as stewards
of the data about their community and that sometimes this means that the data will
not be fully open.
1.1 The Value of Data
The past decade has seen an explosion in the creation of—and interest in—data.
Data had been growing in decades past, driven by individuals using the Internet and
then mobile technologies. Most recently, we’ve seen volumes of data collected by
digitally instrumented and connected devices. This superabundance of data has been
called ‘The New Oil.’1 This metaphor brings connotations of boomtown economics
based on data flowing from a source to a purchasing destination. Indeed, most of the
discussions of such data emphasize the financial returns and the importance of data
acquisition. As one CTO has put it: ‘Even if I don’t know yet how I’ll use that data,
I want it because I can store it so cheaply. My data science team might find a use for
it.’ (Bertolucci 2014). The economics of data appear to be driving an explosion in
surveillance undertaken by those large organizations with the reach and wherewithal
to gather the most data. From this point of view, one could imagine a ‘smart city’ as a
locus for the creation of new financial value for some favored few of its constituents.
Given this, the city can be seen as a site of increasing surveillance—although, often,
for no reason other than to enable a private entity to collect additional data for itself
as it provides municipal services.
In contrast to this private acquisition-focused approach to ‘The New Oil’ is the
Open Data philosophy, where data has no private owner and is made available to
any and all. McKinsey Global Institute (Manyinka et al. 2013) argues that opening
data up to broader sharing and use could generate $3–5 trillion in economic value
over the coming decade. Research suggests that these open approaches to data offer a
variety of benefits. For instance, our own research in the Chilean comuna of Peñalolén
1 The quote ‘Data is the new oil’ has most commonly been attributed to marketing professional
Clive Humby in a presentation at the ANA Senior Marketer’s Summit at the Kellogg School of
Management, 2006.
Data Flow in the Smart City: Open Data Versus the Commons 207
showed that opening up city government procurement systems led to greater local
participation in contracts, with more equitably distributed economic benefits (Kitner
et al. 2007). In an entirely different arena, farmers using shared water data were able
to demonstrate their ability to manage a watershed and avoid unwanted government
intervention (Levin and Beckwith 2015). In a different arena yet again, Mann et al.
(2002) have argued that ‘sousveillance’ by the populace, eyes on the powerful, would
produce greater government accountability. Thus, freely shared (or open) data can
have many positive effects.
For all of open data’s potential benefits, it is itself also a problematic construct,
requiring us to ask such questions as who benefits and who might be harmed by the
unselective sharing of data. Raman and Benjamin (2011), for instance, document
what happened when Bangalore, India, put property ownership data online in the
hopes of providing greater transparency and efficiency in property records. This
inadvertently created a situation where those with the technical means and education
were able to identify and effectively seize property that had problematic records. This
enabled wealthier, more educated citizens to effectively steal land from citizens with
less education, less technology access, or more tenuous legal claims on the property.
Similarly, this chapter will address a smart city application focused on urban flooding.
From one perspective, the open sharing of such data helped residents identify the
source of the problem and organize for collective action. From another perspective,
this community discovered that open flood data could, perhaps undeservedly, put
some homeowners at risk of seeing property values suddenly and steeply decline.
In addition to these issues about who should share data and the potential impact
on monetary value, there is also non-monetary value associated with data. Common
models for dealing with smart city data do not seem to appreciate possible non-
monetary values of data for the community (e.g., social value). This lack of awareness
creates a sword that cuts two ways. On the one hand, the acquisitive private ownership
model seems to see data only as material for ephemeral monetary transactions that
have no history or future (Gudeman 2001). To this way of thinking, there are no
relationships among people with which to be concerned. The community, to whom the
data may refer, will have been forgotten. On the other hand, proponents of open data,
in their rush to shed light on every aspect of a community, forget that communities
consist of relationships and have boundaries. These relationships and boundaries
help the community to cohere but are also vulnerable to forces from outside the
community. We will see that sharing data can be detrimental to those relationships.
Because of these issues, smart cities need more nuanced ways to think about data.
1.2 Thinking About the Flow of Data
Much of the recent interest in data is due to the fact that data has monetary value, but
the value under discussion will accrue only if data flows. As we’ve noted, data can
have both positive and negative values as it flows from one constituency to another.
Given that data flow can create new value and can increase or decrease existing
values, we must ask: What data governance policies will best serve the citizens of a
smart city?
Data doesn’t flow by itself. It is pushed and pulled between different constituencies
with their own goals and desires. Policies for data access and use create affordances
that allow for these changes in value. Facilitations and constraints are placed on data
flows, and these can determine the ways in which people can hack the city. Since it
is the city’s policies that create these affordances, they also must ask: How will these
policies make our future cities ‘hackable’ in ways that citizens and communities
desire?
In our thinking about how to construct a data governance policy for the people,
we build on three conceptual frameworks: the commons, datasheds, and contextual
integrity. These each inform our thinking about how smart city data should flow. The
commons are community resources meant to be freely used by those in the community
(in this discussion, that resource will be data). ‘Datashed’ is our term for all of
the constituencies among whom some collection of data flows. Finally, ‘contextual
integrity’ is a privacy framework (Nissenbaum 2004) that argues, in part, that people’s
expectations of information flow and use within a given context will determine their
perception of privacy violations. Citizens’ perceptions of privacy requirements for
community data can be used to establish better policies (and regulations) for who
should be able to use the data and for what.
1.2.1 The Commons
The commons is a well-known concept having to do with resources that are shared by
members of a community: ‘common pool resources.’ Work regarding the commons
(e.g., Ostrom 1990) is important to consider, especially because recent years have
seen a very reasonable push to make civic data ‘open.’2
Open data has often been said to establish a ‘data commons’ (e.g., Grossman
et al. 2016). Commons resources are considered public goods, meaning that they are
accessible to the public, and also rivalrous, meaning that their use by one precludes
their use by another. Rivalrous phenomena are contentious because of the potential
diminution of the value of the resource for later users. As an example, the grass in a
shared grazing land: If one person’s cattle eat all the forage, there will be none left
for the cattle of others. Because of the rivalrous nature of common pool resources,
they need to be protected from overuse. A key focus of Ostrom’s studies of the
commons is how non-market mechanisms are used by communities (and not a remote
government or local gentry) to enact stewardship and to ensure sustainability of such
2 Two examples: (1) By Executive Order, the US government (“Making Open and Machine Readable
the New Default”, 2013) has mandated that ‘Government information shall be managed as an asset
throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally
permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find,
accessible, and usable.’ (2) Open data is described by UK-based Open Knowledge International:
‘Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose’
(emphasis in original).
resources (1990). Research into stewardship has established the deep intermingling
of resource management and the community’s social and cultural practices (Netting
1981; McKay and Acheson 1990).
One of the conceptual challenges of considering open data as a commons issue
arises from the fact that the notion of data ‘ownership’ is fraught.3 Consider that
data is often created at points of interaction among multiple parties—at the point of
purchase, for instance, involving a buyer, a vendor, and a credit card company, all
of whom may feel some entitlement to transaction data. All three are actors in the
sales event. Clearly each of these actors has the potential to claim ownership. Data,
therefore, often has ownership claims distributed across a number of parties. Dealing
with these claims is one of the roles of a smart city.
Data about the commons increases this challenge. Should a private party be able
to exclude community members from seeing data that the private party has collected
about a community resource? For a negative example, consider whether a London
cabbie (or London Taxi and Private Hire, which oversees the test for ‘The Knowledge’
of the arcane London street map) should be allowed to stop people from using GPS-
enabled mobiles with maps because cabbies have traditionally been associated with
The Knowledge. This kind of restriction is certainly not in the service of greater
London (or anyone aside from cabbies) and wouldn’t be likely to find much support,
legal or otherwise. Maps of public thoroughfares can be owned but not the right to
map. We might ask whether a private party could withhold from public view any
data about ‘public’ resources. Consider, for example, privately collected data related
to a grazing ground or even weather data. Should private companies be allowed to
collect such data and keep it private? Examples from our fieldwork (reviewed below)
suggest that the answer is not so simple.
In addition, questions about the rivalrous nature of information resources them-
selves raise another difficulty. In some ways, it is compelling to find a conceptual
difficulty considering open data as a commons issue. Digital data can be copied
endlessly with no diminution to the original in physical terms. Unlike most material
goods, data and information are often considered non-rival goods—their access or
use by one party does not preclude access or use by others (Benkler 2004).4 We
believe that, in rivalry, the value of the resource is key. While it can be argued that
data copies easily without changing the ability to physically access that same data
for another user, access and monetization of the data do not exhaust the values that a
piece of information might have. In fact, information (the stuff of open data) has been
argued by Aragon (2011, discussed below) to have at least three forms of value—e-
conomic, sociological, and identity. The diminution of any of these values due to
circulation, then, demonstrates that information resources are potentially rivalrous.
Stewardship of the data itself, to which we shall now turn, is how communities can
preserve those values.
3 Indeed,Bezaitis and Anderson (2011) argue that, in the context of so many new information
technologies, the very concept of ownership is in a state of flux.
4 See Benkler’s (2004) exegesis of non-market production of digital information and the results of
the placement of that information into the commons.

Stewardship. Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on stew-
ardship and the commons. Before her work, many economists had been swayed by
potential overuse—‘the tragedy of the commons’—and argued for the rationality
of removing rivalrous shared resources from the common pool (e.g., through pri-
vate ownership of these resources) (Hardin 1968). Instead of privatization, Ostrom
showed through her work investigating communities where the commons were left
to the community that local stewardship could be effective. Ostrom offered eight
‘design principles’ (1990) that were present when communities could effectively
engage in stewardship. These design principles were: (1) well-defined boundaries,
(2) broad compliance with shared stewardship practices within those boundaries, (3)
locally relevant stewardship rules, (4) effective compliance monitoring, (5) appro-
priate sanctions for non-compliance, (6) mechanisms for easy arbitration, (7) broad
recognition of local powers, and (8) tiered management for large resources. When
most (but not necessarily all) of these are in place, a commons can be effectively and
sustainably managed from within.
One well-known example of effective commons stewardship involves the lob-
stermen of Maine as they worked together to manage fishing practices to ensure a
sustainable lobster population (Acheson 2003). This example embodies many of the
principles Ostrom noted as necessary to protect the commons. Here, the threat of over-
fishing lobster in local estuaries could impact livelihoods so government regulation
was proposed as a reasonable strategy for ensuring that lobsters would be plenti-
ful. The community resisted outside regulation. To forestall regulation, the fishing
community drove a set of relationships and agreements among various constituen-
cies, including dealers, legislators, conservation groups, and state agencies (among
others) to develop a set of institutional practices. These practices were developed to
protect a common pool resource, that is, the lobsters around the Maine coastline.
Ostrom’s principles were well represented here. In this case, (a) lobstermen and
parties with economic and ecological interests in their activities, (b) within a specific
state of the USA and a region within that state, (c) saw the threat of a reduction in the
output of lobster, and (d) they developed rules that could be easily enforced through
sales channels. This locally driven approach proved to be remarkably effective.
Stewardship of information. Research on the commons has also been applied
specifically to the use and sharing of information (Kollock and Smith 1999). When
we consider how stewardship of that information should be accomplished, we must
look to the community itself for local guidance because the ways in which a particular
community may choose to enact stewardship can vary in surprising ways. Aragon’s
(2011) work provides a specific example of the ways in which different communities
steward similar information differently. Aragon looked at the surprisingly dissimilar
ways in which two communities control the flow of similar information in order
to steward their respective cultures. She frames her discussion in terms laid out by
Gudeman: ‘taking away the commons destroys community, and destroying a complex
of relationships demolishes a commons” (2001, 27). That is, the commons and the
specific community that shares it are inseparable. Aragon argued that controlling the
flow of information is one way that communities express and steward their culture.
Considering how communities choose to steward their culture (and their shared
information) allows us to see that it is not just the information but also shared beliefs
about that information that define the practices of data governance.
Aragon compared two communities that manufacture textile goods and the differ-
ent ways that they handled information about how these goods were produced. One
employed a ‘circulation’ strategy in which they were happy to have outsiders gain
access to the knowledge of the methods that they use to produce the goods. Another
employed a ‘sequestration’ strategy where they tried to keep production methods a
secret outside of their group. Their choice of strategy depended upon what type of
value people were trying to steward. In the first case, the community felt that if their
knowledge was kept alive, that would keep their culture (and community) alive so
they chose circulation. The second community feared that if outsiders shared the
knowledge of how they produce their goods, then the outsiders could steal their rela-
tionships with customers and their community would be diminished, so they chose
sequestration. These contrasting strategies for stewardship—circulation and seques-
tration—are valuable concepts to use when we think about how a community wants
to share data. It is worth noting that what is called ‘circulation’ here is the typical
notion of open data. Sequestration, though, does allow for some data flow, but the
flow is limited only to those inside a defined community.5
1.2.2 Datasheds
As described by Ostrom, a key element of successful management of a commons is a

clear sense of physical boundaries. In talking about data circulation, one must address
the boundaries within which data circulates. This is what Levin and Beckwith (2015)
called a ‘datashed.’ Just as a watershed helps hydrologists think about water, looking
at the circulation of data—its datashed—helps us to think about civic data. Because
information shifts in value as it flows, observing the sites to which data flows tells
us about how value may be assigned, who collects the data, and also tells us more
about what those people care about.
Levin and Beckwith (2015) examined a community where a recent initiative had
sought to use ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) technologies to instrument a wide variety of
industries and sectors. The data generated by these technologies was meant to flow
not only between various constituencies with a history of interaction (e.g., among
local farmers and the truckers who move their crops) but also to bring in new players
who may have an interest in the data (e.g., investors in commodity futures or the banks
that loan money to farms). That is, data would not just be used by the collectors and
those with whom they collaborate to bring a product to market; the data would also
be used by people within the same or adjacent industries and even people interested
5 Not collecting data at all is a strategy, too. Some Native American communities do not collect
or map the sacred sites for tribal members and, as a consequence, the tribes cannot share such
information with those who would seek to develop the lands. What’s important to note here is that
communities make decisions about data flow. Communities act (either as a collection of individuals
or in concert) as the owners of the data.
in the data for purposes entirely distinct from the original intent. The datashed would
include all of these people.
Levin and Beckwith called the value of data as it circulated outside the initial
site or original intent ‘circulatory value.’6 Circulatory value has implications both
for ‘sheltering’ and ‘sharing’ approaches. Positive circulatory value (for sharing)
will depend upon the existence of an alternative constituency which may or may not
have a common interest. Data only have value when their use or restrictions on use
help someone achieve a goal. Once we understand this, it becomes easier to see why
people often have concerns about downstream recipients of data, especially when
that other’s goals are incommensurate with their own. This is where expectations of
privacy come in and why we think it’s important to consider contextual integrity.
1.2.3 Contextual Integrity
Contextual integrity is the privacy framework that we used to think about the role of
communities in data governance decisions. Contextual integrity (or Privacy in Con-
text) (Nissenbaum 2004) provides a structure for addressing issues around steward-
ship by allowing people’s expectations of privacy to shape the rules for information
flow. Contextual integrity establishes a framework for the problematic challenge of
ensuring privacy in a society where new information technologies enable an ever-
increasing sphere of public surveillance. Contextual integrity uses a concept quite
like datasheds called ‘contextual boundaries.’7 Individuals define these contextual
boundaries to contain the entities to which they believe their personal information
might reasonably flow. The boundaries exclude entities to which the data should not
flow. Through contextual integrity, we are able to identify a number of lenses through
which to consider the ‘sharing’ or ‘sheltering’ of civic data. Within the framework of
contextual integrity, Nissenbaum talks about three roles that people might fill with
respect to shared personal information: information receiver (the person to whom
data is transferred), the information sender (the agent acting to transfer the data, to
cause it to flow), and the subject (the entity whom the data is ‘about’).
Nissenbaum’s work has been primarily applied to issues of personal data and pri-
vacy, but it is also a useful framework for thinking about the circulation of civic data.
Specifically, combining the concept of contextual integrity with an understanding
of civic data as a common pool resource, we can ask how community members, in
addition to municipal governments or other large institutions, might contribute to and
interact with data and information that is deemed valuable by the community. What
facilitations and restrictions on gathering and use need to be applied? How should
flow be controlled among community, municipality, and state? What about private
6 This circulatory value, when considered in the context of Aragon’s work, could be the value of
having one’s culture survive.
7 Datasheds focus on the places where data flow. There is no sense in which the goals or values of
constituencies are reflected. Contextual boundaries, however, do address goals and reflect desires
with respect to data flow.
enterprise? It also raises questions such as what are the settings in which data might
be appropriately gathered, who might legitimately lay claim to such data, and under
what circumstances might it be circulated?
Before getting to our case study, we should review the three areas we believe are
important for thinking about them. We have reviewed work on the commons showing
how local governance can lead to sustainable resources. We talked about data flow
and how various constituencies may interact with a set of data within what we are
calling a datashed. Finally, we explored how rules for flow might be constructed so
as to preserve contextual integrity—privacy.
We will now turn to a focused case study to help us understand data governance for
a smart city. In addition to highlighting the importance of situatedness, the example
below demonstrates the ways in which data or information can bring together oppos-
ing constituencies. In this particular case, it happened that some of those brought
together by the data were somewhat unwelcome by others. In addition, and as a
consequence of those unwelcome others, this example also provides a clear example
of where a community wants to withhold data about the commons from others. It is
our contention that the problems occurred because the interpretations of the data by
remote users of the data were at odds with the understanding of the data shared by
local community members, whose situated knowledge provided a different under-
standing.
2 Case Study: Watersheds and Datasheds
This case study concerns a US suburban town that had recently developed a significant
problem with flooding. We worked with residents over a two-year period where we
also spent time with government agencies that were undertaking activities in the
community. We also worked closely with an advocacy group that was trying to
influence policy and funding in the community.
We spent considerable time with one woman, in particular, who had lived in her
house for over 25 years. In more recent years, her home had flooded over ten times.
She was initially told by local government officials that there was no change in
flooding within the community and this was a problem that was hers alone. Based on
the fact that she lived hundreds of meters from the stream that was flooding and that
a lake regularly formed in the backyards of all the people on her block, she knew this
was not her problem alone. She described for us how she set about trying to get her
neighbors involved in finding a solution. She canvassed the neighborhood and found
others, like her, who were suffering property damage from an increasing number of
floods. She enlisted these others to help the community understand more about the
new floods. The group decided to create a map of each flooding event. With their
mapped data, they were able to demonstrate that there was a significant flooding
problem across their community and again asked the local government for help.
Even after collecting the data and sharing it with town officials, she and her
neighbors were told that there was nothing that this group or even the town could
do. The officials claimed that this flooding was caused by climate change. It was,
in effect, the new normal. This narrative held that because of changes in patterns
of precipitation, the existing infrastructure was no longer capable of supporting the
runoff and that changes in infrastructure would need to be balanced against other
municipal expenditures. The community group did not believe this explanation and
felt that infrastructural changes in an upstream community were to blame. These
infrastructure changes were well known to this group, and they had a theory of
exactly how it might have influenced flooding in their community. Their theory was
supported by the data that the group collected.
The potentially relevant upstream infrastructure changes were discovered because
another aspect of the group’s work was to try to find the water sources, so they
explored the full upstream watershed during flooding events. They found the locations
where the stream flow began to increase substantially. There was one spot at a golf
course where, they discovered, the culvert leading from the course was recently
cleared of brush to facilitate drainage into the head of the stream. Another spot was
the site of recreational sports fields that had been built in the past few years. A
retention pond was built to compensate for the change in water flow that was caused
by the sports fields, but this group observed that the pond was not filling during
flooding events. These facilities were not in the same town but in an adjacent town
where the flooding stream originates, and the incomes and property values are higher.
The group also tried to see what kinds of government programs were available
to their community and to share this information with their flood-mates. This was
when they discovered that certain federal money would be hard to get. It seems that,
according to the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA) maps, they
were not in a floodplain. This did not preclude getting government funds but made
these funds more challenging to access.
Their town had no jurisdiction in any case since the problem originated upstream.
This exemplifies an interesting property of datasheds: A datashed is not necessarily
coextensive with a single jurisdiction. A community can choose to extend its datashed
well beyond the community’s jurisdictional boundaries. This group pushed beyond
the officials of their town and sought relief from regional and national agencies
charged with stewardship of the waters. When they tried to see if there was something
that could be done to protect their downstream community, they were informed that
they were ignorant of the situation and lacked credentials required of someone who
could understand a watershed. Nevertheless, they had a body of theory, data, and
maps which they subsequently brought to many public meetings.
At one of the more raucous public meetings, there was a representative of the
upstream community that the residents blamed. He was quiet through much of
the meeting but when residents started to complain about his town and blame the
upstream community for the floods, he stood up and informed the group that he
worked for the town and was, in fact, the person in control of the retention pond and
that it, too, was overflowing during flooding events. The group then produced pho-
tographs they said were taken during floods that showed the pond was not filled as it
should have been. He questioned whether the photographs were actually taken when
the residents claimed. This photographic evidence was open to being questioned,
but the accusation was now out there. Interestingly, after this meeting, whenever
there was a heavy rain, the group would go and check the retention pond, and it
was always full. More interestingly, the flooding also abated. It would seem that the
residents were right. Despite their lack of hydrology credentials, they were able to
use their awareness of local conditions to collect relevant data and interpret this data
in a manner unavailable to their credentialed but remote partners.
The story is not yet over. This community next faced a new problem. Recall
that FEMA maps did not have this community as a floodplain. Across the USA,
FEMA is in the process of redrawing the flood maps that it uses to assign risk to
communities. Existing maps are inaccurate and insufficient, but it is expensive to
collect new data. To what extent should the data that was collected to argue for
these successful mitigation strategies be used to characterize the flooding potential
of the community? Recall that flooding in this community was felt to be a function
of upstream mismanagement, a problem that has been rectified. The homes are not
flooding as they were. What FEMA would like to do is to use the data collected by
this community to determine the level of risk to assign. Obviously, if they use that
data without considering that potential causal factors have been addressed, they will
determine that a large number of people need to carry flood insurance. This insurance
could add about 20% to the average monthly mortgage payment and potentially
reduce the value of homes. Community members feel that this is unfair as the data
had been used to fix the problem, and they decided that they were no longer willing
to share data with the federal government. That is, they developed a sequestration
strategy.
2.1 Circulation and Sequestration
While free circulation—that is, open data—is a popular option for data from the
smart city, sometimes data may be better suited for a ‘commons-like’ treatment. A
more suitable option may be free use within the community, but sequestration of that
data with respect to some parties or for some uses outside the community. With this
in mind, we address sequestration with respect to data about the commons.
We might ask first, what are the boundaries of the commons? The datashed, water-
shed, and jurisdictional boundaries can all be dissimilar. That is, the boundaries of one
may not be the boundaries of another. The first data flow option to occur to a commu-
nity might be to allow data to circulate freely to enable openness and accountability.
However, expectations around data flows are important to understand. Contextual
integrity tells us that we should be especially concerned with the expectations of
those whom the data is about. We believe that the ‘subjects’ of commons data are
community residents, those locals charged with stewardship of the physical resources
of the commons. This militates against the notion that all potential constituencies
of the datashed should have equivalent access to the data or equivalent power in
determining data flows.
One point to consider here is that the datashed is sometimes not the same as
the resource boundaries because the resource may be controlled by actors who are
outside that boundary. Frequently, elements of jurisdiction or control over a resource
are a function of distant parties, and in these cases, data sometimes must be shared
with these distant participants. The datashed, then, cannot be constrained to the
entities within the boundaries of the resource. When distant authorities regulate
local resources, they may use locally collected data as a tool. What we show here is
a case where the locals who collect the data want to sequester the data from some
distant authorities who are desirous of regulation.
As noted, open data circulation can be quite beneficial. However, it is also the
case that sometimes people do not want specific data to circulate freely or to share
that data with specific others. For example, misleading data that is consistent with
frequent flooding or even the risk of flooding can be used to mandate that home
owners carry significant flood insurance which can impact the value of a home. It
might come as no surprise that some people are hesitant to share information. They
don’t want open data—maybe just slightly ajar data. Some people might argue that
anything less than full disclosure of this information is dishonest. What if the data
being shared would easily invite inferences that are incorrect?
The costs associated with sharing are a consideration for people in the community.
Even before the time that the upstream problem had been addressed, let alone FEMA
threatening to reduce the value of their homes, one community member told us that
some ‘people are always afraid that it’s going to be “information means punishment”.’
It is not that they do not wish the problem solved, they are simply afraid that they
will ultimately not benefit from data sharing.
Sequestration does not mean that there can be no sharing at all. These people
were happy to share their data with those involved in mitigation. The sequestration
that they argued for would restrict the parties among whom the data would circulate
and the purposes to which the data could be put. This request is not out of line with
how we would expect stewardship to come into play around data that a community
has willingly collected. It hardly needs to be said that an unwillingness to participate
in sharing is quite problematic from the perspective of open data. If people do not
participate, there will be no data to make open.
2.1.1 Outstanding Problems
Community-led circulation and sequestration decisions may not work to support

every individual. Consider a person who wants to opt out of the flood information
system because they do not ever want to share their flooding status with anyone. What
if they are right in the middle of flood zone? A system using local topography and the
presence of water in some locations could clearly implicate their property as one that
would be inundated before a neighbor’s (higher) property. How can such a person
opt out? It really is not an option. Inferences can be drawn from a neighbor’s data.
With open civic data, there may be no way to truly implement an individual ‘right
to be forgotten’ since the inferences across the commons are made irrespective of
the individuals. Yet, properties associated with individuals may be easily identified.
Figuring out governance issues such as how to protect or whether to protect data in
such a system will be important.
One of the issues with civic data is that, by providing transparency, this data can
support accountability. That was certainly the case in Peñalolén where community
residents were finally able to profit from municipal procurement (Kitner et al. 2007). It
was easier to see when money was being spent and whether favoritism was involved in
vendor decisions. Accountability, in fact, is often held up as one of the most important
outcomes following from open data. However, one person’s accountability can be
another’s control. By making visible the results of one’s actions, this could invite
inferences about activities or states that one might prefer not to imply. Sensors cannot
show that reasonable decisions have been made for reasons outside the view of the
sensors. If interpretation of data requires contextualization that is not available to all
data users, how is that accountability?
Another issue with open city data is something that we have seen widely through-
out the IoT developer world. Many denizens of the datashed are not capable of
managing the data science to produce answers to the questions they would ask. Oth-
ers may be vulnerable to exploitation by tech elites as we saw earlier in the Bangalore
example (Raman and Benjamin 2011). This lack of data science expertise means that
some people will not know how to meet their needs relative to the circulating data.
This does not mean that they will not be part of the datashed. In fact, people may
not have an option; the data may implicate them in any case. What this lack of data
literacy means is that some people will need to enroll others in the datashed who will
educate, represent, or collaborate with them.
3 Discussion and Summary
As we think about hacking a smart city, it is wise to think about what a smart city
does. At smart cities’ core is the creation and use of data for new services. Many
proponents of smart cities encourage the idea that this data should be made open to
support a new economy. The main argument of this chapter is that smart cities have a
choice of what to do with their data; information resources can be open and available
to all or they can be understood and managed as a commons. There are significant
differences between these two options. On the one hand, open data is typically free
to all with no owner controlling the flow of data. On the other hand, a data commons,
as is true for all commons, should be about resources held in common by a group.
A data commons effectively asserts group ownership of the information resources.
This data would, of course, be collected and distributed to benefit that group.
Rivalry, Stewardship, and the Commons. We argued that the shifts in value
that follow from data flow allow us to conceive of information as rivalrous and,
thereby, characteristic of what stewardship of the commons is meant to manage. The
changes in value we’ve referred to have to do with value being created or destroyed
as data flow from one constituency to another. If value for the first constituency can
be lessened by the flow of data to a second constituency, then we have a form of

rivalry.
Because of this potential rivalrous nature of data, stewardship of informational
resources will be key to a successful data commons. A commons has the property
that the community has to take care of (or steward) the resource. The community
has to worry about sustainability and equity and must, in the case of information
resources, put data governance procedures in place that will ensure these.
This means that cities have a social role to play with stewardship of data. Data
governance needs to consider data gathering, analysis, sharing, sheltering, and is,
above all, necessary so that the community has control over shifts in value. They will
be concerned with the circulation and sequestration of data flows both inside the city
and when data leave the city. Stewardship is not just about the data while it is in the
city. Stewardship is for the life of the data throughout the datashed.
In addition, we argued that while smart city data can create community, not all
communities are created equally. When needs are met and value created by broadly
accessible affordances, various constituencies can be formed, some with ties to the
community, some without. Within the city, constituencies will mostly be composed of
those with some kind of relationship to the resources or phenomena being measured.
Although the data is produced by measuring phenomena within a community, other
constituencies can be brought into the datashed by data alone. Because their interest
is only in data, these outside communities can more easily have interests that conflict
with those stewarding the measured resource.
We have argued that stewardship is one of the social roles that the smart city
must play. There is another way to look at data stewardship that is perhaps even
more obviously social. Stewards of information resources must understand the range
of players and consider the pathways and consequences of how data will be used.
A smart city is the most likely candidate to define the criteria for admission to
the datashed and communities need to trust city administrators to put good data
governance in place. In making decisions about sharing, they may be ‘inviting’
outsiders to interact with city resources.
Who Owns the Data of the Smart City? In terms of real ownership, it might be
reasonable to say that no one owns a data commons. That is why no individual is
empowered to sell to another that thing over which they are the steward. The most
important aspect of a steward is that their job is to take care of a resource so that its
value does not diminish for others.
Given that the same data could have both positive and negative impacts, it is
important to ask who should make the stewardship decisions and whose positive and
negative impacts should have priority. Not everyone who might have a stake in the
data should have an equivalent say in data flows. Obviously, people who see value
for themselves in the data would be interested in how the data flows but an interest in
extracting value does not give them the right to control the data. Also, among those
with a stake in the data are those who see a potential diminution of value (of the
measured phenomena, the data, or the community at large) when that data moves
beyond a ‘contextual boundary.’
Among each of the potential constituencies, just one can make the final decision
as to which values must be preserved and which flows must be forbidden. Whose
values are most significant? We know from the work in contextual integrity that when
data is about someone, expectations of privacy are most significant. Perhaps, then,
the question should be ‘who are the data about’? In many ways, the data could only
be ‘about’ a community that knows how the data relates to the measured phenomena,
people who know how to interpret the data as it relates to the local resource.
Data is ‘about’ locals, since they are best able to understand the data and its
meaning. Some potentially impactful interpretations of data actually require situated
knowledge, the requirement for which impairs the distant communities’ interpreta-
tion of local data. In our fieldwork, for example, the implications of circulating data
(without situated knowledge) could be seen as negative and unfair.
We have tried to show that typical ‘smart city’ data—data about the com-
mons—may require restrictions on data flow. As we’ve seen, openness of data
may not always be the best thing for a community nor what a community
might choose for itself. Circulation and sequestration are data stewardship strate-
gies that need to be considered with smart city data. Whatever strategy is cho-
sen, processes need to be put in place for decision-making that are conso-
nant with community desires. Then the stewardship of information resources
can help people to work together. This is one way that communities can
cohere.
Smart cities can be a locus for the creation of new value for those within the city.
They can also be the locus of serious breaches of trust where information can be
shared to provide value to others while it simultaneously harms city residents. As a
bulwark against this, we believe that a city should manage its data as a commons. To
do so means trying to understand potential data flows and the values of the communi-
ties within the city, while also being respectful to rightful claims of ‘ownership’ and
rules of stewardship. If cities do this, they can expect that the citizens of the smart
city will be better served by the smart city itself and will be more strongly invested
in its success.
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Richard Beckwith is a Research Psychologist in Intel Labs with the Adaptive Computing Lab’s
User Experience Insights. Richard has been with Intel since 1996. He has published primarily on
language, education, sensors, and privacy. His recent work has focused on service development
for community-based sensing schemes. He received his Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia
University in 1986. His degree is in Developmental Psychology and his work focused on how sta-
tistical parsers could enable language acquisition. From 1986 to 1991, he was a research scientist
at Princeton University’s Cognitive Science Lab, working on WordNet. Before coming to Intel, he
was an Associate Professor at Northwestern University in the Institute for the Learning Sciences
(ILS) where, from 1991, he taught qualitative methods to support technology design and oversaw
the development of assessment schemes for AI-based educational software.
John Sherry is a social anthropologist and manager of User Experience Insights at Intel Labs.
John joined Intel in 1997 as the company’s first anthropologist, serving as a founding member
of what was then called Intel’s People and Practices Research Lab. Subsequently he has served
in a variety of positions, including director of User Experience Design in Intel’s Digital Health
Group, before taking on his current role. His research has always involved understanding ordinary
people in their everyday settings, including the complex social, economic and technical systems in
which we are all embedded. The purpose of this research is to help Intel better imagine and invent
new uses and experiences of computing. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (1995, University of
Arizona) and a B.S. in Computer Science.
David Prendergast is a social anthropologist and Professor in Science, Technology & Society
at Maynooth University in Ireland. His research career over the last twenty years at Cambridge,
Sheffield, Trinity College Dublin and Intel has resulted in a wide range of books and articles on
ageing, health, cities, science, technology and social relationships. His most recent volume ‘Aging
and the Digital Life Course’ edited with Chiara Garattini was given a CHOICE ‘Outstanding Aca-
demic Title’ by the American Library Association and was described as one of ‘the two most fas-
cinating books on aging in the 21st Century’ by the Huffington Post.
Part IV
Theorizing the Hackable City
Hacking, Making, and Prototyping
for Social Change
Ingrid Mulder and Péter Kun
Abstract 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.
Keywords City-making · Urban interaction design · Societal challenges

Systemic change
1 Introduction
Every day, new individuals, new creative communities, and new collaborative net-
works get organized to ‘reclaim’ public space, spatially, physically, and politically.
Even though they intend to trigger substantial changes, it is still hard to apprehend
their real power to transform space and the way we live together. At the same time,
mundane cities are being laced with sensors and mobile technologies that are gener-
ating a myriad of opportunities for developing smart solutions and generating new
directions for social innovation. When these emergent technologies go urban and
I. Mulder (B) · P. Kun

ID-Studiolab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft,
The Netherlands
P. Kun

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_12
226 I. Mulder and P. Kun
become embedded into our everyday lived environments, these technologies have
the potential to transform our public spaces, and more importantly how we live and
interact together. In the cities of the future, a digital landscape overlays our physical
world. Differently put, computing is not just with us; it surrounds us, and it uses
the context of our environment to empower us in more natural, yet powerful ways
(Urban IxD Manifesto 2014). Urban interaction design is a forming field that explores
new methodologies for new ways of city-making elaborating upon the fact that the
‘making of the city’ is no longer the sole concern of urban planners (Brynskov et al.
2014). No longer do their methodologies, expertise, and theories suffice to address
the increasing complexity cities face. That is why designers of all sorts, IT special-
ists, urban anthropologists, philosophers, HCI researchers, artists, and sociologists
are increasingly teaming up in coalitions that up to a few years ago were unthinkable
to come up with (Brynskov et al. 2014).
Although promising, these opportunities also contribute to an increasing complex-
ity in city-making. In the current work, we view this increasing complexity in city-
making as a collaborative design challenge and explore how designerly approaches
and co-creative activities, such as hacking, making, and prototyping may bring
city-making activities further than grassroots activities and generalized smart city
‘visions’, aiming to trigger a broader change and transformation process. In our
view of city-making, smart solutions only work when they fit in with as well as arise
from the everyday settings people live in.
In other words, traditional city-makers need to collaborate with grassroots’ ini-
tiatives and other active citizens in changing city lives and living conditions. More
specifically, we explore how the core mechanisms behind hacking, making, and
prototyping intertwine, and next, we discuss how this triad can enable emerging
city-makers to positively influence urban interaction design projects for systemic
change.
2 City as a Platform
As the physical and digital aspects of a city started to interfuse and the stakeholders
that create value for the city became multi-faceted, the city itself has become a
patchable plug-in platform: a platform for city hacking. Platform thinking addresses
the interplay of data, technology, and community. In keeping with the ‘Hackable City’
metaphor (de Waal et al. 2017), this interplay resembles the commercial platform of
Github: a platform to connect individuals, organizations, and open-source projects
to better software projects together. The city as a platform connects its citizens with
its decision-makers and local projects, enabling all the stakeholders to combine top-
down planning and bottom-up participation in patches to better their city.
On the city as a platform lays interaction design’s stretch towards the urban scale,
which also redefines how the fuzzy front-end of the design process is conducted:
citizens navigating in a rich urban context, in order to improve life quality in their
proximity, working with democratized technology within their reach. Aiming to get
Hacking, Making, and Prototyping for Social Change 227
Fig. 1 Hacking, making, and prototyping in relation to each other
a more nuanced understanding of the city as a design platform, we elaborate upon the
concepts hacking, making, and prototyping while entering the cityscape. In the next
sections, we discuss these concepts, which hold several different connotations, and
make them operational for hackable city-making, using an urban interaction design
perspective and take stock of its roots in arts, technology, and activism (Fig. 1).
2.1 Hacking
Hacking is an ambiguous term with multiple, competing meanings in contemporary

culture. Firstly, in its original meaning, hacking refers to the ‘hacker culture’ of
software and hardware tinkerers coming from MIT and then Silicon Valley (Levy
2001). The notion that Levy calls ‘true hacking’ is based on the hacker ethic, with
core principles, such as sharing, openness, and world improvement. These principles
are referring to a general constructive behaviour. Secondly, another contemporary
meaning of a hacker is associated with criminality, a person that exploits computer
security systems. This notion carries negative sentiment and describes destructive
behaviour that is almost the opposite of the ‘true hacking’ idea. Thirdly, a modern pop
culture connotation of hacking is lifehacking. Lifehacking was coined by technology
writer Danny O’Brien (Thompson 2005), referring to productivity and efficiency
shortcuts, skills, and tricks for daily life. Such shortcuts and tricks as a hack follows
the description of a kludge—a historical computer jargon term from the 1960s—as
described by Koopman and Hoffman (2003: 73):
A fix that is awkward or clumsy but is at least temporarily effective or An overall design that
is of questionable elegance or downright ugly.
Expanding this definition from decades ago, today the previous contemporary con-
notations of hacking carry a refined understanding of what a hack is: an exploratory,
creative way of overcoming limitations of a system. How this takes shape is often
by modifying or repurposing a certain knowledge, technique, or technology for a
new use. Moreover, this repurposing also leads to a hacker attitude ‘because we can’,
trying out if a technique works in another context. An iconic example of this thinking
is the story of the ‘Trojan Room Coffee Machine’: in 1991, people at the Computer
Laboratory of University of Cambridge installed a camera showing the coffee pot.
The creators needed to develop many things from scratch, like server and client
software, and generally went a great length for solving a non-substantial problem
(Stafford-Fraser 2001). This coffee machine broadcast became the first webcam.
When looking at city-making from an urban interaction design perspective, hack-
ing is considered as a constructive activity, such as Townsend’s Civic hackers (2013)
or The Hackable City project (Ampatzidou et al. 2015). In our view, hacking can
indeed be seen as a social constructivist activity in city-making, and embrace a typical
hacker attitude. Such an attitude can manifest as optimizing an inefficient, bureau-
cratic policy-making process that is often lagging behind technology advancements.
An early exploration of the hacker attitude applied to city-making can be found in
squatting, the movement of occupying abandoned or unoccupied buildings that the
squatters do not own. There are many policies for squatting today, though a common-
ality is its history of operating in a legal grey zone and the corresponding legislation
that was lagging behind. In the case of squatting, the hacker attitude refers to a new
way of thinking around redistributing unoccupied, available buildings for residential
purposes. Beyond squatting, a timely example for hacker attitude in city-making
addresses the rise of various sharing economy start-ups that are operating at the
borderline of governmental policies and use–abuse the lagging of policy-making to
flourish. For example, Airbnb hacked the general accepted way of short-term room
rental while Uber hacked the established norms in transportation services. Sharing
economy start-ups often question the status quo, and in our view, this is the hacker
attitude applied in city-making. Although often experienced as controversial, it is
obvious that these new kinds of businesses introduced by Airbnb and Uber do not
necessarily refer to a constructive hacker attitude. However, these exemplary sharing
economy business cases do challenge the current, established way of city-making,
and open the floor to new city-makers to trigger a systemic change for new types of
social innovation. Urban interaction design operates in a world full of complexities,
from stakeholders to citizen needs and policy-making; there are various layers, var-
ious actors, and various types of problems. To cut through these complexities, we
argue that the hacker attitude is core: people need to be proactive to trigger change,
sometimes to provoke change. Many art and design schools teach by Grace Hopper’s
famous quote [retrieved from CHIPS Magazine (2002)]:
It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission—Grace Hopper
Innovation oftentimes happens fast and is not bounded by the lagging of gov-
ernmental regulations. Considering urban complexities, the core mechanisms of the
hacker attitude are exploring the borders and stretching the status quo, let them be
legislation or the public’s thinking on a certain matter (such as ownership in the age
of the sharing economy). To conclude, the hacker attitude might appear disobedient
or unabashed, but also pioneering and daring to be the first, and these we find key
characteristics. The hacker value for city-making lies in the potential to serve the
public interest, but still too often hackers undermine the common good due to a short
time, activist focus on political protest.
2.2 Making
With the third industrial revolution (Rifkin 2008), manufacturing has been expected
to shift towards a democratized and decentralized, distributed ecosystem, enabling
the masses to realize bespoke products with modern technology, such as 3D print-
ers, accessible electronic prototyping kits, or a blossoming open-source culture on
the Internet. Pioneer activists leading this movement, the makers, initiated physical
spaces all around the globe. Fablabs, Hackerspaces, and Makerspaces are appearing,
providing a physical shop as well as a meeting point for like-minded people, who
come together to work on their own Do-It-Yourself (DIY) projects, but also to collab-
orate with other makers, exchanging expertise or share knowledge. The knowledge
and expertise sharing aspect of making makes it also intertwined with education
all over the world, as illustrated by Mostert-van der Sar and her colleagues (2013).
Educational institutions are increasingly hosting Fablabs and other fabrication work-
shops become available for the masses. Such connections to education provide a safe
environment to test and experiment. When people visit a Fablab or a Makerspace,
they are not expected to know how equipment, tools, and devices work; they go there
to learn. Furthermore, specialized working tools are not available in every household,
and it is hard to justify having, e.g. a soldering station or a 3D printer at home if
you have never tried it beforehand. These physical spaces where making can take
place are democratizing who has access to realizing various hobbies or professional
projects.
Besides providing spaces for making, a vast number of tools are getting available
for people that are not very tech-savvy or trained. The focus is not anymore on creating
tools for experts, but to serve a broader user base including complete beginners and
interested amateurs. Makers have been successful in attracting children to code, 3D
print, or build in Minecraft, and this success generates demand for better end-user
tools that are not overcomplicated and has the right constraints and trade-offs to
still remain usable and productive after a little-learning curve. For urban interaction
design this is important, because in the urban context design often happens by citizens
that are not necessarily trained in design.
To leverage making in cities, the fabrication communities are essential to provide
places where lead users of a city (i.e. citizens) can gather to realize technological
projects that better the living in the city. In this way, making enables citizens to
create bespoke solutions (patchable plug-ins) for their city; when the citizen needs
are addressed by citizen-designed solutions, that is a major shift from the dominant
concept of urban services being provided by the government, more often than not
resulting in services that are far from how reality works. In all complexities in urban
space, making democratizes the creation of bespoke solutions by providing infras-
tructure and knowledge and skills for the urban interaction designer. In the future,
this could be further amplified by the maker community and its sharing practices
on the Internet; when people upload their local bespoke products, services for peer-
production sites, such as Instructables.com. The local bespoke solutions could live
a global life, getting adapted to different circumstances.
2.3 Prototyping
In the past decades, the techniques and methods previously characterized with the
design-related professions (e.g. industrial design, architecture) have started to find
their use for a broader audience. Design thinking (Brown 2008) has gained popu-
larity in the business world illustrating this trend of innovation and new ways of
management. Living labs have grown in popularity in the past years to stimulate
open, collaborative and bottom-up models of innovation where citizens are at the
centre of the innovation process. A living lab can be defined as:
an experiential environment where users are immersed in a creative social space for designing
and experiencing their own future. Policy makers and citizens can use living labs to design,
explore, experience, and refine new policies and regulations in real-life scenarios before they
are implemented. (McPhee et al. 2012: 3–4)
Where the origin of living labs started from the industry’s or city management’s
drive for regional innovation, today’s city laboratories are often initiated by emerging
city-makers. Even though co-creative partnerships that join forces in developing new
product and services are keys in both ‘prototyping’ initiatives (Mulder 2014, 2015).
In the meanwhile, designers have been redefining design towards complex systems
and tackling complex societal problems (Sanders and Stappers 2014). In our view,
these trends illustrate that the designers’ toolbox of techniques, methods, and ways
of operating has the potential for cutting through the urban complexities as well.
A key aspect of problem solving (in design) is the use of prototypes. Prototypes
can be all kind of artefacts, as long as they enable the different stakeholders to col-
laboratively explore alternatives and to articulate their different viewpoints. In this
view, prototyping is a way of communication between different parties. We consider
communicating via prototypes as a process where iterations happen throughout the
discussion, evolving the prototypes in a trial-and-error manner towards finding the
optimal design solution (Buxton 2010). Out of their context, early prototypes can
easily be seen as quick hacks, and making often enables quick prototypes. In urban
interaction design, prototypes are often design interventions, with the leading princi-
ple to engage the public in the conversation about the possible future. The powerful
aspect of iterative development is to keep the tangible solutions close to its users, and
continuously adapt the feedback in the following prototypes. These are the important
aspects to abandon the principle to aim for over-polished solutions that are never-
ready. Like this, people can dare to envision futures with bolder ideas, iterating their
way towards one prototype a time.
A manifestation of prototyping and design for solving urban or societal matters
is the emergence of different design jams and hackathons—pressure cooker events
that are targeted at establishing active local communities, while teaching design
techniques to interested people. These types of events enrich the spectrum of the
physical places connected to making and encouraging the hacker attitude to innovate
solving complex problems by applying cheeky or clever thinking in repurposing of
previous knowledge or techniques on new problem areas. The time frame a pressure
cooker event enables is short, so people should not think too much about an approach,
just do it and see what happens. This set-up is interventional and based on weekend-
long get-togethers, consequently the outcomes might not be sustainable. However,
on personal and community levels, such an approach is a boost to probe ideas, get
stakeholders together, and learn new things. This transition is doing the groundwork
for sustainable change for projects that has bigger potentials.
3 Hackable City-Making: Towards Systemic Change
Seeing the city as a platform that welcomes bottom-up social innovation and allows
for hackable city-making opens the path towards system change. In keeping with
Suchman et al. (2002) as well as Junginger (2008), we use prototyping as an insight-
giving tool enabling society to change. Considering the complete spectrum from an
idea to actual change in society, the role of hacking, making, and prototyping is
ranging from prompting the idea to the creation of prototypes to communicate the
idea.
We refer to the definition of social innovation as elaborated in the report of the
European Policy Advisors (2010) entitled ‘Empowering people, driving change:
Social innovation in the European Union’. Social innovation refers to social demands
that are traditionally not addressed by the market and are not directed towards or
involve vulnerable groups in society. A common case of social innovation is the
care for elderly, which is a ubiquitous problem in the world, and as the world’s
population is ageing, also addresses a growing need. Social innovation is complex
from multiple aspects; the boundaries between ‘social’ and ‘economic’ blur for social
challenges, which are directed towards society as a whole and often involve end-users
(e.g. citizens, who proactively shape things). Further examples in cities for social
innovation may be increasing social cohesion, creating sustainable living, supporting
the ageing society, etc. However, in order to reshape society in the direction of a
participatory arena where people are empowered, learning is central to make policies
more effective. The following three approaches are interdependent and strengthen
each other.
The first approach is the foundation for the second which creates the conditions
for the third—an innovation that addresses a social demand (e.g. care of the elderly)
contributes to addressing a societal challenge (ageing society) and, through its process
dimension (e.g. the active engagement of the elderly), it contributes to reshape society
in the direction of participation and empowerment. In the next section, we discuss
how hackable city-making can trigger a broader change and transformation process.
To illustrate the complete life cycle of such a hackable city-making process,
we adopted the six stages of social innovation as defined by Murray and his col-
leagues (2010) to address hackable city-making towards systemic change (see Fig. 2).
Observing this model from a designerly perspective separates the ‘early stages’ from
the ‘sustaining stages’ of social change. In the following part, we elaborate on this
twofolded framing, to leverage the process of hacking, making, and prototyping for
social change.
Fig. 2 Hackable city-making in relation to the six stages of social innovation
3.1 Fuzzy Front-End of City-Making
Following the hacking, making, and prototyping practices of doing urban interac-
tion design, the outcomes are most frequently ‘design bursts’ and interventions,
semi-worked out ideas; rarely take on the high-level (transformational) design chal-
lenges of establishing sustainable change. Considering Rittel and Webber’s wicked
problems (1973), we observe an interventional design approach that targets solving
wicked problems without a typical end point:
With wicked problems […], any solution, after being implemented will generate waves of
consequences over an extended – virtually an unbounded – period of time. […] The full
consequences cannot be appraised until the waves of repercussions have completely run out,
and we have no way of tracing all the waves through all the affected lives ahead of time or
within a limited time span. (Rittel and Webber 1973: 163)
In an urban context, we call the ‘fuzzy front-end of city-making’ the first three
stages of social innovation: [1 Prompts], [2 Proposals], and [3 Prototypes]. The fuzzy
front-end of city-making happens often at pressure cooker events, such as hackathons
or design jams. These events host people from various stakeholder groups, who are all
invited to propose problems [1 Prompts, 2 Proposals], often attend workshops to work
on specific problems [1 Prompts] and by DNA of hackathons create prototypes to
communicate the ideas [3 Prototypes]. Reaching the [3 Prototypes] stage is relatively
easy, and there are many tools available from end-user development, co-design, or
making. Co-designing activities during such events (but also student projects, etc.)
can flesh out preliminary/immature ideas for envisioned futures. Turning these ideas
tangible is important for discussing them with the different stakeholders, but also
for ‘thinking through designing’, to really understand the core wicked problems the
idea intends to solve. All these processes have hacking, making, and/or prototyping
at their core.
As illustrated, this fuzzy front-end stage might take a long while, and the process
might happen in a way that a preliminarily realized idea (e.g. as a prototype) inspired
another project with another set of people, who figure a different angle to solve
the problem which eventually succeed. This cross-pollination of ideas is a common
characteristic of pressure cooker events, but also a cultural characteristic for social
innovation and cities; cities do not exist in a vacuum, and best practices are there,
out in the wild, to be copied as well as improved elsewhere.
3.2 Co-creative Partnerships
In keeping with Anthony Townsend (2013), we put the smart citizen in a central
position. Interestingly, in a recent public debate, Townsend stressed that although
hackathons are the main form to have citizens involved in demonstrating the potential
of open data and smart cities, there are no best practices that stress the citizens’ voices
that can be scaled and sustained. Most hackathons organized nowadays act as nerd-
meetups and remain stand-alone events. In our co-creative activities, we therefore
deliberately elaborate upon various ways to involve ‘civic hackers’ and stakeholders
representing a quadruple helix (van Waart et al. 2015, 2016) as well as upon the
role of these co-creative activities in making them more aware of open data and the
potential value in order to drive social change (Morelli et al. 2017). We refer to this
quadruple helix consortium as ‘co-creative partnerships’ (Mulder 2014, 2015) and
emphasize the human scale in a shared process of knowledge production in which
they collaboratively envision desired futures (Brodersen et al. 2008; Carayannis and
Campbell 2012; Mulder 2014; van Waart et al. 2016). Key to co-creative partnerships
is a dialogical approach (Mulder 2014, 2015) while in most hackers’ initiatives an
activist approach is leading, which not necessarily lead to systemic changes that
contribute to the common good.
Similarly, Manzini and Rizzo (2011) have demonstrated how ‘large-scale sustain-
able changes’ could be achieved by participatory design when citizens and designers
work together, co-creative partnerships are a crucial asset to enable the collaborative
activity of prototyping and scale these activities towards participatory city-making
[4 Sustaining, 5 Scaling]. The fuzzy front-end activities can be interpreted as largely
unobtrusive ways of building a common vision among the new city-makers for cre-
ating fertile structures and embedded areas that introduce design knowledge for the
systematic exploration of new ways of city-making [6 System change].
3.3 From Designing for to Making Together
There is a plethora of promising cases and best practices that illustrates prompts,
proposals, and/or prototypes. There might even be more good, best, and promising
practices that stay unnoticed by the general publics. However, practices that address
systemic change are hard to find. The question why it is so hard to get from the fuzzy
front-end of city-making towards co-creative partnerships making a systemic change
largely remains unanswered. The current debate on social design largely focuses on
what design can do, showing mainly prompts and proposals that are not evidenced
by impact. Similarly, many toolkits have not shown their value in sustained prac-
tice. The outcomes of a workshop to map and collect various strategies for citizens’
engagement and the role of cities held at the Design & the City conference (Ams-
terdam, April 22, 2016) contributed to a great bricolage of designerly approaches
and a vivid discussion on how to scale up interventions and to foster system change;
however, no clear guidelines could be derived (see Kun and Mulder 2016). Also,
in a recent policy workshop on ‘Shaping the Future of Digital Social Innovation’ at
the European Commission (June 29, 2016, Brussels), it was also concluded that it
appears hard to sustain and scale these practices (see Mulgan 2016).
Of course, cherish and promote small experimentations is a welcome first step, but
foremost the need to change designerly perspectives towards more participatory and
systemic perspectives that reflect on how to activate new forms of collective action
is key. The role of designers in hackable city-making moves towards orchestrators of
the various stakeholders involved and includes ‘designing’ the relationships among
them as well in order to triggering a process of broader change and transformation
(Mulder and Loorbach 2016).
4 Discussion and Conclusions
Although promising, it is not straightforward that hacking, making, and prototyping

allow for a systematic exploration of new ways of city-making. It requires a differ-
ent designerly mindset, from an emphasis on the designed object towards strategic
design and the process, such as the role of infrastructuring (Karasti 2014). Emerging
contexts for systems perspectives in design are still in its infancy (Jones 2016). Both
systems and design fields have developed largely independent and outside academia,
with hardly any effort in uncovering the hidden links. Design has been largely biased
by its practical materialism and driven by theories of use and human-centredness.
Systems theory has been biased by its abstract nature, and lack of attention to design-
erly ordering and practicality. The main point is to see how hacking, making, and
prototyping can go beyond the smart city visions and address real problems of the
everyday life.
Even if initiatives as Uber and Airbnb might have started as social initiatives, the
corresponding increase in popularity and economic benefits seemed to have encour-
aged the use of ‘old economy’ business models that continued dominating the further
path. It is obvious that the current way of operation is far less ‘addressing the com-
mon good’, and that these initiatives no longer function as co-creative partnerships
aiming for new city-making. Differently said, the value is no longer in and for the
city.
In our view, hackable city-making needs to become more pluralistic and needs
to involve more (inter-)disciplinary stakeholders in a dialogical way in order to face
today’s challenges. Such participatory city-making process envisioning livable and
sustainable urban environments goes far beyond simple, or even complex, produc-
t–service design; it has political, organizational, and even cultural implications. Con-
sequently, a collaborative systemic approach emphasizing the human scale, is vital
for engaging stakeholders from public sector, industry, education, and research as
well as citizens in a shared process of knowledge production in which they col-
laboratively envision desired future cities (Brodersen et al. 2008; Carayannis and
Campbell 2012; van Waart et al. 2016). It requires co-creative partnerships to actu-
ally team up towards a future direction. In this, the biggest challenge is to embrace
a new collaborative attitude, a participatory approach, and to have a proper infras-
tructure that supports this social fabric. This new city-making process is not only
about bringing various disciplines together that addresses urban developments, but
foremost to establish a collaborative effort of defining a new way of working between
professional designers, academics, policy-makers, and citizens.
Although co-creative partnerships seem to be the answer and time is ripe for a
more collaborative approach, it is not straightforward that everybody can participate.
However, the participatory turn and the maker movement have contributed largely
to fact that ‘everybody is a designer’. Making and participatory prototyping can
empower citizens and allow them to express and to be part of the city-making process.
Participatory city-making is about democracy, rather than politics; it is about caring
together for a shared environment and making your own future. Interestingly, Barber
(2013) clearly points out why mayors should rule the world; mayors have a city to
manage, but also need the people to make their city. Hackable city-making, thus, can
make a difference through involving emerging city-makers and by elaborating upon
the interplay between systems thinking and design thinking.
Having the city as a patchable plug-in platform asks for participatory gov-
ernance, a new paradigm in city-making, which combines top-down public
management with bottom-up social innovation (e.g. Bria et al. 2014; Loor-
bach 2014; Mulder 2014). A patchable plug-in platform enables emerging
city-makers to create value for the city, for society; however, it asks for new
ways of city management too. New participatory ways of governance include
advanced hacking, making, and prototyping skills, such as envisioning, trans-
lating, or orchestrating, and enable emerging, heterogeneous city-makers to
participate actively in exploring the collaborative envisioned potential and
constructive dialogue aiming for transformational change for the common
good.
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Ingrid Mulder is an expert in design for social transformation, currently working as an Asso-
ciate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology.
Thanks to her background in Policy and Organization Sciences (M.A., University of Tilburg) and
Behavioural Sciences (Ph.D., University of Twente), her on-going research interestingly combines
strategic design with diffuse design, and addresses the interplay between top-down policy and
bottom-up participatory innovation. Her current projects have been awarded by prestigious grants:
Open4Citizens (Horizon2020 CAPS) aims at empowering citizens to make meaningful use of
open data; Participatory City-Making, funded by the NWO Research through Design call, consid-
ers the collaborative construction of new visions through small-scale experimenting as a way of
triggering a process of broader change and transformation; and DESIGNSCAPES (Horizon2020
CO-CREATION) plays a fundamental role in building capacities to enhance design-enabled inno-
vation in urban contexts.
Péter Kun is an interaction designer with an interdisciplinary background, currently doing Ph.D.
research at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. With his
interdisciplinary background in Interaction Design and Technologies (M.Sc., Chalmers Univer-
sity of Technology), Industrial Management (B.Sc., Budapest University of Technology and Eco-
nomics) and several years working as a workshop facilitator, in his research Péter investigates the
intersection of design research and data science, and seeks new design techniques for exploratory
and generative design, where data is used to fuel creativity, inform design concepts and be a
source for inspiration. This research is conducted within the Open4Citizens (Horizon2020 CAPS)
project, aimed at empowering citizens to make meaningful uses of open data.
Unpacking the Smart City Through
the Lens of the Right to the City:
A Taxonomy as a Way Forward
in Participatory City-Making
Irina Anastasiu
Abstract 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.
Keywords Participatory city-making · Right to the city

Participatory action research · Hacker ethic · Civic engagement · Smart city
Human smart city · Urban informatics
1 Introduction
At a time when voices are increasingly raised on how the techno-centric, top-down
smart city vision is flawed and cannot deliver the civic or economic benefits promised,
partly also because it is driven by large corporations not attuned to the “messy,
disruptive way people use technology” (Hemment and Townsend 2013), revisiting
Lefebvre’s radical concept on the right to the city to achieve a new form of urban
governance that moves beyond both capitalism and the state seems timely.
The exploration of the smart city through Lefebvre’s lens enables the reconceptu-
alisation 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
I. Anastasiu (B)
Urban Informatics, QUT Design Lab, Queensland University of Technology,
Brisbane, Australia
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_13
240 I. Anastasiu
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.
It first presents a critique of the smart city discourse and its evolution towards
embracing people-centricity. Along the way, it highlights key prerequisites for the
emergence of a new sense of ownership of a city where its residents are active agents
of change, before turning to using Lefebvre’s (1996) right to the city as a key concept
to understand and elaborate on the notion of participatory city-making. Subsequently,
it further unpacks this notion, proposing understanding it as a participatory process
governed by procedural and essential principles, that are also discussed in depth. It
then turns to the more practical requirements and tools that can assist in implement-
ing participatory city-making. Finally, it draws upon previous reviews of relevant
initiatives to propose a taxonomy of participatory city-making initiatives, which not
only allows for a snapshot of the city-making ecosystem and the extraction of best
practices for a way forward, but also for the observation of its evolution over time
and identification of trends and their coherence with Lefebvre’s transformative idea.
2 From Smart City to Human Smart City
In academic literature, one of the earliest usages of the term smart city describes a
city where urban planning and development turns towards technology, innovation
and globalisation (Gibson et al. 1992). Coining of the term came about in the context
of the emerging information or knowledge economy and the exploration of the
role of metropolitan areas within it. With predecessors and contemporaries such as
the information city (Hepworth 1987), the technopolis (Smilor et al. 1989) and the
intelligent city (Heng and Low 1993), in essence these city concepts revolved around
interactively linking “technology commercialisation with the public and private
sectors to spur economic development and promote technology diversification”
(Smilor et al. 1989, p. xiii), where local governments would strategically deploy
the emerging networking and data transmission and storage technologies towards
this goal (Hepworth 1987). Singapore has been an early adopter of the technopolis
strategy (Heng and Low 1993).
An aspect that has been traditionally neglected in favour of understanding technol-
ogy and policy aspects, despite being crucial, is the topic of people and communities
in smart cities. This includes addressing digital divides, accessibility, participation
and partnership, education and quality of life (Chourabi et al. 2012). While designing
smart cities to benefit people, rather than abstract concepts like economic growth is
a step forward, scholars highlight the missed opportunity of making precisely these
people part of the solution to the challenges faced. People with agency are the “smart”
in the human social or sociable city (Foth et al. 2011; Ratti and Townsend 2011; de
Lange and de Waal 2013; Oliveira and Campolargo 2015; Mulder 2014).
Beyond the criticism related to the weakening of privacy protection and evolu-
tion towards total surveillance—the panoptic city, as Kitchin (2014) puts it, further
Unpacking the Smart City Through the Lens of the Right … 241
significant concerns have been raised. As Hollands (2008) summarises, these range
from difficulties with the definition and actual components of “smart” cities, to social
divide, inequality and the challenge of balancing sustainability and business goals.
Specifically criticising the u-City (Hwang 2009), de Waal (2011) notes that person-
alised and context-aware systems address citizens as individual customers, when
modern technology should treat them as citizens. He warns of a potential shift of the
relations between citizens and city, leading to people becoming consumers indiffer-
ent to their civic rights or duties, and ultimately also altering the relationship they
have with each other. This risk of passivity increases through what Crang and Graham
call anticipatory technologies that provide users with a predefined set of alternative
actions, or even create “delegated agency” to “pacify” the user (Crang and Graham
2007).
The discourse around top-down, centralised smart cities has not only begun to
shift on a scholarly level, but increasingly we find initiatives of local governments
taking a step forward to open up the aptly coined “city in a box” (Shepard and
Simeti 2013). Cities such as members of the international Open and Agile Smart
Cities network commit to develop and implement open standards and open access to
city data driven by implementation, by concrete use cases. Open standards and open
access create opportunities for bottom-up and grassroots initiatives, such as not-for-
profits and individuals, to plug their own technologies into the city. This places the
smart citizen centre stage, as Breuer et al. (2014) argue, and Capdevila and Zarlenga
(2015) eloquently illustrate with concrete examples from Barcelona.
Although also containing the marketing-loaded word “smart” (Nam and Pardo
2011), and in spite of being inclusive of approaches that heavily rely on the skilful
use of open data and digital technologies (e.g. smartphones, prototyping platforms
such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi), the smart citizen movement goes beyond. It is
rather about people engaging with their local environment, urban planning, policy
and development processes (Shepard and Simeti 2013). Technology then takes on
not only the role of means to an end to relieve social, economic, educational and
other imbalances as well as other forms of malfunctioning that grassroots initiatives
traditionally try to tackle but can be deployed towards the higher level of reshaping
the process of addressing these challenges itself.
Achieving fundamental change in the way urban issues are tackled, de Lange
(2013) suggests, can only occur when we rethink how technology integrates with
the social fabric. He currently sees it deployed as “plugins” for “the continuation
of normalcy and sameness”. It should, instead of blending in with everyday life, be
profoundly political and move people, and, in turn, enable them to move others. As
also suggested by Greenfield (2013), the same technologies can be deployed to go
beyond providing “sterile ‘solutions’” to pose questions and raise issues of equity,
power and access.
De Lange and de Waal (2012) point out that achieving what they call the
social city is essentially about redefining the ownership of the city to “a sense
of responsibility for shared issues and […] taking action on these matters”—an
inclusive, collective and participatory ownership, not its proprietary sibling inherent
to top-down governance.
242 I. Anastasiu
This new kind of ownership of the city has two dimensions: first, the willingness
to act upon an issue that affects the collective, and second, the right to do so. The
right to act requires changes in regulation towards policies that do not force citizens
to operate in grey areas or even within the sphere of the illegal. Ito argues that, in the
developed world, the barrier to urban innovation is not lack of funding, but the lack of
permission, suggesting local governments either be supportive, or reduce their level
of control (Tischler 2013). The willingness to act is strongly tied to motivation. In
his framework, the affective smart city, de Lange (2013) proposes to build smart city
interventions around “people’s emotional attachment, or lack thereof, to shared urban
issues”. By directly addressing issues that move urban residents and acknowledging
these feelings, such interventions nurture citizens’ willingness to act.
However, in order to be able to exercise the rights that come with this ownership,
a third dimension seems crucial: the ability to act upon an issue. Without having the
necessary resources, obtaining tangible results is difficult, no matter how motivated
the citizen is and that the law grants him permission. Particularly in a context where
aspects of urban life are increasingly permeated by technology, lack of digital liter-
acy can be considered a key factor leading to exclusion from the process of active
engagement. Chourabi et al. (2012) identify “digital divide(s)” as one of the key fac-
tors related to people and community that must be addressed by smart cities, based
on their review of existing smart city definitions.
Grassroots movements fuelled by this new kind of ownership of the city not only
face challenges in terms of scalability and achieving longevity and bigger impact
(Breuer et al. 2014), but are commonly treated as a nuisance (Hollands 2008) and
initiators perceived as a threat or trouble-makers by local government, as their goals
may conflict with wider city strategies or even be illegal. Models of governance of
zero tolerance towards minor infractions manage to stifle and overcriminalise this
kind of interventions. Douglas (2014) provides a notable overview of the discourse
on DIY urban design in academic literature, highlighting that even in the academic
discourse these individuals are met with scepticism.
This makes evident their power struggle not only with government, but with the
capitalist system, the commodification of urban life and the marginalisation and
displacement it inherently brings with it. At its core, what we are witnessing through
these initiatives is citizens claiming their right to the city, what Lefebvre (1996)
describes as the “demand…[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life”.
Harvey (2008) criticises that this right, defined not only by individual access to public
resources, but rather as the right to collectively reshape the process of urbanisation
itself, is currently reserved for a small political and economic elite, who can at will
shape the city to its own benefit. He argues that the right to the city is “one of the
most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”, as it ultimately gives us the
freedom to change ourselves by changing the city. Our experience from interacting
with its tangible and intangible environment have a deep effect on shaping who we
are, as well as the web of social relations in which we are embedded.
3 The Smart City Through the Lens of Lefebvre’s Right

to the City
In one of the last essays before his death, Lefebvre (2014) criticises the increasingly
technocratic and bureaucratic approaches to shaping the city. He laments the dete-
rioration of social relations, as well as of the urban as conceived and lived social
practice.
The year 2016 has seen significant social and political polarisation. This is a
powerful reminder of those who have been left behind in the frantic competition for
innovation and economic growth. As of 2018, inequality is one of the four most dan-
gerous global risk factors according to the World Economic Forum (2018). Voorheis
et al. (2015) demonstrate how rising inequality increases political polarisation and
leads to rightward shifts in political governance.
The rise of the creative class and the competition to innovate between cities has
led to an urban crisis (Florida 2017), a global and regional struggle of the have-
not cities to compete with the ones perpetually attracting wealth and people in a
self-reinforcing loop. What Lefebvre lamented in this essay is arguably exacerbated
in today’s cities, not lastly through their hyperconnected nature, a network of both
people and “things” as part of the Internet of things.
As argued by Hollands (2008) and Kitchin (2014), there is further need to decon-
struct the term smart city towards an understanding that addresses deep-rooted struc-
tural problems with a prospect of systemic change.
The smart city seen through a Lefebvrian lens could serve as a deconstruction
of the smart city, where technology and information is used and produced by its
residents as a tool to exert their right to the city and/or is the product of these
rights having been exercised. This discourse is people-centric, embracing the idea
that citizens hold valuable tacit knowledge about their physical and social space
collected from their lived experiences (Foth and Brynskov 2016), legitimising the
right to self-management, a right that is inextricably embedded in the right to the
city (Purcell 2014).
Lefebvre’s concept is calling for two fundamental rights: the right to appropriate
urban space and more importantly the right to shape the process of urbanisation
itself (Lefebvre 1996; Harvey 2008). As part of applying this lens, Purcell (2016)
stresses, it is crucial to understand it in its original, radical form, deeply rooted in
Marxist humanism. Over time, the concept has been dilated to mean “everything and
nothing” (Purcell 2014). While Purcell recognises the need of multiple formulations,
he also emphasises that these formulations require specificity, as well as transparent
political content. The striking contrast that emerges from comparing Purcell’s (2014)
exemplary liberal-democratic interpretation of the right to the city to the compre-
hensive one he situates within Lefebvre’s larger body of work stands testimony to
how strongly contemporary interpretations have drifted away from the most defining
pillars of the original concept: self-management and self-organisation under condi-
tions of prioritising use value over exchange value and the rejection of the notion
of property rights (Purcell 2014). This implies a restructuring of urban space and
244 I. Anastasiu
processes in response to the social, economic and cultural needs of people, rather
than according to the needs of capital (Smith 1979).
Lefebvre conceptualised the right to the city not as mere addition to existing
liberal-democratic rights. Instead, the concept is geared towards what might be
labelled a form of “gradual revolution”, a wider political struggle to “move beyond
both [the institution of] the state and capitalism” (Purcell 2014) and radically change
not only cities, but society as a whole. This gradual revolution would be fuelled
by self-management, by the city’s inhabitants increasingly actively and voluntar-
ily taking over decisions and tasks traditionally reserved to the urban elite. Instead
of exclusively relying on confrontation, as city-related tasks would increasingly be
taken over by the majority of city inhabitants, the political-economic apparatus, its
structures and its representatives would become redundant and gradually dissolve
into the broader citizenship (Purcell 2014). Yet this kind of citizenship would require
a radical redefinition that re-associates the act of inhabiting the city with citizenship,
two entities currently dissociated (Lefebvre 2014) as a consequence of the narrow
definition of citizenship as appurtenance to a country in a globalised world.
What could this citizenship that would allow the citizen a right to the city then look
like, and thus whose right would it be? The key to a possible reconceptualisation may
lie in exploring Lefebvre’s call to revive grassroots democracy and the more philo-
sophical associative life—la vie associative (Lefebvre 2014). Grassroots democracy
places as much decision-making authority as practical on the lowest geographical
and social levels of the group, while at the same time creating the prerequisites for the
ability of all individuals to participate. The associative life describes the voluntary
coming together of individuals or groups to serve a common purpose, requiring the
willingness and the motivation to associate. Citizenship (and the right to the city)
then would become something one voluntarily claims. However, the level of influ-
ence is weighed in reverse-hierarchical social and geographical order, placing the
power in the hands of the people of the lowest social level as well as of those living
geographically closest. A definition of citizenship thus reconnects the individual with
the geographic proximity and their belonging to the broad mass of the population
of that given geographic location. Such a definition transcends nationality, origin,
cultural background, gender and a myriad of other factors of diversity, encourag-
ing exchange, learning and mutual exploration. And it lies at the core of Lefebvre’s
vision of reviving the urban as a lived collective social experience as part of the right
to the city.
In the context of the smart city or digital city, Lefebvre’s idea is not confined to the
right to simply access the smart city, information, its data, the right to use services
or technology, but as the right to both produce, manage, and own all of these as part
of an act of political and economic empowerment that is geared primarily towards
the collective benefit and the strengthening of social relations.
In today’s cities, where technology increasingly permeates cities both through
physical deployment, for instance of IoT (Internet of things) devices, as well as
by being linked conceptually to their virtual, abstract representations, such as online
digital maps, the right to appropriate urban space evolves to include the appropriation
of the hybrid space, and implicitly of the digital space included in it. Inadvertently, this
includes the access and manipulation of the information underpinning these hybrid
and digital spaces, Lefebvre’s complementary call for the “right to information”
(Lefebvre 1990; Shaw and Graham 2017). Shaw and Graham (2017) explore the
reproduction of power through code, content and control of urban information by
informational monopolies that produce abstract space through their technologies,
taking the example of Google. They conclude that Lefebvre’s original separation
of the right to the city and the right to information is rendered problematic by the
dependence of virtual urban spaces on the flow of digital information.
The struggles required for the reconfiguration of power dynamics in cities, previ-
ously primarily involving citizens and governments, have now expanded to include
global IT corporations. Power is even more concentrated when governments employ
soft- and hardware from global technology purveyors, such as IBMs for city manage-
ment, where obscure, protected algorithms are consulted by city officials to inform
decisions on how infrastructure, space and services are to be designed and deliv-
ered. To whose advantage or detriment? Who makes this decision in the first place?
“Technology is never neutral, it has the potential and capacity to be used socially and
politically for quite different purposes” (Williams 1983; Calzada and Cobo 2015).
Lefebvre’s now unified right to the city and right to information go well beyond
the simple right to access the information—or results—produced by these systems.
They not only require transparency about the algorithms themselves, and, with the
increasing usage of machine learning, about the kind of information used to train
these new technologies. Instead, they imply that citizens should be in charge of their
conceptualisation and the decision-making processes involved.
On the smart city level, Lefebvre’s revolutionary idea includes the gradual reclaim-
ing of urban technology from corporations to shared ownership by citizens, taking
over the production and management of these technologies and thus incrementally
working towards the withering away of technology monopolies.
In this new light, how does systemic change—the process through which the
current system becomes a different system—connect with Lefebvre’s right to the
city? The right to the city is an open, ongoing project that fosters self-management
and striving beyond the commodification of all aspects of urban life, yet whose
outcomes cannot be fully known. Instead, it can be seen as a cascade of outcomes,
each triggering the creation of a new outcome, closer to an alternative form of urban
life, a form that itself is under constant reimagination. It is an ongoing democratic
project of being “willing to imagine and demand a possible world, even if that world
is impossible under the conditions that exist now” (Purcell 2014).
How might we go about putting this democratic project into practice? What would
the mechanism underpinning it look like, and what existing tools can we rely on?
And last but not least, where might the roles and opportunities for technology herein
lie?
The emerging notion of participatory city-making seems suitable to be further
shaped towards a mechanism consisting of methods, tools and principles that imple-
ments the right to the city and grounds it in practice.
246 I. Anastasiu
4 Participatory City-Making as the Right to the City

in Practice
The first logical connections between the term “participatory” and city-making
appear to have emerged in 2014 in the Netherlands in the field of urban design, with
the similarly new terminology of “collective city-making” as an intermediary (Tan
2014). Tan (2014) discusses citizen participation in the context of self-organising
cities, elaborating on the evolution and nature of towns that had concrete outcomes
with regards to moving towards Lefebvre’s concept: Gulensu in Turkey and the Dutch
town Almere Haven. Further on, she proposes a set of properties of a new method
for self-organising urban processes: multi-agency, open communication, collabora-
tion, simple dynamic rules, incremental evolution, constant learning and a generative
character. Finally, she proposes gaming—structured forms of playing—as a method
for collaborative city-making (Tan 2014). A direct continuation of this idea can be
identified together with one of the first occurrences of participatory city-making as
a concatenation of the two terms in de Lange’s exploration of the playful smart city
(de Lange 2015). While it does create an explicit link between participatory city-
making and the smart citizen, it makes no explicit reference to a particular mode
of governance. In the same year, Mulder calls for a “new paradigm in city-making,
which combines top-down public management with bottom-up social innovation to
reach meaningful design”, which she further distils into participatory city-making
in the context of a sociable smart city (Mulder 2015a, b). Thus, these three early
conceptualisations can be placed along a spectrum ranging from self-governance
to multi-purpose and finally to a progress of negotiating power between the parties
within the existing system and structures.
It may appear of no surprise that participatory city-making emerged within the
urban design field, as the preceding participatory design is a well-suited point of
departure. It describes a design process and research methodology, grounded in action
research that originated in Scandinavia in the 1970s. It attempts to actively involve all
relevant stakeholders in order to obtain a result that best meets the needs of its users
(Spinuzzi 2005; Schuler and Namioka 1993). The clear distinction from user-centred
design consists in research and design conducted with stakeholders, as opposed to on
behalf of them (Iivari 2004). Participatory design attempts to tap into the “traditional,
tacit and often invisible” types of knowledge of knowing by doing (Spinuzzi 2005).
In this context, participatory city-making seems a legitimate approach, considering
the “wealth of knowledge, wisdom and experiences collectively and privately held
by each urbanite (Foth and Brynskov 2016).
Participatory design is coordinated by a superior entity, such as a researcher, an
institution or a company that guides the process according to its methods (Spinuzzi
2005; Schuler and Namioka 1993). This line cannot clearly be drawn for participatory
city-making, as there is no formal answer with regard to coordination yet—mediated
stakeholder negotiation that includes the current bureaucratic structures, as Lefebvre
would call them, or self-organisation?
In concordance with the initial aim of exploring the smart city through Lefebvre’s
lens, participatory city-making is inextricably linked with self-organisation, or what
Lefebvre would call “autogestion”. Participatory city-making as a form of power
negotiation within the current structures would defy Lefebvre’s radical idea, instead
acting only as an incremental addition to liberal-democratic rights rather than a
pathway to an inherently different system.
Purcell’s (2014) conclusion that the right to the city is not an ideal utopianism
and thus not describing a desired final state to be achieved, but rather sits in between
ideal utopianism and reality as an urgent utopia provides a basis to further unpack
a Lefebvrian participatory city-making, coherent with Tan’s (2014) ideas. Lefebvre
describes the urgent utopia as a “rigorous form of utopian thinking that demands
constant feedback between its ideals and empirical observations” (Purcell 2014;
Lefebvre 1996). This translates into a necessity for it to be governed by strong
principles, both procedural and essential, that ensure the permeability of the process
for new contributors and contributions on the one hand, and a coherent way forward
on the other.
Foth and Brynskov (2016) propose participatory action research for civic engage-
ment as an “indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance
infrastructures and practices for civic engagement”. This cyclic method, organised
around phases of planning, acting, observing and reflecting and reinforcing a col-
lective inquiry in all phases, can not only be used to gather insights to develop such
final outcomes, but, applied continuously, to direct an ongoing process. It thus seems
to provide appropriate procedural principles for participatory city-making, offering
the necessary theories and methods (Chevalier and Buckles 2013) to systematise the
process and ensure the rigour Lefebvre expects incorporated in an urgent utopia. We
would then see a multitude of these cycles coexisting, each in its own phase, due to
the decentralised nature of participatory city-making.
With the increase of prominence of the commons (Ostrom 2015; Cox 1985; Feeny
et al. 1990), open licensing models, open-source software as well as open standards,
data and interfaces, we observe a current that embraces the so-called hacker ethic, a set
of moral values and the philosophy of individuals seeking to overcome the limitations
of computer systems in playful, explorative and meaningful ways. These principles
are built around sharing, openness, decentralisation, free access to computers and
world improvement (Levy 2010). The core ideas, subject to continuous revision
through the procedural principles delivered by participatory action research, could
well function as the essential principles of participatory city-making. While the
hacker movement’s claims of strong influence from Weber’s (2002) writing on the
protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Himanen et al. 2001) may appear
as a fundamental contradiction to Lefebvre’s vision of going beyond capitalism, a
more thorough examination reveals that there actually are significant consistencies,
arguably more than with Weber’s ideas. As Torvalds outlines in his prologue as
Linus’s Law and the book proceeds to further elaborate, the hacker movement is
about survival, social life and entertainment, a sequence that describes progress.
Ultimately, hacking is meant to be a joyous undertaking (Himanen et al. 2001)
This is in perfect harmony with the revitalisation of social relations and the city as
248 I. Anastasiu
oeuvre, as a masterpiece of playful and enjoyable interactions that Lefebvre (1996)

envisions. Similarly, sharing, free access and world improvement are nothing less
than a concrete articulation of prioritising use value over exchange value, and quite
contradictory to notions of capitalism.
Due to the decentralised nature of participatory city-making, the reinforcement
and application of these procedural and essential principles would be the product
of participatory city-making itself. As its contributors join the movement entirely
voluntarily, by conviction that it is the desirable way forward, they implement these
principles within themselves and keep other contributors accountable, while them-
selves being held responsible by others.
5 Tools for Participatory City-Making
With a conceptual framework of participatory city-making at hand, the question

arises of what concrete tools can be used to support it. We can attempt to identify an
initial set by returning to the three prerequisites of a collective ownership of the city
outlined at the beginning—citizen’s willingness, ability and right to act, which are
also fundamental to the translation of Lefebvre’s right to the city into practice.
5.1 The Willingness to Act and the Associative Life
The willingness to act is strongly tied to motivation and its manifestation results
in civic engagement, where the individual, the citizen, is the primary actor. Civic
engagement refers to the attempt to “make a difference in the civic life of our com-
munities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motiva-
tion to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community,
through both political and non-political processes” (Ehrlich 2000). Notably, it is not
only actions such as being members of a community association, voting or going to
city council meetings that civic engagement consists of, but also educating oneself
on how to best carry out these actions.
This is the arena where technology, particularly digital technologies such as web-
sites, apps, videos, interactive visualisations, digital art installations, media archi-
tecture, photography can be used to raise the profound questions Greenfield (2013)
calls for, implementing de Lange’s (2013) proposal towards technology that is pro-
foundly political and appeals to emotions. Combined with, e.g. social media, these
achieve the technologies of scale-making Dourish (2010) sees as catalysts for social
and political action.
5.2 The Ability to Act
The ability to act requires a horizon for action. This may involve access to particular
resources, e.g. financial resources, material resources or access to city infrastructure,
but also necessary skills, ranging from particular theoretical domain knowledge, to
execution experience, to media literacy and technical affinity. With regard to skills,
there are two distinct threads that can be identified: the social thread, that encourages
exchange between people, for instance in co-working, hacker or makerspaces; and the
experiential thread, that emphasises learning through immersion and/or immersion
into the subject that is to be learnt, whether it is a concrete technology or a knowledge
domain. Civic engagement or voluntary association becomes then the enabler for both
oneself, as well as for other citizens to become active, as it supports both individual
learning as well as exchange with the community.
5.3 The Right to Act
The right to act is the most difficult to achieve component, as it involves a struggle for
power. In the current system, the various power dynamics are manifested through cit-
izen and community engagement, where the degree of participation is decided by the
initiator of the engagement process, usually the power holder, currently represented
by government and increasingly by IT corporations.
Citizen and community engagement mainly refer to initiatives that should be pur-
sued by an institution, e.g. the government, in order to foster collaboration when
addressing issues of public concern. While the first focuses on engaging individuals,
the latter targets groups of individuals. Citizen engagement is “based on a two way
interaction, conversation or dialogue. Citizen engagement emphasises the sharing of
power, information, and a mutual respect between government and citizens” (Sheedy
et al. 2008). Community engagement is “a planned process with the specific purpose
of working with identified groups of people, whether they are connected by geo-
graphic location, special interest, or affiliation or identify to address issues affecting
their well-being […] shifting the focus from the individual to the collective, with the
associated implications for inclusiveness’ (Davies et al. 2011).
Citizen and community engagement are conceived as an outreach of inclusion
initiated by the power holder, as opposed to voluntary and self-initiated civic engage-
ment. Examined under Lefebvre’s lens, they fundamentally contradict the principles
of voluntary, intentional and motivated participation. However, they serve as valu-
able tools to assess the evolution of the withering of the bureaucracy and technical
monopolies: as participation levels reach the highest rungs, official’s tasks and deci-
sions have been taken over by citizens and further increasing the redundancy of the
state.
Although exposed to criticism, e.g. by Tritter and McCallum (2006), Collins and
Ison (2009), Arnstein’s ladder of participation (1969) is still the de facto framework
250 I. Anastasiu
Fig. 1 Three dimensions of Wilcox’ framework for participation (left); stances of participation
(right)
to critique, design, implement and evaluate participation in both academia and pol-
icy practice (Collins and Ison 2009) and has significantly influenced approaches to
governance and policy making, including urban planning (Schroeter 2012).
It outlines participation as a constant struggle for power between institutions and
citizens. Similarly, re-works and alternatives, see Connor, Potapchuk or Choguill
(Potapchuk 1991; Choguill 1996; Connor 1988), also look at participation in relation
to governments and, as Collins et al. point out, imply that “meaningful participation
occurs only in relation to the decisions, activities and power of state organizations
or similar authority” (Collins and Ison 2009). This subsequently would erroneously
reduce participatory city-making initiatives to being irrelevant—a fundamental con-
tradiction to Lefebvre’s radical ideas around self-management.
Wilcox’ (1994) framework for participation, as shown in Fig. 1, is more appro-
priate for participatory city-making as it accommodates for complexity by taking a
more nuanced standing with regard to power. Instead of the topmost stance always
being considered the most desirable outcome, it acknowledges that different people
may aim or fight for a different level of involvement depending on the purpose to
be achieved. This is clearly embedded through the inclusion of a second dimen-
sion called “stakeholders”, which need to be understood not as representatives of
authority, but rather as the diversity of a Lefebvrian citizenship. Finally, it reflects
the fluid nature of participatory city-making through the third dimension, “Phase”,
acknowledging that during this process, different levels of participation are claimed,
necessary or desired.
Technology then can be deployed towards various aims. It can be used to reduce
the access barrier, increase the quantity of participation, improve the quality of par-
ticipation as well as the quality of the outcome of participation, and finally be either
(a part of) the outcome itself or support the crafting of the outcome. For example,
a 3D printer may have been used to generate elements to be incorporated in an
interactive street art installation that raises awareness of a certain societal issue and
was developed as part of a participatory and open process. Using such a participation
framework more systematically within each individual participatory city-making ini-

tiative, combined with other frameworks, would provide a basis for the wider phase
of planning within the participatory action research cycle.
However, in order to clear the way forward, it is not only necessary to conceptu-
alise the goal and identify the principles and mechanisms of implementation, items
discussed in detail above. It is also necessary to develop a deep understanding of the
status-quo, identify whether the evolution is consistent with fundamental notions of
the right to the city, and extract the best practices of how these mechanisms are used
in order to replicate, reappropriate and amplify them.
6 Identifying the Way Forward Through a Taxonomy
Initiatives that contribute to the city in one way or another are diverse and numerous,
and discussing them is difficult, as it seems that there is no taxonomy and attached
vocabulary to organise and describe them. Yet the ability to deconstruct them into key
traits and understand how the different combinations of the representations of these
key characteristics reflect the nature of these initiatives and implicitly the level of
pervasion of participatory city-making, as a mechanism for systemic change beyond
capitalism and the state, appear crucial in deciding where to invest our efforts next.
6.1 Taxonomy Development Methodology
The taxonomy to be outlined seeks to be an initial means to develop this ability. It

evolved in three steps: first, a broad review of initiatives that contribute to the city
and subsequently revisiting the emerging traits from the first step; second, linking
them back to a moderate, liberal-democratic interpretation of Lefebvre towards par-
ticipatory city-making to create a refined set of traits; and third, a last re-evaluation
of the traits under the radical interpretation of the right to the city outlined earlier.
6.2 Step One: A Broad Review as the Initial Step

in Taxonomy Development
The first step involved generating an initial set of traits based on the review of over
fifty initiatives that contribute to the city, following the methodology of taxonomy
development that allows the taxonomist to “make a more or less sound selection [of
the characters] on the basis of an intuitive model of the organism, which is again
determined by current knowledge and hypotheses” (de Hoog 1981). The implicit
252 I. Anastasiu
research question of how participatory city-making with the aid of technology works
in practice acted as the equivalent of the intuitive model of the organism.
The review included projects from both an academic and a non-academic back-
ground identified in previous related research, as well as an additional search on
the Internet and in scholarly directories. The inclusion criterion was that the ini-
tiative had to make use of technology in some form, no matter whether to present
itself on the Internet, to organise itself, as a direct result of the initiative, etc. The
additional search was carried out with terms such as “civic engagement”, “citizen
engagement”, “participatory”, “city”, “city-making”, “urban development”, etc., and
combinations thereof in different languages. Some initiatives were found as they were
cross-referenced by the ones already identified. Included in this set are, for example,
the MakeCity festival in Berlin (2017), the online consultation platform Neighbor-
land (2017), the collective visioning platform NextHamburg (2017), matchmaking
platform synAthina (2017) in Athens connecting volunteers with funders, the crowd-
funding platform SpaceHive (2017) focusing on civic projects, and the innovation
unit of Boston’s city council called New Urban Mechanics (2017).
The goal at this stage was solely to capture the breadth of what potentially could
fit under the umbrella of participatory city-making. This also means not using pri-
oritisation of exchange value over use value as an exclusion criterion—commercial
organisations were included; similarly, initiatives developed in partnership with gov-
ernment.
Four broad areas emerged as relevant aspects to explore within the identified
initiatives selected:
1. relation to technology;
2. relation to civic/citizen engagement;
3. contribution to city-making; and
4. degree to which they are participatory.
By reviewing them at medium depth, various salient characteristics emerged, again
following the principles outlined by de Hoog (1981), where the researcher is free to
choose the optimal criterion, as long as it is consistent with logical reasoning. The
taxonomist’s intuition not only is present at the beginning, but also evolves during
the entire data collection process. The data collection process, in turn, empirically is
interwoven with the classificatory process, and thus, the ordering is equally intuitive.
The review leads to a total of six traits:
Participation stance it facilitates based on Wilcox’ framework of participation;
Form that can vary but is not restricted to being a blog/online magazine, a community
or crowdsourcing platform, collaboration network, company or research institution;
Direction refers to the direction of the initiation; if initiated by an official body, the
project is considered “top-down”, otherwise “bottom-up”, unless they’re not actively
involved in the activity and act as a coordinator, which qualifies them as “mediator”;
Focus describes the area relevant to city-making, e.g. mobility, economy, design of
urban space;
Potential for impact on policy making to enable citizens’ right to act upon issues;
Potential for impact on citizen motivation highly important for the development
of the participatory sense of ownership.
Further, a set of questions related to how participatory city-making can be under-
stood emerged:
Who are the stakeholders? On a metalevel they may include government entities,
businesses, universities, individual citizens but also collectives. On a smaller scale, it
could be residents of a certain area, workers, shop owners and passers-by in general.
Which level does participatory city-making occupy? Referring to whether it is
oriented inwards, ensuring the initiative itself respects participatory principles and
had a dedicated coordinator, similar to participatory design, or whether it is a net-
worked, distributed set of initiatives of various stakeholders and that constituting the
participatory element.
At which scale does participatory city-making operate? Referring to small-scale
grassroots initiatives, large-scale top-down initiatives, initiatives that bridge the two
or the possibility of the sum of all three.
6.3 Step Two: Taxonomy Re-Evaluation Based on a Moderate

Reconceptualisation of Participatory City-Making
The second step consisted of revisiting this set of open questions and further fleshing
out the notion of participatory city-making to a moderate interpretation of the right
to the city as an increment to the current liberal-democratic rights system, including
thinking of it in more operational terms. These new insights and the deeper under-
standing achieved were then distilled into the eight traits highlighted below through
the following process:
(1) Inward Participation Level and (2) Outward Participation Level: Considering
the new distributed and networked understanding of participatory city-making that
emerged from this moderate interpretation of Lefebvre, the trait Participation Stance
had been split up into Inward Participation Level and Outward Participation Level,
reflecting the governance model within the initiative (inward) and the collaboration
model between initiatives (outward).
(3) Organisational Form, (4) Technologies and (5) Purpose: Form lacked a clear
distinction between organisational/legal form, technological form and purpose. In
consequence, Form was renamed to Organisational Form and supplemented by Tech-
nologies and Purpose.
Direction became obsolete with the new, distributed view of participatory city-
making as the sum of all initiatives.
With the introduction of Purpose partially overlapping with the initial usage of Focus,
the latter has been removed, particularly because Purpose covers the broader city
aspects such as economy, culture, sustainability, mobility on a more granular level.
254 I. Anastasiu
(6) Relation to Government: The Potential for impact on policy making is difficult
to quantify, and results can come with a long delay, as methods for success assessment
of academic research based on policy impact show (Donovan 2007, 2011). For this
reason, Relation to Government was used as a proxy, as a partnership or funding
relationship with a governmental institution increases both access to policymakers,
as well as the probability of recommendations made to be considered.
(7) Participation Incentives: Potential for impact on citizen motivation suffered
from a similar problem and was replaced with Participation Incentives, which could
be of political, affective or hyperlocal nature, and more.
(8) Success: Finally, in order to leverage the potential of the taxonomy to identify the
optimal representations of the above traits, a crucial trait to be added was Success,
and substantive work is required to identify criteria and approaches to incorporate
into success assessment.
6.4 Step Three: Participatory City-Making as a Radical

Interpretation of the Right to the City
The final taxonomy, building on the results from the second step, was informed by
two research questions:
• How well can the taxonomy asses the level of consistency of a given initiative
with Lefebvre’s radical interpretation of the right to the city, and the resulting
understanding of participatory city-making?
• How does technology contribute towards this consistency?
7 A Taxonomy for the Classification of Participatory

City-Making Initiatives
The proposed final taxonomy developed through the methodology described above
consists of six traits:
1. Inward participation level
Based on the stances of participation in Wilcox’ (1994) framework of participation,
this trait seeks to identify the dominant stance the initiative adopts within itself, mean-
ing amongst its own members. The stances can be Information, Consultation, Decid-
ing Together, Acting Together and Support. It gives thus insights on the approach
to governance the initiative takes in direct juxtaposition to the grassroots democracy
Lefebvre calls for.
2. Outward participation level
Based on the same participation model, this trait focuses on the dominant stance
the initiative seeks with other initiatives This can give an indicator of the nature of
partnerships and their outcomes. For each partner, a stance can be assigned. The
stronger, more numerous and more the ties to government or corporations, in com-
parison to those to civil society, the less consistent the initiative is with participatory
city-making as seen through Lefebvre’s lens.
3. Organisational form: profit versus common good
This trait can take multitude of representations, such as an individual, an informal
collective, a cooperative, a not-for-profit organisation, a small business, a company,
an institutional subdivision, etc. The more profit-oriented the initiative is without
generating social and public value in return, the less it is in concordance with Lefeb-
vre’s idea of use value above exchange value. It must, nonetheless, be added that the
legal form is not always an accurate representation of organisational practice.
4. Activities: constructive versus adversarial
Lefebvre’s idea is built on generative and constructive principles, assuming people
come together to take over tasks and decision-making, and make alternative visions
happen. The initiatives activities should reflect this constructive spirit, instead of
being exclusively adversarial.
5. Role of technologies
This trait maps a specific type of technology to its role, such as to inform, educate,
enable collaboration, as a direct product of participatory city-making in order to
develop a comprehensive matrix of its overall contribution to the initiative.
6. Consistency
By combining the levels of consistency of all previous traits into one overall indi-
cator, indicator, the taxonomy provides a mechanism to rank initiatives based on
their adherence to right to the city principles, quantify how many are converging
towards these principles as well as identify trends based on regular application of the
taxonomy to the participatory city-making ecosystem.
7.1 The Role of the Taxonomy in Status-Quo Assessment

and Tracking the Evolution of Participatory City-Making
By revisiting the understanding of participatory city-making as an open-ended demo-

cratic project, as a process unfolding in cycles, the taxonomy can serve as an instru-
ment in the evaluation phase of the participatory action research that underpins this
process as a method. The development of the taxonomy serves as the necessary
delimitation of what is, and what is not a participatory city-making initiative. The
application of the taxonomy on the existing initiatives allows for the assessment of
the status-quo, as well as identifying trends in respect to progressing towards Lefeb-
vre’s vision of grassroots democracy and the prevalence of use value over exchange
value by it being periodically applied to the city’s ecosystem. Thus, the taxonomy
256 I. Anastasiu
development achieved more clarity through the framing of participatory city-making

within the larger theoretical frame of reference of Lefebvre’s (1996) right to the city.
8 Conclusion
Framed by Lefebvre’s concept of the right to city, that addresses the structure of
life in the city itself, rather than more operational aspects such as within the frame
of collaboration to produce a specific urban space, participatory city-making can
be elevated from a mere mechanism to incrementally amend the existing system to
one that radically empowers citizens to fundamentally reshape urban life, envision
an entirely different system and gradually make it happen. This exploration has
produced a conceptualisation of participatory city-making as a framework that relies
on procedural and effective principles based on the hacker ethic and participatory
action research, as well as concrete methods, of which the taxonomy is part of.
While the proposed framework is a step towards an enhanced conceptualisation
of participatory city-making, the challenging nature of the radical transformation it
implies requires a whole range of additional tools, methods, and more refined princi-
ples, as well as further theoretical exploration. Additionally, it would benefit from its
systematic application in the context of developing technologies with emerging and
existing initiatives towards a shared ownership of the city and its urban processes.
In the future, the messiness inherent to its distributed nature will prove challenging
for participatory city-making, while at the same time it is exactly this feature that
allows for openness, randomness and serendipity—“everything that makes a city
great” (Lindsay 2011). It is in these spaces of messiness that “cityness”, as opposed
to “urban agglomeration” can emerge, it is there that the act of making takes place
(Sassen 2005). For this messiness inherent to the right to the city can be considered a
“space for encounter, connection, play, learning, difference, surprise, and novelty,” a
space to “overcome their separation, come to learn about each other, and deliberate
together about the meaning and future of the city” (Purcell 2014).
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Wilcox, David. 1994. The guide to effective participation. Brighton: Partnership.
Williams, Raymond. 1983. Towards 2000. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
260 I. Anastasiu
Irina Anastasiu is a Ph.D. candidate at Queensland University of Technology. She holds a

B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Media Informatics and Communication Science from Ludwig-Maximilians-
University of Munich, and an honours degree in Technology Management from the Center for
Digital Technology and Management—a joint institution of Ludwig-Maximilians-University and
the Technical University of Munich. Her research, in response to techno-managerial approaches to
smart cities, investigates opportunities for public participation in which residents are active agents
of change, rather than just providers of urban data. More specifically, she is interested in explor-
ing participatory city-making as an opportunity to build solidarity with those neglected or suffer-
ing as a result of dominating smart city visions, in order to strengthen urban social movements
towards systemic change in how cities are produced and governed. In doing so, she seeks to inte-
grate social, political and urban theory into civic technology.
A Hacking Atlas: Holistic Hacking
in the Urban Theater
Douglas Schuler
Abstract This essay is intended to help further the understanding of contemporary

social change and social activism, which in turn should assist people developing civic
intelligence 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 neigh-
borhood 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 hacking and holistic hacking, and hacking spaces (and seven
types of hacking spaces) are introduced and then employed in relation to an actual
activist mobilization called Shell No, that was waged in Seattle by environmental
activists over a 30-day period in Spring 2015.
Keywords Civic intelligence · Activism · Hacking · Holistic hacking

Hacking spaces · Governance · Social change · Cities · Enablers · Hackability
Coordination
1 Introduction
This essay is intended to help further the understanding of contemporary social

change and social activism, which in turn should assist people developing civic intel-
ligence within both local and global communities. To accomplish this, the concepts
of hacking and holistic hacking, and hacking spaces (and seven types of hacking
spaces, each described below) are introduced and then employed in relation to an
actual activist campaign. Generally speaking, a hack is a single action or interven-
tion; they are insufficient for bringing about significant changes. Holistic hacking
describes the phenomenon in which a variety of hacks that are not planned or dic-
D. Schuler (B)
The Evergreen State College & The Public Sphere Project, 2202 N. 41st Street,
Seattle, WA 98103, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_14
262 D. Schuler
tated by a single source are sufficiently coordinated that they help bring about a
common goal. Civic intelligence, the focus of my work for nearly 20 years, helps to
provide purpose and substance to our considerations of hacking and holistic hack-
ing. 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. The last piece of our analytic framework, hacking spaces, describes
collections of people, roles, rules, norms, processes, etc., that can influence how
city-making plays out. We discuss seven types of spaces specifically as they relate
to cities. Each of the spaces, although not wholly autonomous, provides a sort of
governance, formal or informal, that determines a portion of the maintenance of the
status quo and the ability to help determine the direction of the whole. Each of the
seven spaces describes spheres of action that interact with the others. The spaces
describe the various sub-theaters within the broader urban theater. The spaces can
be used generically in considering the city in the twenty-first century, but here we
consider one mobilization, a focused climate action campaign called Shell No, in
Seattle waged by environmental activists over 30 days in Spring 2015. Finally, the
atlas here, as with more conventional atlases, is a collection of the various spaces,
demonstrating how the interconnections of the various actions or hacks can become
something resembling holistic hacking.
2 The City
People live and die, work and play, suffer and rejoice in cities. And the city is the
seat of the economic and cultural engines that drive much of the human activity (and
consequently non-human activity, the climate, etc.) on our planet, the urban and the
non-urban. The city is a dynamic physical complex of streets, buildings, tunnels,
bridges, and complex systems that supply humans with water and electricity and
move our wastes invisibly away from many of us. The city is also comprised of an
assortment of social and human (and other life) systems that interact with it. It is
in a perpetual state of decay, repair, maintenance, and creation. As Lewis Mumford
reminds us, “The city creates the theater and is the theater” (1996). This means that
the city is open for appropriation, enactment, annotation, occupation, exploration,
and hacking.
3 Hacking and Holistic Hacking
In general, hacking can be summed up as undisciplined, clandestine, unexpected,

unorthodox, volunteer-based, fun, unauthorized, amateur, out of bandwidth, off the
grid, skunkworks, not official, experimental, insurgent, out of jurisdiction, transgres-
A Hacking Atlas: Holistic Hacking in the Urban Theater 263
sive, free, DIY, and provisional. Thus, hacking can be seen as oppositional to the
bureaucratic, rationalistic, business-as-usual approach. For that reason, the idea of
‘hacking’ can serve both as a metaphor and as a pragmatic approach for rooting out
opportunities for clever activism in the urban theater.
The urban theater metaphor needs to be briefly introduced and explained further.
We use it primarily as a setting for action (similar to its use in military parlance)
while acknowledging the importance of the imaginative, performed nature of city
life. When the city becomes the theater, the play spills out beyond the theater walls and
it is performed throughout the city; the city simultaneously becomes a theater where
meaningful actions—sanctioned and non-sanctioned—are enacted and viewed. The
roles of actors and audience members tend to shift, they are dynamic and somewhat
interchangeable, and their actions are both scripted and improvised. (And, of course,
‘actors’ are not always human actors; within the city, the buildings, roads, traffic
lights, communication systems, are also players….)
The connotations of hacking come in many flavors. One in general circulation
goes something like this: illegally breaking into a computer system generally with
the intent of causing mischief—stealing private information or trade or national
secrets or causing damage of some sort. The original version basically meant messing
around, sometimes obsessively, with computers, programming, and data—generally
on tasks that were not on the formal agenda, tasks that were selected solely because
they were interesting to the hacker. (See Weizenbaum (1976) and Levy (2001) for
two somewhat different versions.) The meaning I employ here is related to ‘civic
hackers’ (Townsend 2013) which generally means using digital approaches for civic
amelioration of some sort, often in a non-corporate sense and often with data that
been made available with today’s transparency initiatives and demands.
For the purposes of this chapter, we are restricting our usage to social or civic
amelioration which often includes oppositional actions of one type or another. At
the same time, although we are placing most of our attention here on ICT and digital
media, we are opening up the idea of hacking to be any type of interruption that shares
the attributes discussed above which often, although not always, employs technology
of some sort. The general concept that of interrupting the flow is not limited to com-
puting. Similar ideas crop up in a variety of fields including design (Hartmann et al.
2008), fashion (von Busch 2008), art (Guerrilla Girls 1998), technological pranks at
sporting events,1 and activism (tactical media, message corrections, guerrilla theater,
detournement, etc.
Hacking also means plunging right into a project (often writing code) without the
benefit (sometimes questionable) of a mock-up, design document, public hearing,
or deep analysis. Hacking can be precise and planned yet it is often ad-lib, ad hoc.
Hacking at some level is a matter of economy. An ‘efficient’ or successful hack means
a high yield per input: more publicity or support for the hackers’ side and/or more
pain for the opposition in the form of confusion, embarrassment or discomfort, or
embroilment in a more complex, protracted, wider (e.g., becoming involved in legal
1 See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_

Technology.
264 D. Schuler
battles) or more costly enterprise. People hack because they’re strapped for resources
(including time) that may never come. Also, there’s something in the nature of a
hack that suggests—or at least allows for—experimentation and incremental and
improvised adjustments, something that a full-scale plan (e.g., to land a person on
the moon and bring him back safely) generally discourages.
Hacking is often conducted sporadically and perpetrated by an individual or small,
often marginalized, groups. Often deemed a provocation or a symbolic act, de Lange
and de Waal (2013) point out that artistic and other urban interventions (what we
might call hacks) often “remain highly temporary and stick to oppositional politics.”
They argue for an alternative approach to “urban design with digital technologies
that focuses on the active role of citizens and uses the city itself as the test bed
for experiments.” Of course, whether an action is an experiment or not is to some
degree in the eye of the beholder. The political moments described by Becher (2012)
are unlikely to be considered explicitly as experiments by the activists themselves.
And many activist hackers might find the experimental perspective alien, sterile, or
confining even though they are certainly involved in some type of informal or implicit
evaluation or metacognition (Schuler 2015) regarding the impact of their actions.
A hack can also be a provocation; it is at least intended to suggest a deflection
from the business-as-usual path that inertia suggests is the most likely. Humor is a
natural hack since it can often be employed economically without necessarily needing
vast resources. And while humor by itself is only one hack among many, its role in
revealing the flimsy veneer of one imaginary can be invaluable in the construction of
an imaginary (or myth or paradigm or vision) that embodies sustainability and social
justice. It can play the important role of exposing the rhetoric or imaginary (Wright
et al. 2013) that being employed to justify or rationalize the unexamined momentum
of the status quo of the present or some version of the status quo of the past.2
3.1 Holistic Hacking and Civic Intelligence
So far, we have concentrated here on ‘hacks’—limited interventions that may

require fewer resources—but with an eye toward holism, toward significant and
durable social change. Holistic hacking suggests another level of hacking, a con-
cept that is related to civic intelligence, the capability of people working together to
address shared concerns equitably and effectively (Schuler 2001). Holistic hacking
is intended to be focused on the common good; it is a version or extension of civic
hacking. As the name suggests, holistic hacking is more systemic, coordinated, and
purposeful than the interventions described above by de Lange and de Waal or by a
random, non-coordinated, or economically or politically self-serving hack. The hacks
become holistic when one hack helps increase the likelihood that other purposeful
2 Thiscan be exemplified by the curious, imprecise, and somewhat ominous slogan of current
president Donald J. Trump: Make America Great Again! Just what period of time was he alluding
to? And people who were oppressed during that unnamed period might not agree.
actions (including hacks) that get closer to the goal are now more easily enacted. Sig-
nificantly, building the capacity of one’s allies is one way of getting closer to their
goals. Holistic hacking describes a purposeful application of hacks with the spaces
that are relevant, positively or negatively, to a desired outcome or set of outcomes.
The relevance can be potential or actual. Because the actors have similar goals but
different philosophies, norms, strategies, and tactics, they will need to strategically
adapt to each other and to changing circumstances if they are to achieve their goals.
Holistically hacking the city allows us to bridge the gap between temporary probes
and long-lasting effects. A series of temporary hacks could help lead to long-lasting
social change—if the hacks were timely, purposeful, capacity-building, and coordi-
nated. Holistic hacking can be done to interject new ideas or focus, and this can be
in service of maintenance or upkeep of the city—the everyday re-making of cities
as well as the more revolutionary making of cities.
The working hypothesis (and preliminary findings) suggest that a focus on social
and environmental amelioration will promote different actions and outcomes than
a putatively objective, norm-free enterprise, i.e., that there are general characteris-
tics that distinguish collective intelligence (Malone et al. 2009) and civic intelligence
(Schuler 2014, 2015).3 As an example of civic intelligence, holistic hacking will nec-
essarily rely on the same enablers, the characteristics of civically intelligent actions
to help lead to successful outcomes, that civic intelligence relies on. In other words,
some subset of these enablers will be required for successful changes within any of
the spaces that constitute the urban theater mentioned by Mumford (1996) in the
next section. These enablers, of which nearly 50 have now been identified, have been
organized into a framework containing five dimensions (Schuler 2014), namely:
• Knowledge, including a variety of knowledge-based enablers such as theory,
knowledge of problems, skills, resources, self-knowledge, and metacognition (the
ability to think about one’s own thinking);
• Attitude and aspiration, including a variety of enablers that are typically seen as
non-cognitive but are essential for civic intelligence such as values, social critique,
civic purpose, and self-efficacy;
• Organizational capital, including the processes and structure of the collectivity
that are needed to complete tasks effectively, such as personnel, work practices,
and access to resources;
• Relational and social capital, including reputation, social networks, social capital,
and opportunities; and
• Financial and material resources, including money, buildings, land, and the like.
The framework is used to depict the wide diversity of enablers that are involved
in positive social change via civic intelligence. The framework is descriptive as it
is really just a list of what sorts of resources (very broadly considered) are useful
for civically intelligent activism. The framework can also be used prescriptively. An
3 Itis interesting to note that a study of civic intelligence must necessarily include a study of civic
ignorance (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) which, as with civic intelligence, relies on a variety of
interrelated processes to sustain it.
266 D. Schuler
organization, for example, could use the framework for self-diagnostics. It could
reveal weaknesses within the organization which could then take corrective actions
to improve one or more of the enablers by making it more appropriate to the organi-
zation’s challenges and opportunities.
Each major dimension of the framework will necessarily be engaged in any mean-
ingful action. The important question to ask, however, is how well and to what degree
the dimension was engaged. If, for example, a group created a website that contained
policy proposals, but the developers had neglected to consult the policy experts within
their own group, they would have shown a deficiency in at least three of the five
dimensions: knowledge, organizational capital, and resources. This of course also
holds true for the individual enablers. Finally, although the enablers are numerous,
the list is still not exhaustive—and probably would never be broad enough to cover
all circumstances.
4 Hacking Spaces
According to historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford, “It is in the city, the city as
theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through
conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant cul-
minations” (1996). Social change is complex—it is an ecosystem where people and
organizations with varying skills, tactics, and perspectives collaborate often with lim-
ited explicit communication and coordination; yet they are working ‘together’ toward
similar ends. The process unfolds over time—and although there are many impor-
tant patterns to be recognized (and respected), social change cannot be scheduled or
engineered, taken for granted, or permanent. This chapter fits within that tradition by
presenting seven spaces in which these unfoldings occur, within the context of the
city theater. The concept of spaces is used by a variety of disciplines and is fundamen-
tal to geography. Its virtues include flexibility and universality. Aase in his article on
Symbolic Space (1994) stresses that space must be considered contextually. In this
article, the context can be seen generally in terms of urban activism—specifically
environmental activism in Seattle during one month of Spring 2015. Harvey and
Davidson (1973) stress the usefulness of the concept: “… space becomes whatever
we make of it during the process of analysis rather than prior to it.” Here, hacking
spaces describe a conceptual realm or category that can be fairly readily be demar-
cated from the other spaces in its universe, basically by the actions within the space,
the players, rules, products or results, and goals.
These particular spaces were identified via examination of significant activities
that take place within cities using the lens of spaces. We are differentiating between
spaces generally by what takes place within them. In other words, different actors
give different performances for different purposes using different rules. Generally,
this will include norms, values, demographics, actions, and consequences. Contrari-
wise—when sets of actors and actions are sufficiently different (via demographics,
norms, etc.) from other sets—they are likely to be constituting a different space. But
these spaces are not autonomous: activities within a space can shape (or create or
destroy) other spaces or aspects within them.
The seven broad conceptual spaces in which urban hacking can occur correspond
to the characteristics of an actual city and to the actual events and issues within that
city and those that affect that city. The spaces have diverse sites, actors (including
hackers), and areas of focus, modes of actions, and effects. (And the spaces have
spaces within them.) The spaces are intended (and hoped) to be comprehensive in
that the set of spaces listed here adequately describes (or at least suggests) all of the
possible conceptual ‘homes’ for holistic urban hacking.
The spaces in this ‘atlas’ are abstract; they become relevant when they are instan-
tiated and mapped to the specific relevant attributes of the city and the issues that are
under contention. When considering actual locations within the city as a focus for
physical action, there are many options: The location for a demonstration against a
war might best be at federal or national state building, demonstrating against redlin-
ing might best be done near the entrance of the bank’s headquarters; demonstrating
against air pollution—which although diffuse is generally far worse in low-income
neighborhoods—might be more effective when others are brought to the neighbor-
hood either in person, or virtually, via an online video or a virtual reality tour.
The spaces take particular significance when multiple ones are in play (see the
Shell No example below) and when hacking in one space promotes successful hack-
ing and actions in other spaces. How readily an actual city can be ‘hacked’—its
hackability—will depend on the particular aspects of the city and the skills, creativ-
ity, and dedication of the hackers and the hacks they can identify and employ, as
well as access to the space. An analysis of the various spaces could also be rich and
potentially productive.
Can ‘hackability’ be operationalized, assessed, perhaps even measured, and cal-
culated? Although the idea is currently underdeveloped, the spaces could be queried
for measures of hackability. One important note on our hypothetical hackability index
is that it is not intended to be an index of vulnerabilities, although an authoritarian
government could think of it in those terms. The hackability index in many ways
could be thought of as an index of openness and opportunities—and any closing of
them or raising the cost of using them could be considered as threats to the open
character of the city—and its various spaces.
Just as traditional maps of physical spaces can be organized via political, topolog-
ical, or other means that highlight some characteristics and downplay others, these
seven spaces bring particular focus to some attributes at the expense of others. And,
like maps of physical cities, the perspectives of spaces where political boundaries
and natural features such as rivers are likely to be strongly related, the spaces in the
hacking atlas are likewise strongly and densely interconnected. The hope is that the
conceptual slicing and dicing of the city in a very broad sense can contribute to our
social imagination, both practically and theoretically.
268 D. Schuler
4.1 Information and Communication Space
While today’s civic hacking has little in common with the idea of hacking a competi-
tor’s computer system or stealing personal data and identity, the legacy of this reliance
on hidden data is often still present in today’s usage: using digital data that has been
kept out of reach of citizens, or, even, repurposing data for purposes that the people
who collected the data did not foresee, or might even oppose, still remain. Infor-
mation and communication can often provide the seed for other types of hackings.
The space also includes vital elements of the economic side of the city. John Perry
Barlow’s comment that “cyberspace is where your money is” highlights the fact that
financial information is stored in ‘cyberspace’ and online systems are responsible for
massive amounts of financial transfers. Thus, cyberspace provides the target for both
hackers that are providing information about corruption and money-laundering and
also for the people who would like to add the money in your account to the money
in their account.
How the ‘hackers’ within a social movement or urban campaign communicate
with each other and with potential allies is important as well—and the security
of these channels can be vital. This area of course is the focus of many articles
and discussion thanks in part to new movements like Arab Spring (Lotan et al.
2011) and the Occupy Movement (Gamson and Sifry 2013). New DIY networks
that can be set up and mobilized easily and autonomously without being connected
to the Internet also offer opportunities for hacking in this space (Antoniadis and
Apostol 2014). It is also important to note that the mass media is covered in this
space [which is similar to mediascapes (Appadurai 1990)]. The mass media can
act as a force multiplier for the hack, but, so too, can email, electronic petitions,
or social media. And because the mass media often comes with its own agenda,
it is often necessary to hack this as well. See the patterns on Illegitimate Theater,
Tactical Media, Indigenous Media, or Media Intervention (all in Schuler 2008) for a
variety of perspectives on media interventions. Civil society has been active in this
space. Community networks (Schuler 1996) generally created and maintained by
community developers and activists to support local community using the Internet
numbered in the hundreds before commercial interests became dominant.
4.2 Governance Space
This space describes the formal governmental procedures that are intended to govern
the city and the seven spaces within it. And while these procedures are not necessarily
always obeyed (by either the governed or the governors), may be subject to bribes and
corruption or other unequal application, or be inconsistent or unfathomably complex,
the influence of this space is generally quite considerable as it is backed up by laws,
judges, police, and prisons. For this reason, a hack that helps enlist a part of the
government (e.g., the legal system) in the struggle can be considerably powerful. The
‘checks and balances’ that have been intentionally built into democratic systems (by
early adopters of cybernetics and systems thinking)—as well as the polycentric reach
and roles of governmental bodies (Ostrom 2015)—suggest that myriad points exist
for holistic hacking and that the potential of enlisting formal governmental systems
in social struggles is possible. The boundaries of this space (like the others) are
not constant. The entire space can change fundamentally, although more frequently
this change is more localized. It is subject to some renegotiation, readjustment, and
realignment in which ‘ordinary’ citizens are granted some quasi-governmental status.
This can be seen in institutions such as citizen advisory boards and public meetings.
One important hack is establishing a citizen police review board—or changing it by
adding more representative voices from the community it polices.
To be effective in this space, some important questions need to be addressed.
Where are various types of decisions made—and how are they made—and by whom?
Government agencies come in many shapes and sizes and have a variety of roles and
responsibilities that connect with each other—and with citizens—in complex ways
that are not well understood by the citizenry [or, even, in many cases, by the officials
themselves (Buxbaum 2015)]. Knowledge of this space—where responsibilities and
decision making are situated—while not hacking in its own right, provides important
insights about where to hack. Hacking in this space includes any type of reconfig-
uration of the roles of government and citizens. Participatory budgeting—hacking
the budget—is a major new development in this area because it opens up the role
of budgeting to include people who played little direct role historically—citizens.
See Stortone and De Cindio (2015) for an online instantiation of this process. The
governance space also includes the idea of self-governance and protocols such as
Roberts Rules of Order (Robert et al. 2011) belong here as well as new online ver-
sions such as eLiberate which supports distributed decision making using Roberts
Rules of Order in an online environment (Schuler 2009).
4.3 Social, Organizational, and Institutional Space
While the space above is specifically related to the formal institutions of government
and its relationship with people, this space is associated with civil society including
social networks (both ‘traditional’ and online), advocacy, educational, community,
social, and organized labor. The MAZI is an interesting case study of an ‘institutional’
effort to reach out to activists and support grassroots movements and bottom-up
initiatives through a ‘research and action’ funding framework (see Research and
Action pattern).4 Hacking in this space might mean starting a new organization,
joining an existing one, or, even, devising a new type of organization as people
did when they developed the ‘B Corporation’5 entity or a bottom-up ‘world citizen
parliament’ (Schuler 2013). It might mean developing new partnerships, consortiums,
4 See http://mazizone.eu.
5 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_corporation.
270 D. Schuler
coalitions, etc., that are able to organize themselves to create larger actions on more
fronts. This is a form of social network hacking—and it doesn’t only pertain to online
social networks.
Although much of the activity within the space seems to be more hostage to inertia
than others, there is room for hacking. One way is to remind organizations of their
founding goals or mission—either to help activate a new line of work for them or to
embarrass them for their dereliction of duty. One interesting approach along these
lines was demonstrated a few years ago when activists in 1998 formally requested
the Attorney General of California to revoke the charter of a US corporation, Union
Oil Company of California, which is the legal basis for a corporation’s right to exist
(Brooks 1998) for actions that were deemed to be illegal.
4.4 Infrastructure Space
Cities in particular are noted by various socio-technological infrastructures that main-

tain them. Energy use, surveillance, water availability, and quality, etc., are related to
this space. This space can be hacked in many ways from hooking into the electrical
grid without paying to setting up a free wireless network. These infrastructures are
largely invisible, in the sense that people may use them routinely but rarely think
about how they work, how they are maintained, etc. This allows city dwellers to pay
attention to other things, but it also helps sustain a level of civic ignorance: How are
citizens expected to contribute to infrastructure decisions—let alone develop alter-
natives—in a city if they lack basic knowledge? One hack here is simply making
infrastructures more visible. The Local Governments for Sustainability (iclei.org)
provides some window into this world although it is relatively static at this point,
while an ensemble of more dynamic, real-time (and other) displays would be more
illustrative and useful. The smart city movement, primarily an industry initiative, is
positioned as a solution to concerns over sustainability. These ‘smart cities’ are to be
managed to a very large degree via an intelligent use of big data. Although there is
likely to be substantial potential with this approach, the momentum is generally away
from transparency, citizen sovereignty, and self-governance and toward technocracy
and inscrutability of infrastructure.
Numerous opportunities exist for new civic infrastructure, such as municipal
broadband, community networks, or deliberation systems. Setting up a new elec-
trical utility corporation could also be considered a type of systemic or long-term
hack—one that could also be considered as a part of another space (such as organiza-
tional and institutional space). And any effort to improve infrastructure within a city
can be an occasion for hacking. And although infrastructure space can (somewhat
justifiably) be seen as big, expensive, impersonal, and severely limited in type, this
is not necessarily the case. Many of contemporary participatory or social sensing
projects (e.g., Airantzis et al. 2008) could be considered as possible predecessors of
components of tomorrow’s urban infrastructure. It is well known that people who
are marginalized due to economic or other factors are often concentrated in zones
within the cities that are environmentally degraded, unhealthy, dangerous, and iso-
lated from civic amenities. An ‘infrastructure’ that monitored air pollution that was
mobile and crowd-sourced could serve as alternative watchdog infrastructure that
provided evidence that could be used to show that environmental law enforcement
was needed.
4.5 Physical Space
The actual, palpable, aspects of the city can too be hacked. A demonstration or any
other occasion where people take to the streets reconfigures the city if only temporar-
ily. The Occupy Movement (Gamson and Sifry 2013) was a significant expression of
this. Another ‘hack,’ also significant, that is generally motivated more by the need for
survival is squatting and the erection of shantytowns, favelas, and informal housing
worldwide. The ‘Ministry of Space’ in Serbia (Predić and Čukić 2013) through semi-
seriously establishing itself with the quasi-official administrative rhetoric ‘Ministry’
becomes a ‘mirror institution’ (Schuler 2008), a provocative hack that could also
probably be filed in either the Governance or in the Social, Organizational and Insti-
tutional Space dossiers. In the physical space, the Ministry has hacked marquees of
shuttered theaters in Belgrade, Serbia (“No Play Tonight. Come Back Yesterday”)
and ‘spontaneously’ transformed dismal and neglected urban backwaters into pop-up
festivals of music, art, and conviviality. And this can take other forms such as tactical
urbanism (Lydon and Garcia 2015), city repair (Cowan et al. 2013), and urban par-
ticipatory design (DiSalvo et al. 2008). Some types of hacking of the physical space
can be promoted by government. The city government in San Francisco, California,
has identified ‘free spaces’ all over the city which people can lease from the city for
$1 annually. Of course, it is critical to note that physical (as well as other) spaces
in the city are often contested and afford unequal access and privilege. This is often
maintained through unvoiced norms but often also through laws such as prohibitions
against sitting the sidewalk that criminalize poverty. Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehren-
feucht (2009) provide an enlightening look at the history of negotiation and conflict
in relation to sidewalks in the USA. Thus, hacking this space often means using
the space by people in manners or for purposes that are not formally or informally
sanctioned. Henry LeFevre’s Rights to the City (1976) provides many insights with
which to inform the holistic hacking/civic intelligence orientation. A vast amount of
scholarly, political, and activist work has revolved around LeFevre’s work. The rights
to the city basically focused on the physical/material side of the city, the physical
space in our atlas. While this work has been extended in many ways, it could include
rights to each of the seven spaces.6
6 Seethe work of Antoniadis and Apostol (2014) on the ‘hybrid city’ for some ‘basics’ of the
Lefebvre’s work.
272 D. Schuler
4.6 External Space
Sometimes when hacking the city, it becomes necessary to hack the rest of the
world as well. Cities are not autonomous islands or planets but areas that exist
within broader environments. These broader environments include the natural world
(sometimes forgotten and undervalued) and the inhabitants outside the city (also
often forgotten and undervalued) as well as relationships to other cities, towns, and
the natural world. This space, of course, is actually a metaspace, although it is listed
as a single space for convenience. One way to look at this ‘space’ would be to see it
as a space containing the six others—each of these would be related in various ways
to similar spaces ‘outside.’ This is especially clear in the sense of the governance
space; the governance space within a given city has links to other spaces—Seattle’s
city government, for example, is related to county, state, and federal government as
well as to other city governance spaces with a varied set of interrelationships.
Based on his belief that national governments are increasingly unable to promote
progressive change, Barber (2013) presents a variety of current and potential relation-
ships between cities in which innovations are spread more quickly and more widely.
At the same time, the mayors of the world have established new networks that help
them to compare issues and develop innovative approaches to the problems of cities.
The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (http://www.c40.org/), for example, is a
network of the world’s megacities committed to addressing climate change.
4.7 Imaginary Space
This space may be the most important as it focuses on the creation of ‘realities’
that are different than the current ones including ones that are actually possible; it
drives the conceptual orientation or perspective that people carry in their minds as
they move through their daily lives. This space ultimately helps determine how the
city and the people within it are represented, basically through narrative imagination
about the future—and the present. This is the space of engaged and purposeful make-
believe (Walton 1990). Thinking about the city and its citizens as they are, lays the
groundwork for the future: Is the city mysterious, paranoid, engaged, reflective, open,
rambunctious, laid-back? This space encourages people to think about what could be
and what part they could play in achieving that end. If, for example, they are interested
in equity and environmental sustainability and they have sufficient social imagination
and self-efficacy, they are more likely to become active advocates (Schuler 2014).
If their worldview, on the other hand, consciously or subconsciously, rests on the
notion that they are powerless, and change is impossible, then they are more likely
to cleave toward the sidelines. If they believe that certain trends and certain types
of futures are inevitable, then, again, there is no reason to act beyond the strictly
personal and consequently they could decide to concentrate on maximizing personal
happiness and material accumulation to the exclusion of everything else.
This is the space where the idea of play becomes very relevant. Play is rehearsal;
it is an occasion for actively exploring possibilities. And the city can be playful;
it can support play in an endless number of ways. Playful acts and hacks can be
important including novel ones made possible because of digital technologies. The
‘Shadowing’ project in Bristol, UK, records shadows of people as they pass under a
lamp post which are then reproduced for the next person who happens by. This gives
the city dweller an unexpected chance to step out of ordinary reality at the very least
but also to interact creatively with the system by interacting with the prior shadows
or provide new interesting shadows for the next person (Nijholt 2015).
Hacking in this space includes imagining—and articulating—the futures that we’d
like to see as well as surfacing the imaginaries that are maintaining or even strength-
ening harmful tendencies of the status quo (Wright et al. 2013). Neither of these
efforts is easy of course. The forces that fight against new ameliorative imaginar-
ies, narratives, and futures are vast; they are seemingly ubiquitous—and they are
certainly well-financed. One of the most important aspects of city-making in the
imaginary space is that the city that is being constructed is one that won’t be in exis-
tence for a number of years—if ever. One of the most common contemporary vision
of this space is the sustainable city, a city that provides the urban amenities that its
dwellers would like to see, to enable them to live within limits in an environment
that is a socially responsible entity within itself and with its neighbors and the planet.
The o500 project exemplifies the idea of imagination nudging us into the future.7
It demonstrates how large innovative projects are likely to have their origins in the
imaginary space:
o500 is a work in progress that aims to foster a global perspective for inventing sustainable
urban lifestyles that are compatible with the survival of the biosphere and our aspiration to
fulfilled and happy lives. At the same time it is a concrete and immediate action plan based
on real projects around the world.8
4.8 Discussion
Explorations of the city’s seven spaces should reveal myriad ways open to citi-
zen engagement and, ultimately, prospects for bringing about positive social change
through holistic hacking. Looking at these spaces helps us appreciate the multidi-
mensional richness of the city including how the city is perceived, inhabited, used,
imagined, experienced, critiqued, measured, governed, etc., and how cities have
changed, are changing, and could change. The framework is abstract, but it takes
more specific attributes when it is considered in a specific case. And how the seven
spaces are instantiated are not universal—the challenges and opportunities that exist
vary considerably according to their context; a hack that is merely frowned upon in
one context may be punishable by death in another.
7 http://www.o500.org.
8 http://www.o500.org.
274 D. Schuler
Each ‘space’ contains the particular structure linking disparate types of institutions
and processes, but like a map, the representation within a space can only represent
a portion of the entire space. Hence, uncovering hidden structure and relationships
within the space can be crucial. Hacking can take place within a space (or multiple
spaces), and it can actually help reconstitute the space (or spaces) and the relationships
between them. Although the possibilities for future explorations must be realized
in future endeavors, we can at least suggest a number of possible next steps. One
of the most interesting that of actual ‘maps’ or other graphical depictions for the
different spaces is suggested by the idea of spaces. This could help people explore
the complexity without necessarily overwhelming them. The maps themselves could
employ a variety of icons, some specific to a single space, some shared by many, if
not all.
5 Case Study
The following discussion is based on a recent mobilization that took place in the
city of Seattle in the northwest USA but has ramifications beyond. Although this
chapter concentrates on city-making, particularly focusing on digital media, I have
chosen to convey a broader view of hacking within the seven urban spaces. I have
done this for several reasons. The approach that we took to this work was to look
at an actual event that was significant yet fairly limited in terms of geography and
duration. The objective was to identify an important mobilization and identify what
hacks occurred within that—including how new ICT was involved. An alternative
approach to exploring city-making vis-a-vis ICT would be to uncover an action that
relied to a large degree on ICT. While this approach is certainly valuable, it seems at
least possible that it may miss a large part of the reality that it is intended to describe.
This includes the fact that movements consist of many moving and, presumably,
coordinated elements, some of which takes place online but many offline. Moreover,
and this was not demonstrated in this paper, the focus on actions that rely solely on
ICT may also miss new constitutive developments or realignments that develop over
time.
The hacking spaces framework proposed here relies on the idea that cities are
dynamic systems with countless complex, interrelated elements. It does so, however,
by presenting spaces that although not strictly autonomous appear to be subject to
their own structure, norms, and processes that alter aspects of the city in a broad
way that encompasses considerably more than the view of the city as aggregation
of people and built structures. Hacking any city attempts to create a city that is an
alternative to the current one. But the alternative one is necessarily based on the
current one and connected to it; it is not totally separate, and hence, a digital hack
that only affected the digital world would not be city-making in the sense that we
are exploring. Without a viable connection to the ‘real world,’ the hack would be
impotent. Moreover, the actions (including hacks) that lead to successful conclusions
form a dynamic ecosystem. For that reason, in the Shell No example that follows,
the actions in the spaces that are being discussed are not only digital. On the other
hand, because the focus of this chapter and of the book is on digital phenomena,
noting the digital as well as the other connections among other actions and across
the spaces is critical. The connections between spaces may be bridged via ICT or not
(but it is commonly part of the overall campaign). The connections help to form a
complete, coherent set of spaces, a universe, although still (of course) inadequately
understood.
Cities are made through the activities of people and at the same time the city struc-
tures activities of the people. Within the paradigm of the seven spaces, people make
cities by changing elements and relationships within those spaces. In the following
section, we explore city-making by examining a recent mobilization through the
perspectives of the seven spaces. The attempt is to raise a broad number of relevant
characteristics without making claims for comprehensive or complete analysis.
5.1 Shell No
Climate change is ushering in a new era for the Arctic. The ice is receding at record
rates (NSIDC 2012) allowing for unprecedented opportunities for oil extraction.
Environmental activists believe that these new efforts endanger the environment and
lead to more cataclysmic climate. In the Spring of 2015, Royal Dutch Shell Oil
Company was preparing for a new initiative in the Arctic which included docking
a giant drilling rig, the Polar Pioneer, at the Port of Seattle. From the point that the
rig arrived (14 May 2015) until the point that it departed for its Arctic rendezvous
(15 June 2015) environmental activists from Seattle and beyond engaged in holistic
hacking, a multiplicity of hackings generally connected to each other—and generally
mutually reinforcing—in a variety of non-coerced and semi-autonomous ways.
Information and Communication Space
Mass media, the modern-day behemoth, was an all-important consideration through-
out the duration of the mobilization. All things considered the demonstrations were
ultimately mediagenic. The media did not choose to come down hard on the demon-
strations. Seattle is progressive politically and is more likely to be environmentally
friendly and scientifically informed than other places in the USA. Also, although Seat-
tleites tend to like order they’re not strangers to demonstrations. While not focusing
on the media alone, the Backbone Campaign, headquartered in the Pacific Northwest,
helped ensure that the efforts were clearly recorded in a way that provided a strong
message that was interesting enough to catch people’s attention and be likely to be
picked up by the mass media as well as social media.9 Their website stresses ‘artful
activism,’ ‘creative action,’ and “building a vibrant and joyous nonviolent nationally
networked, community-based progressive populist movement that makes a real and
positive difference in people’s lives.” In addition, the Shell No activists posted to
9 http://www.backbonecampaign.org.
276 D. Schuler
YouTube and managed at least two Facebook accounts which were used for shar-
ing information and ideas, loosely coordinating activities, building community and
solidarity, and providing visibility to the cause. Finally, the economic component of
this space was also in play. The Port of Seattle makes money from the organizations
who use its facilities. And Shell, of course, is a huge corporation that employs people
and lobbies government. And economic concerns present a wide variety of hacking
opportunities, including boycotts and divestiture.
Governance Space
As mentioned above, these spaces intersect and interplay in many ways. For one thing,
there are many relevant agencies, laws, permits, and the like that govern how—and
if—the drilling rig must be managed while it is visiting Seattle’s waterways. The
permit to allow it to even be there was, in fact, a major contention. It turned out that
the discussion and vote on it by the Port Commission was done in secret and there
was no public scrutiny (Brownstone Feb 15, 2015a). Clearly having the laws and the
roles of the relevant agencies online allowed much more visibility to this space than
before.
The Shell No campaign action demonstrates another interesting use of the gover-
nance space. On the Polar Pioneer’s last day in Seattle, two dozen kayaktivists were
arrested as they attempted to block the path of the massive rig (Brownstone Feb 15,
2015b). One protester, Mike O’Brien, was a Seattle City Council member. O’Brien
as an elected official brings to mind the governance space. But O’Brien apparently
hacked several other spaces as well. By performing civil disobedience, he blurred the
line between the governors and the governed and stretched the narrative of what’s
the proper response to his extraordinary action. In a text message sent from the Coast
Guard office while he was being processed, he articulated his objection: “That mon-
strous rig is headed to the Arctic to attempt to do something unconscionable. I had
done everything I know how to do as a citizen, an activist, and as a council member
to stop Shell from drilling in the Arctic.”
Social, Organizational, and Institutional Space
In addition to environmental groups such as 350.org and Green Peace, the sovereign
nations, indigenous people from North America played strong roles throughout the
month of protests. At a basic level, this hacked the legitimacy of the national state
and the corporations which is enabled through corporate-friendly legislation. As the
original inhabitants, indigenous people have prior rights to the land. However, due
to invasion and conquest, they are often impoverished: The environmental damage
wrought by modern technologically driven systems is not of their making. It is
contrary to their fundamental ethos, yet they are often the ones hit hardest by climate
change.
One seemingly unlikely group who played a prominent role was The Raging
Grannies, a group of women who dress like ‘innocent little old ladies’ and were
arrested, having padlocked their lawn chairs (with them in them) across the entrance
of the port where the rig was docked. They’re certainly hacking the ‘innocent old
lady’ paradigm. This group of Grannies was presumably living in the Pacific North-
west although they could have been from any number of affiliated chapters because,
perhaps unexpectedly, they are a global group and their website Raging Grannies10
include a ‘herstory’ and a ‘starter kit’ to help other Grannie groups get launched.
In addition to people ‘of that certain age,’ there was also a strong focus at the other
end of the age spectrum. Young people were often speakers at the rallies, and some
were preteens, while some were in high school or college. Their generation is more
likely to be affected by climate change than their predecessors, and in their speeches,
they expressed bewilderment that the older generation has been so derelict in its
responsibilities to future generations.
Infrastructure Space
On some level, the entire campaign was focused on infrastructure in a very large
sense—the massive worldwide carbon-based enterprise which fuels the economy
and unleashes the damaging effects on the planet’s climate. Locally, the 400-foot
drilling rig presented a visible month-long reminder of this infrastructure, that while
huge in itself, is infinitesimal compared to the incomprehensibly vast infrastructure
that is being resisted. In marked contrast to the drilling rig, the activists themselves
created an alternative structure that also floated in the waters of Puget Sound: A large
barge, physically close to the training and embarkation area of the kayaktivists, was
used as a music and dancing venue thus providing an opportunity for relaxation and
community building under the ever-present shadow of the big rig.
Physical Space
The physical space of the city is of course important focus of the city. In the Shell
No case, this physical space was unlike the typical physical space of cities in gen-
eral—including Seattle’s streets and squares that had been ‘hacked’ in previous
encounters—notably the demonstrations against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and
against the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999. The physi-
cal spaces in the Shell No campaign were to a large degree water-based. A barge,
for example, was anchored that served as a floating protest hub and home to music
and dance as well. And the water-based space most importantly gave rise to a new
breed of protester, the kayaktivists that encircled the rig and attempted to disrupt its
northward transit (Fig. 1).
External Space
While the entire action we are examining took place within Seattle, virtually the entire
purpose is tied to situations outside the city limits. The ultimate intent, of course, is
to prevent catastrophic effects of climate change. But this can’t be accomplished at
one go and obviously not by activists in Seattle alone. Other external spaces were
involved or incorporated with the Shell No actions. One such transit through this
space echoes the movement of the rig itself. Thus, the entire path of moving the
rig from one place to another presents opportunities for actions—and cooperation
between activist efforts, possibly utilizing the spaces in different ways as the rig
moves on—when it enters Canadian waters, for example, and a whole new set of
circumstances. Because ultimately the Shell No actions must be linked to other
actions outside of the time and space discussed here, the lessons learned in Seattle
10 http://raginggrannies.org.
278 D. Schuler
Fig. 1 Hundreds of waterborne kayaktivists demonstrating against shell provide stark contrast to
the 400-foot technological behemoth they are resisting. Photograph credit Arctic Drilling Kayak-
tivists vs Shell Polar Pioneer—Photograph by Daniella Beccaria (https://www.flickr.com/photos/
backbone_campaign/17332349103, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))
would ideally be shared with other activists in other locations and the cooperative
social networks between them would also grow both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Imaginary Space
Finally, the imaginary space is also crucial. According to Wright et al. (2013), “…
there is a need to view climate change as a social and politically embedded phe-
nomenon, fundamentally linked to patterns of production and consumption and the
ideological assumptions that underpin the economic system and our collective sense-
making processes.” In other words, climate change presents not only a physical (and
ecologically material) threat to our existence but also a conceptual challenge to the
way in which we imagine that existence. The Shell No campaign operated in new
ways in relation to the imaginary space. One was their ability to encourage new ways
of mobilizing people from under-represented sectors (indigenous people, youth, peo-
ple of color, elderly) in creative, family-friendly events thus helping to legitimize
‘protest’ by making it more accessible and natural. One of the more prominent ways
in which the mobilization used this space resulted in city-making in a way that was
abstract yet likely has significant and material consequences. This is by helping to
establish Seattle as a site of (inclusive) resistance which could serve as a model.
Here, city-making can be city image-making for people within the city and outside
the city. This could be part of a broader remaking of cities in general as they become
increasingly dominant—as well as specific cities, as Dickens did for London and the
director Ridley Scott for Los Angeles.
The imaginary space, interestingly, may be the one that reveals changes to the city
most clearly. The city itself may have an enlarged activist core and begin, even, to
see itself—and be perceived by others as a leader of sorts, whose citizens are active
as watchdogs, change agents, and cultivators of civic intelligence.
6 Hacking the Future
The nature of the city, currently and in the future, is of critical importance. The
main objective of this chapter was to present the seven spaces and to demonstrate
why they are important to city-making in an era of ubiquitous networked digital
infrastructures. The assertion in this chapter is that changing the nature in one or
more of these spaces in a given urban setting (or theater) demonstrates city-making.
While the digital domain may quite possibly grow in importance in future campaigns
or in some contemporary campaigns, its use in the Shell No campaign was generally
supportive (critically so) rather than dominant.
The seven spaces presented here are intended to provide some analytical and
design perspective for holistically hacking our future, in particular motivating cre-
ative civic intelligence work in the digital realm. The reality is, however, that new
concepts or frameworks like new technologies will not do this work for us. That work
requires the animating force of human beings, using creativity, values, courage, and
intelligence, as well as skilled, reflective, and informed hacking. Also, as noted ear-
lier, blocking these hacking access points, or raising the cost of exploiting them, is
threats to democratic processes and the openness of cities as described in the Hack-
able City Toolkit (2015). One of the most important lessons about civic intelligence
is that successful application of civic intelligence increases capacity for applying
civic intelligence in future endeavors.
The month-long story of Shell’s Polar Pioneer stay in Seattle provides an inter-
esting and useful snapshot, an opportunity to highlight the idea of holistic hacking
and the seven spaces in which urban hacking can be enacted. Over the course of the
month, two dozen or so formal and informal groups met one or more times a day with
a variety of agendas. The coalition was voluntary and informal, and the individual
groups usually made their decisions based on consensus. Their actions were always
peaceful—if not always legal. The questions as to the effectiveness of their actions
are now being raised: “Who won?” is one such question. Clearly, the actions, how-
ever brief, attracted national and international attention, e.g., in the UK’s Guardian
newspaper, and the fight, of course, is not over.
Climate change is still making its global advances while humankind struggles with
the issue, sometimes with unprecedented success such as with the Paris agreement
in December 2015 but too often with business as usual or even denial. During the
writing of this chapter, several months after the main event, Shell abruptly announced
that it was ceasing its Arctic operations. After spending over 7 billion dollars (USA)
280 D. Schuler
on their search, Shell stated that the company had not found enough oil to keep
looking (Brownstone 2015c). While the Arctic may be safer in the short term, it is
not obvious whether the activists can also claim a win. An organizer from 350 Seattle
stated that “I think it’s impossible to know which degree we had an impact, but it’s
safe to say it played into the larger calculus of whether it was worth it to Shell”
(Brownstone 2015c).
But the Polar Pioneer may yet return to Seattle (Garnick 2015). The theater will
presumably be available. What performances will be enacted there? Will the kayak-
tivists return, perhaps with new tricks (and hacks) up their sleeves?
This work benefited from discussions with Panayotis Antoniadis, Stephen
Buxbaum, Mark Gaved, and Matthew Horwitz. Any mistakes in this analysis or
reportage are probably mine.
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Douglas Schuler With a background in computer science, Doug has spent over three decades
looking at opportunities and risks of information and communication systems. Doug has presented
his work around the world. In 1987 Doug co-founded the Seattle Community Network, an all-
volunteer, free public access computer network. Working with over 85 contributors Doug devel-
oped “Liberating Voices, a pattern language for communication revolution”, that is available as
a book and is online in five languages. He also wrote New Community Networks, co-edited six
books, and authored dozens of articles and book chapters. Doug is former chair of Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility. He directs the Public Sphere Project and is working on
projects such as eLiberate, an online application that supports distributed meetings using Roberts
Rules of Order. Doug is continuing to explore civic intelligence, the collective capability of soci-
ety to address its problems, with his teaching, research, and organizing.
Of Hackers and Cities: How Selfbuilders
in the Buiksloterham Are Making Their
City
Michiel de Lange
Abstract How can citizens become active city-makers alongside design profession-
als, 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 house-
holds 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 contri-
bution results from a long-running research project called The Hackable City (http://
thehackablecity.nl), which between 2012 and 2017 in multiple separately funded
iterations, investigated new modes of city-making through the notion of ‘hackabil-
ity’. 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.
Keywords Smart cities · Smart citizens · Hacking culture · Urban planning

City-making
1 Selfbuilders and Hackable City-Making
How do new media and digital culture shape today’s practices and logics of city-
making, and what does this mean for the role of citizens? Principles and practices
of hackable city-making can be seen at work in the recent resurgence of selfbuilding
in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In the period after the financial crisis, selfbuilding
M. de Lange (B)
Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3_15
284 M. de Lange
emerged or re-emerged to be more precise, as an alternative way to develop the Buik-

sloterham brownfield area in the northern part of Amsterdam, from approximately
200 inhabitants to 10,000 people. Selfbuilding entails a range of practices and oper-
ates on different scales. I differentiate between private individuals and individual
households who build their own home, and building arrangements organised on a
collective scale. In the Buiksloterham area, the latter usually comprises of groups of
about 15–50 people who join forces to build a shared apartment building together. In
some cases, non-experts themselves are at the wheel, collectively hiring architects,
constructors, consultants and so on. More often, however, it is urban professionals
like architects or consultants who initiate such a project, allowing for varying degrees
of consultation and customisation to selfbuilding groups.
In this contribution, I attempt to draw productive parallels between selfbuilders
and hacker culture, in order to better understand how new media and digital culture
shape the future of city-making. In general terms, hacking refers to processes of clever
or playful appropriation of existing technologies or infrastructures and bending the
operation of a particular system beyond its intended purposes or restrictions to serve
personal or communal goals. The term ‘hacker’ originates from computer culture
and refers to playful cleverness in opening up the ‘blackbox’ of complex systems,
and a do-it-yourself spirit and collective practice driven by openness. As is argued in
this volume, there are striking parallels between hackers, as computer hobbyists who
write their own software for existing machines and shared that among each other
and with the world, and current city makers who similarly contribute to their city by
innovating with limited means. Like hackers, today’s city-makers use digital media
to bend around, innovate upon and change existing urban infrastructures, systems
and services. The notion of a ‘hackable city’ then, I argue, productively connects
parallel yet oftentimes disparate developments in how cities today are being shaped
by a variety of sometimes conflicting forces. City municipalities worldwide embark
on smart city policies with tech businesses and knowledge institutions. They deploy
digital technologies and big data to optimise services like traffic, energy, environment,
governance and health. Yet at the same time, a wealth of bottom-up citizen initiatives
is blossoming. These can equally be called ‘smart’ but are more people-centric. Such
initiatives consist of networked groups who engage in issues like area development,
neighbourhood liveability, community formation, cultural programming, taking care
of their own energy provisioning or measuring and generating environmental data.
Oftentimes, people employ sensor technologies, use open data or utilise social media
to organise themselves around a shared ‘matter of concern’ (Latour 2005: 114–120).
In an attempt to better connect these worlds, many cities have assigned specific areas
as urban laboratories, or ‘living laboratories’, for studying and experimenting with
new ways of city-making (Almirall et al. 2012; Bergvall-Kåreborn et al. 2015; van
der Graaf and Veeckman 2015).
A comprehensive vision that is ‘productive’ in the sense of being both critical and
affirmative towards these developments is lacking. The notion of the ‘hackable city’
is an attempt to do just that (see Ampatzidou et al. 2015; Gardner 2014; Mattern
2014; Townsend 2013). As we state in our introduction to this volume, the ‘hack-
able city’ functions, among others, as a heuristic lens to investigate how new media
Of Hackers and Cities: How Selfbuilders in the Buiksloterham … 285
technologies enable people to become active shapers of their urban environment,

how urban institutions and infrastructures as ‘closed platforms’ can be opened up
to systemic change by other than the usual suspects, and—crucially—to highlight
the struggles this may involve. The notion of ‘hackable city-making’ is urgent and
relevant from an academic point of view and from a societal perspective. First, a
hotly debated topic in academia is how digital media technologies become increas-
ingly important shapers of urban life and culture. Most notably, the ‘smart city’ as a
phenomenon and discourse has attracted huge attention from various academic disci-
plines. This has also spurred questions about how to foster more citizen-centric smart
cities (e.g., Albino et al. 2015; Allwinkle and Cruickshank 2011; Calzada and Cobo
2015; Caragliu et al. 2011; Diez and Posada 2013; Foth et al. 2016; Hollands 2008,
2015; Kitchin 2014; de Lange and de Waal 2013; McFarlane and Söderström 2017;
Ratti and Townsend 2011; Sadowski and Pasquale 2015; Söderström et al. 2014;
Townsend 2013). Second, researchers point to a crisis in expert knowledge systems
like urban design and study how this waning of professional legitimacy shapes the
work of professionals and the role of institutions.1 Less attention however is given to
the question how these professionals adapt, reshape and reinvent their professional
practice to accommodate to such shifts (for a recent example that includes the voice
of an architecture professional; see de Waal et al. 2017). Third, governments across
the world are adopting ‘participatory’ policy agendas in an attempt to harness a pur-
ported do-it-yourself civic attitude for expenditure reduction and legitimising policy.
However, critical voices argue that this often entails pseudo-participation or that it
exploits people’s free labour cloaked behind hip-sounding labels like ‘co-creation’ or
‘sharing economy’ (Fast et al. 2016; Scholz 2013; Terranova 2000). Fourth, a variety
of factors—ongoing rapid urbanisation in our ‘urban age’, climate change and natu-
ral disasters, the monetary crisis—have exposed the need to build resilient cities. The
question is how this can be done in a way that respects public and democratic values.
Put differently, how to steer away from the solutionist deployment of smart tech and
instead develop a strong set of human-centred narratives for truly smart cities? With
this contribution, I attempt to sketch the contours of this ongoing endeavour.
2 From Computer Culture to Selfbuilders
In order to turn the notion of hackable city-making into a productive term for under-
standing shifts in contemporary city-making, I turn to a small selection of key works
of the literature about hacking as a cultural phenomenon. The discussion helps to
extract and define three aspects that are relevant for our ensuing discussion of self-
builders as city-makers, namely the particular principles, ethics and practices asso-
1 Arguably, among the first to attack urban planning as a ‘science’ was Jane Jacobs, in her famous
book The death and life of great American cities from 1961 (Jacobs 1992). Today, the emerging
field of ‘science of cities’ attempts to rationalise what it deems the ‘pseudo-science’ of planning
through the use of mathematics, data and modelling (e.g. Batty 2013, Bettencourt 2014).
286 M. de Lange
ciated with hacking. Steven Levy in his book Hackers: heroes of the computer revo-
lution (originally published in 1985) describes the rise of various subcultures based
around computers, like MIT-based software hackers and Californian garage hard-
ware hackers (Levy 2010). Theodore Roszak in The cult of information: The folklore
of computers and the true art of thinking (1986) describes the rise of an ideologically
driven counterculture of ‘guerilla hackers’ based around the democratic potential of
computers (Roszak 1986: 158–162). In these two early accounts, hackers figure as
active makers and shakers of computer innovations, and the relationships mediated
through them (Levy 2010; Roszak 1986: 158–173). Levy describes how a group of
students at MIT—driven by curiosity—successfully obtained access to very expen-
sive early computers. Initially, such machines could only be operated by a select
caste of specially trained people, dubbed the ‘Priesthood’ (Levy 2010: 5). This ran
counter to the spirit of openness these students had in common through their shared
love of electric model trains. Hence, they soon began to find ways to gain access
to these room-sized machines and started experimenting to make it do all kinds of
other things and to control it. These selfproclaimed ‘hackers’ became the vanguard
of a new ‘symbiosis between man and machine’ (Levy 2010: 27).
Thus arose a new kind of hacker culture that is based, first, on a set of principles.
According to Levy, these principles include: freedom of information (all information
should be free); decentralised organisation (and mistrust of authority); fundamental
meritocracy (judgement of each other is solely based on quality); aesthetics (code and
computing can be a source of art and beauty); computing as change agent (believing
that computers can change life for the better) (Levy 2010: 28–34). Below, we will
see similar principles at work in how the making of cities has been claimed by non-
professionals without (much) expert knowledge, in a spirit of openness and sharing
of information.
Second, this set of principles is accompanied by a specific ethic: a shared attitude
of finding intrinsic pleasure in tinkering, of balancing between pragmatic problem-
solving and curiosity-driven problem-seeking, and considering messiness as a poten-
tial strength instead of a threat. According to Pekka Himanen in his book The hacker
ethic, and the spirit of the information age, the hacker ethic consists of several values
(Himanen 2001: ix–x, 139). The hacker ethic stands in opposition to Max Weber’s
classical idea of the ‘Protestant work ethic’, in which work is seen as a duty and end
in itself. By contrast, hackers assume an intrinsically motivated and selfdetermined
stance towards their work. They are driven by passion and freedom (Himanen 2001:
18–19, 33, 140). Hacking is also opposed to the exclusive ownership of informa-
tion on which making money in capitalism is premised (Himanen 2001: 45). For
many hackers, money is only a means towards greater individual freedom. Real
value derives from social currencies like peer recognition, social worth and open-
ness (Himanen 2001: 51–55, 140; Raymond 2000). Himanen furthermore argues
that hackers embrace key values of Manuel Castells’ ‘network society’, like privacy,
freedom of speech and selfdetermination (Himanen 2001: 89, 106, 109, 113). This
‘hacker ethic’ is predicated on unobstructed access to information (in the form of
code) and the freedom to build upon other people’s work. Today, we can see a similar
selfmotivated and selfprogrammed ethics in many of the selforganised city-making
efforts. As is described in more detail further below, selfbuilders invest a lot of time
and resources in their work, driven primarily by an intrinsic motivation to solve indi-
vidual challenges and in the process combine ‘selfishness’ with lofty social ideals of
sharing these solutions with the collective.
Third, hacking also is a praxis: a way of doing things by passionately engaging in
an activity that is ‘intrinsically interesting, inspiring, and joyous’ (Himanen 2001: 6).
For the hacker, things only are meaningful if you find out how they work and master
them (Levy 2010: 3, 6–7). The way of doing something matters: a proper ‘hack’
shows artistry by being imbued with innovation, style and virtuosity (Levy 2010:
10). At the same time, hackers frequently operate with reused or repurposed generic
instruments and without any grand design. Hackers are interested in understanding
the complexity of systems and being able gain mastery over them, playfully tinkering
with the resources available at hand. In the words of Richard Stallman, open-source
hacker and founder of the free software foundation, ‘playfully doing something
difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking’.2 Again, as we will see there are
clear parallels with selfbuilding, which more often than not requires people to cleverly
influence and gain control over the complex amalgam of physical resources, digital
information, rules and institutions, while balancing individual and collective aims.
Despite the fact that selfbuilding sometimes appears to be more a matter of ‘painfully
doing something difficult’, we shall see that people derive satisfaction and pride from
dealing with the challenges.
Hacking reconfigures the relationship between individual and collective interests.
It serves to scratch people’s very personal itch (‘I don’t like the way something works
so I’ll modify it according to my wishes’), but it also has a social side to it (‘I’ve come
up with something clever and this could also benefit others’). This social element can
be competitive in an attempt to impress and gain respect among peers (Levy 2010:
12), but it can also be communal in the spirit of openness, share-alike and community-
building (Himanen 2001: 59; von Hippel 2005: 97–98; Levy 2010: 46). Hence, as
a mode of production hacking can be positioned between the capitalist free market
economy in which competition and profit reign supreme, and communitarian ideals
of collectivising and redistributing resources in an equal way. It oscillates between
organising individual creativity and communitas. Himanen suggests that hacking
establishes a kind of third way. Hackers challenge the idea that corporations are best
suited to drive innovation and wellbeing and reject capitalist control of information.
Hackers also see the collective interest best served by meritocratic achievement
and are suspicious of centralised authority representing the community (Himanen
2001: 60–61). Hackers like to engage in communal open innovation and care deeply
about individual reputation (Himanen 2001: 40). Hackerdom highlights tensions
between the individual and the collective and between reputation-based competition
and communitarian openness. As will become clear, these dimensions are central to
understanding new practices of city-making.
Selfbuilding is as much a cultural practice as a spatial one. Indeed, as we shall see,
it entails the formation of subjectivities and individual and group identities, which
2 Source of the quote: https://medium.com/backchannel/what-is-a-hacker-51257cad8b54.

288 M. de Lange
bear striking similarities to early hacker culture. Hackers tend to have a playful and
curious world outlook. They want to know how stuff works by tinkering with it, not
as engineer who designs according to a careful preconceived plan or blueprint but
in an improvising go-along way. Seeing oneself as a hacker usually entails having a
slightly subversive attitude. Hackers do not accept defaults (‘as is’) but are interested
in imagining spaces of potential (‘what if’). Understanding hacking as involving a
form of subjectivity stresses how important it is to understand contemporary modes
city-making as deeply ingrained in people’s selfunderstanding and selfevaluation. To
study ‘hackable city-making’, therefore, means to study people’s mediated way of
being in the world and their strong affective relationships to the urban environment.
The city hacker is both a homo faber and a homo ludens.
3 Approach
The findings described here are based on intermittent and non-intensive ethnographic
fieldworks done in the period between September 2014 and the end of 2015. The
methods consisted of unstructured and semi-structured interviews with over 20 self-
builders and other stakeholders, as well as participant observation during multiple
public and closed meetings in, or about, the Buiksloterham area that were organ-
ised during this period on various locations. As a new actor in the area, a designated
‘urban laboratory’, members of The Hackable City project team were regularly asked
to present our work in progress and contribute to public or closed discussions about
the development of the area. Hence, we ourselves became one of the visible actors
and stakeholders in the area. In addition to participating in shaping the future of the
area, these sessions allowed us to observe other actors and become attuned to their
motivations, ideas, stakes and actions. Other occasions and settings for ‘presence’, a
hallmark of doing ethnography, proved to be somewhat problematic since there area
itself was still fairly undeveloped. Especially in the beginning of the project, there
was not yet a real community physically ‘present’ on site with whom to engage.
Questions that guided the initial explorative phase of the investigation were aimed
to get a better understanding of what drives the people involved in selfbuilding, what
structural issues they encounter, how they deal with them, how they balance between
individual stakes and efforts and collective processes and how they deal with insti-
tutional stakeholders. The underlying assumption was that selfbuilding is as much
a cultural practice as it is a spatial practice. Building your own home, I assumed, is
not just about a goal-oriented habitation but constitutes a mode for selfexpression,
identity construction and collective meaning-making. I attempted to capture as much
of people’s own emic terms and expressions, that is, the vocabulary that people use
to describe their own actions, experiences and interpretations. These were quickly
transcribed, further analysed and interpreted, with the aim of finding out whether and
how this can be called a kind of hackable city-making and, by extension, what that
could teach us about the role of digital media technologies in people-centric city-
making. Through this prolonged involvement and various interpretative cycles, com-
mon narratives started to emerge. These, following anthropologist Clifford Geertz,

are taken as stories people tell themselves about themselves. Although hacking itself
was rarely if ever used in emic selfdescriptions, it did provide a productive etic frame
(i.e. external to the group under study) to capture the zest of many of these emerging
narratives. This approach contributed to the inductive development of the hackable
city model described below and in the introduction to this edited volume (see also
de Lange 2016; de Lange and de Waal 2016; de Waal et al. 2017).
4 Stories About the Challenges of Hackable Selfbuilding
Many shades of grey exist when it comes to the financial and organisational construc-
tions under which collective selfbuilding happens. Some individuals or households
are at the wheel themselves. They might also hire architects, constructors, consultants
and so on, at certain stages. Notably, a majority of collective selfbuilding projects
are initiated by architects, who create new procedures that allow for varying degrees
of consultation and customisation. The stories that individual selfbuilders recount at
times sound like adventure quests. Like hackers, selfbuilders are invariably driven
by strong motivation and emotional commitment. Many respondents emphasise that
only thanks to their own cleverness, stamina and the sharing of resources, they were
able to overcome the many obstacles and hardship they faced in the complex maze
of an unknown terrain. For example, in fall 2015, dozens of households camped out
in the rain, cold and mud for 3 weeks, just to acquire a plot of land for building their
own home. They did attempt to make the best of it, gladly providing the intrepid
researcher on a soggy fieldwork visit with coffee and tea, and indeed seemed to
assume a kind of casual pride to be able to endure these primitive circumstances in
order to realise their desires.3 Selfbuilders depart from an ideal, use their imagination
and venture into open spaces. Sometimes that comes at a steep price. The initiator of
Schoonschip, a project to realise a housing neighbourhood of 30 water arks,4 tells:
For my work I visited the autarkic geWoonboot. Then I thought: hey, that’s what I want
too. I immediately envisioned an ideal of sustainable living on a real housing boat. That’s
the plan I started working on. I went looking for a group of people who share my ideals.
Next, we searched for a good location. What I liked in the Buiksloterham was that there
weren’t too many rules and restrictions. I was really drawn to that openness. Initially, the
council of the borough Amsterdam North did not want to lease out the waterfront for area
development. They said: ‘first we want to do the mainland’. Then we directly approached
Alderman Maarten van Poelgeest, who is a fan of both sustainability projects and citizen
initiatives. So he had to support us. We managed to get him to write a letter to the council.
After that, a tender was being put out for that specific waterfront location, which was exactly
what we needed. All this cost me a tremendous amount of time and energy. But I persevered.
I even had to stop working for four months because I was on the verge of a burnout. In
the end, it gives me a lot of energy and satisfaction to see that we, with our little group of
3 See in Dutch https://nos.nl/artikel/705682-weken-kamperen-voor-een-kavel.html.

4 See https://twitter.com/SchoonschipAdam.
290 M. de Lange
selfbuilders, have become part of a much larger movement in the Buiksloterham. Things are
really happening in a visible way and on a scale that matters.5
From the above quote, we also see that successful selfbuilders are capable of
mobilising key figures or institutions in an early phase of the project. This suggests,
as a more theoretical point, that we should nuance crude top-down versus bottom-up
framings of civic participation and instead look at the capacity for strategic mobilisa-
tion (or ‘middle out’ as Fredericks et al. argue elsewhere in this volume). In this case,
the embryonic group of people was able to present themselves as a collective to the
Alderman. In this sense alone, doing things together is crucial. According to many of
the people we talked to, new city-making is all about group formation and identities:
shaping the identity of the neighbourhood and of the people living there. How do
groups construct a feeling of togetherness and what makes them recognisable as a
group, which allows them to ‘mobilise’ this collective identity and get investors and
other parties to become interested in doing business with them? Such questions also
play a role at the level of new services. Do you arrange services like water and energy
provisioning individually, collectively or publicly? And how do groups manage trust
and risks among themselves?
Obstacles and opponents come from all directions. Sometimes it is the big vested
parties who, after the financial crisis, aim to continue in old ways by developing the
city at a grand scale. Sometimes it is the municipality that is perceived as giving
selfbuilders not enough or too much freedom, to provide insufficient guidance and
support, or to superimpose rules and procedures that are either unnecessary or too
ambiguous. One respondent talks freely about some of the challenges that selfbuilders
face:
A requirement for acquiring plots of land is that selfbuilders submit a realistic plan and get
good marks on a sustainability score chart. According to the municipality, we must solve
questions of energy provisioning at the level of our individual plots. But this is often expen-
sive. So we tried to tackle this by making complementary arrangements between neighbours:
one does green energy, another does water retention, another one separate flows, and so on.
That too did not pan out because municipality only looks at individual submissions. A third
challenge is that collective investments in large infrastructures is hampered because every-
one moves in different temporal cycle. Some have to decide tomorrow while others are still
in the orientation phase. The list goes on and on: when collective selfbuilders for example
want modular electric patch cabinets, to accommodate future investments in solar or wind
energy, energy company Aliander says it’s impossible. If a building group wants to invest
in heat-cold storage, the rules prescribe there have to be three units while one is obviously
much cheaper.6
Sometimes quarrels arise from within or between competing selfbuilding groups.

Many selfbuilders share variations of stories about the messy and frequently conflict-
ridden dynamics of building collectives. Problems will inevitably arise, many confide.
As soon as you have eight or more people together in a group, one will be a trouble-
maker. Moreover, frictions between neighbouring selfbuilding groups occur, even
5 Source: personal interview on 11 March 2015.

6 Source: personal interview on 12 December 2014.
between professionals. In one case, the initiator of a collective apartment building

found out that the new neighbouring building collective on the south side wanted to
increase the altitude of the building, thus blocking view and sun. ‘The rules to which
we have to conform are ambiguous. I was lucky to find out in time that the neigh-
bouring group followed a different interpretation of the rules and went up higher.
This unexpected occurrence sparked a chain reaction in the whole block, in which
everyone had to change their plans to accommodate. With digital tools we could have
engaged in dialogue much earlier’.7
Nonetheless, by engaging ‘adversaries’ in the right way, they can become allies.
In the end such parties may become partners for scaling up and institutionalising this
new way of city-making. Another selfbuilder, building an individual house, tells:
Institutions like the municipality, Waternet [public water company], Liander [energy network
company] are large and unwieldy. My future house lies at the south-side of the plot that I
bought. There is this rule that the water and energy meters have to be installed within three
meters from the front door. In my case that would mean in my living room! I had to negotiate
with the water and energy companies. Fortunately, I found people inside these organisations
who were helpful, so I managed to get these meters in my garage at the backside of the
house. Of course, I shared all of this information with my neighbours, so they could benefit
too. There are only a few idiots like me who want to find out everything for themselves.8
In the end, such parties may become partners for scaling up and institutionalising
this new way of city-making. Selfbuilders perceive a momentum. This was fostered
through community activities in ‘living laboratory’ Buiksloterham.9 During such
regular meetups, selfbuilders meet people in organisations, whether municipalities
or (semi-public) businesses. Frequently, these people would have similar visions
of a more participatory and sustainable way of city-making. A number of public
and private organisations joined a consortium of Buiksloterham stakeholders, which
eventually led to the signing of a declaration of intention for a Manifesto Circular
Buiksloterham. Despite the fact that there were hackers ‘on the inside’ too, these
institutions faced thorny issues like balancing an impetus towards rapid innovation
and following transparent and just procedures. As one of them noted during a con-
versation: ‘although we’d like to see government moving along more rapidly, this
should not lead to Berlusconi-practices’.
A major challenge for many novices in selfbuilding is the availability and transfer
of knowledge. Selfbuilders all face steep learning curves. ‘To some degree we all
reinvent the wheel’, many acknowledged with a shrug. Synchronisation of knowl-
edge is extremely hard because everyone begins at different moments in time and
faces their own peculiar hurdles. At the time of the research, selfbuilders were
sharing information and knowledge via a variety of platforms, including Facebook,
WhatsApp, various websites, face-to-face conversations and public or closed mee-
tups. This often made it difficult for other people to find existing information and
7 Source:personal interview 9 Dec. 2014.

8 Source:personal interview on 21 May 2015.
9 These were organised by a specially appointed ‘area trailblazer’ Frank Alsema, who was later
joined by Saskia Muller and Peter Dortwegt. See website http://buiksloterham.nl.

292 M. de Lange
build upon this knowledge. Moreover, individual experiments and innovations are
often not properly documented and non-transferrable (a known weakness of many
Free/Libre/Open-Source Software projects). We found that several knowledge gaps
exist. One is between advanced and beginning selfbuilders. Another is between self-
builders and (semi-)professionals who have the vocabulary and understand the pro-
cesses but who have rarely actually built a home from scratch themselves. A third
gap exists between selfbuilders who engage in experiments and institutions who also
experiment, like the municipal ‘team selfbuilding’ or public service companies.
5 From Alternative Narrative to Hackable City Model
Hackers are characters who speak to the imagination. They figure as protagonists
in a quest-like storyline about urbanites who use their cunning—sometimes against
all odds—to make their own city using tools available at hand. As we have out-
lined elsewhere (Ampatzidou et al. 2015), the notion also bears the suggestion of
provocation and friction. Some people will associate hacking with disruptive or even
illegal activities. Others will think of a libertarian Silicon Valley ethics of selfgov-
ernance, own responsibility and technological solutionism. However, many authors
have pointed out that hackers often like to work in groups and share their efforts,
thus contributing to the common good. The notion of hacking employed here is one
that deliberately uses these tensions to hone the discussions about the future of our
cities. Who have the right to make the city? Instead of being a hermetic narrative that
offers a singular solution to complex challenges, the story and the model are open
to be ‘hacked’. It ties together multiple levels of individual hacker attitude, collec-
tive hacker practices and institutional hackability. It provides a frame to address the
complex interplay between economic challenges (how do we build resilient cities
after the financial crisis, and what are new business models), spatial and social ques-
tions (how do we deal with cooperative area planning, demographic shifts, new types
of communities), cultural changes (how do we leverage contemporary do-it-yourself
culture, the reshuffling of roles between professionals and amateurs) and governance
issues (how can we shape the participatory society, what roles are there for institu-
tions, and what public values do we want to sustain or strengthen). In the hackable
city urban designers, institutions and citizens together build the city of the future in
participatory, innovative and sustainable ways.
Based in part on the outcomes of this limited ethnographic research, we inductively
constructed a model for hackable city-making, which has been described on more
detail elsewhere (see de Lange 2016; de Lange and de Waal 2016; de Waal et al.
2017; de Waal et al. 2018). That happened in an inductive grounded theory-like way;
that is, we combined empirical observations and conceptual reflections to form a
theoretical model that could be further tested. The model captures in a simplified
manner the complex dynamics between city stakeholders at three basic levels and
scales:
Fig. 1 Hackable city-making dynamics
(1) An individual hacker attitude fuelled by a do-it-yourself ethics and professional

amateurism (doing something very well ‘for the love of it’, being intrinsically
motivated);
(2) A collective set of hacking practices, including open innovation, collaboration
and sharing of knowledge and resources;
(3) The hackability of institutions, that is, the structural affordances at the level of
organisations, rules and public governance to be open to systemic change from
within or outside (Fig. 1).
This model is neither purely descriptive nor prescriptive. It acts as a heuristic
that allows us to investigate how the city can be made ‘hackable’, that is, opened
up to other people to shape the future of their cities. As we have seen, selfbuilding
in Buiksloterham spans across these different levels. The individual level is made
up of selfbuilders who each acquire their own piece of land and start building their
own home. The collective level consists of group activities and events that transcend
the individual plot. Connections between the individual level and the collective level
are forged when people start sharing resources like generic information and specific
knowledge about, for instance, dealing with infrastructure companies, to collabo-
ratively start working on public green spaces. When enough people keep sharing,
benefits can be reaped individually while still strengthening the commons. The insti-
tutional level is composed of the various parties and regulations responsible for
shaping the conditions for selfbuilding and providing the infrastructures. The collec-
tive level, as we have seen, is a crucial hinge for getting individuals and systems to
move.
6 Reflections: Hackable City-Making?
Failures, so we are told, teach valuable lessons. Let me then conclude by way of the
confession of failure, to hopefully arrive at a number of productive take aways. The
Hackable City project team used the ethnographic data and the model to develop
a design probe that sought to intervene and test how hackable city-making might
294 M. de Lange
work in practice using digital technologies. As was mentioned above, we identified

several knowledge gaps. To bridge the information gap and lower the barrier to
entry, we attempted to build a Wiki for selfbuilders. This was to become an open-
source, community-driven writable platform for selfbuilders to share their insights.10
Disappointingly, it was not met with raging enthusiasm by anyone, and at some point,
we decided to abandon the idea altogether. We assumed that it was not useful enough,
because of technical glitches, time constraints and the fairly high level of literacy
required to work with wiki software. In hindsight, I now feel that the problem of
this design probe was actually the complete opposite. Instead of being not functional
enough, it was too functional. It was primarily utilitarian and goal-oriented, instead
of matching the autotelic identity-based motivations of selfbuilders. There was no
‘community curation’ (Wyatt 2011) and sense of ownership from the outset. Instead,
it was erected for them by a third party. If I had to do it again, I might have suggested a
platform or tool to tell meaningful stories instead of sharing chunks of information.11
A second failure is of a more structural nature. The tragic turn in our narrative
of heroic hacker/city-makers is that in the end the pioneers, the innovators, were
superseded by business-as-usual city-making. Midway during the project, around
2015, markets had crawled back up and project developers and builders awoke from
their dormancy. Amsterdam municipality happily embraced the restored ‘normal
situation’ of doing business with fewer but larger developers, instead of an unruly and
quarrelsome bunch of loosely organised civic hackers. Initiators of midsize collective
selfbuilding apartments complained they could no longer get their foot in the door
with the larger stakeholders. Apparently, the narrative of selfbuilders as hackers
resonates in a time of crisis but is not compelling enough to last.
A third failure, if you could call it that, is the ease with which the ‘hacking’ ter-
minology falls prey to blurry metaphorical parlance. It is important to distinguish
between various kinds of ‘civic hacking’ and use the notion with some concep-
tual rigour. The kind of hacking discussed in this chapter differs from hackathons,
appathons, hackspaces and so on, which usually involve just coders or hardware
tinkerers. While the ‘civic hacking’ discourse partially overlaps, we look at actual
city-makers, people shaping the city. Oftentimes, criticisms of the ‘civic hacker’ phe-
nomenon point to barely disguised underlying neoliberal forms of exploitation. For
example, in a recent publication about precarious labour, well-known critical urban
sociologist Sharon Zukin criticises hackathons for being a form of labour extrac-
tion and exploitation (Zukin and Papadantonakis 2017), echoing similar arguments
made by others (e.g. Gregg 2015; Terranova 2000). Likewise, Evgeny Morozov and
Francesca Bria state that ‘neoliberalism 2.0’ casts citizens as ‘hackers’, people who
are able to do more with less in the context of austerity of public service expenditure
(Morozov and Bria 2018: 20). While these certainly are valid points from a political
10 Project intern Melvin Sidarta invested a considerable amount of his time to actually build this
wiki.
11 In fact, at a later stage in the project newly joined team member Tara Karpinski devel-
oped a much more interesting app for selfbuilders to recount testimonials and success stories.
See the report here: http://thehackablecity.nl/2016/12/13/designing-and-testing-the-internationale-
bouwtentoonstelling-app-2/.
economy perspective, I want to push back a little, using two arguments. As a more
general first point, such criticism neglects to give a voice to the variegated ‘emic’
perspectives, that is, the range of possible motivations of people themselves. Seen
from the outside, civic hacking activities may appear as precarious or exploitative.
Indeed, as was mentioned, selfbuilders in the Buiksloterham might be seen as guinea
pigs that were only given leeway while the crisis lasted. To participants themselves,
however, it can feel tremendously gratifying and well worth the contribution. Sec-
ond, and more important for my point here, ‘hacking’ can act as a critical term that
highlights these and other frictions and allows us to raise thorny questions. Hence, I
propose that the concept of ‘hacking’ entails a form of criticality (Rogoff 2003) or
‘critical making’ (Herz 2012; Ratto 2011; Ratto and Boler 2014).
Hackable city-making as discussed here entails a selfreflexive criticality of the
tools used, of the range of city-making practices and of the institutional protocols
and governance. It also critiques the prevailing narrative of city-making as the pre-
rogative of professionally trained experts, while refraining from claiming that these
alternative practices are the definitive ‘solutions’ to question of resilient future-proof
and participatory city-making. It questions instead of answers: who can build the
city? In this sense, I argue that the value of ‘hackable city-making’ as a concept is
that it reinserts political dimensions into new ‘smart’ ways of city-making, highlight-
ing negotiation, friction, subversion and questions of in/exclusion (see also Perng
and Kitchin 2018). A hack means a quick and often somewhat messy but working
makeshift solution to a problem. ‘An ugly hack’ is a common phrase for something
fixed in a haphazard make-do way. While this does not necessarily lead to the most
high-quality or sustainable result, this way of working offers a perspective on city-
making not as endeavours for eternity but as perpetually unfinished enterprises that
are by nature always open to modifications and are deeply reliant on the factor time
(for this fundamentally temporal reimagining of the practices of architecture and
urbanism, see Bergevoet and van Tuijl 2013). The term thus is critical of itself: it
acknowledges its own make-do and imperfect nature and understands itself as the
product of friction. There is, then, a lesson to be learned by designers and policy-
makers from hackers in terms of accepting ‘messiness’ as a given and daring to
relinquish control. The terms ‘hackability’ and ‘hackable’ point to an affordance of
systems, the condition of being open to modification or systemic change from within
or from the outside by anyone willing to invest effort. To call city-making ‘hackable,’
then, means to take subversive and countercultural city-making practices seriously.
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Michiel de Lange is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Studies department at
Utrecht University. He is the co-founder of The Mobile City, a platform for the study of new media
and urbanism; co-founder of research group [urban interfaces] at Utrecht University; and he works
as a researcher in the field of (mobile) media, urban culture, identity and play. He is currently
co-leading the NWO-funded three-year project Designing for Controversies in Responsible Smart
Cities. He is co-editor of the books Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures
(2015) and Playful Citizens: The Ludification of Culture, Science, and Politics (forthcoming).
298 M. de Lange
Epilogue: Co-creating a Humane Digital
Transformation of Cities
We live in an era of digital transformations, for good or for bad. The dominant
narrative has since the Second World War been a positive one: digital technologies
will foster positive externalities like efficiency, wealth, health, inclusion, trans-
parency, environmental sustainability, global understanding and generally
improved quality of life.
Increasingly, however, a negative narrative is on the rise from critical corners to
the mainstream, not necessarily about the digital as such, but relating to some of the
less positive externalities of everyone and everything being connected and mea-
sured: vulnerability, insecurity, surveillance, complexity, exclusivity, volatile
economy, job loss, migration, stress and loss of belonging.
This should come as no surprise. Despite prevailing digital utopianism being
heralded, why should change brought about by digitalisation be any different than
earlier revolutions in this regard? The issue, however, is that in a paradigmatic
transition as the digital one, where every custom and institution is challenged, we
simply do not know in advance what is the better way forward, and even less is the
chance that ‘we’ will agree. So, while the consequences on core concerns like
safety, economy and well-being are simply daunting, the digital transformation is
coming as a global force and it creates an outlook of uncertainty.
Cities are the most complex creations of humans. They contain everything,
including more than half the world’s population, by far the largest chunk of the
economic activity, and cities pollute more than anything else. At the same time,
they are also about the most resilient part of our civilisation. Cities do not tend to go
away when first founded. Unless an infrastructural revolution arrives.
The transformation of cities is the transformation of the contemporary human
condition. There are certainly communities that are not urban, but they will follow
in the footsteps of the cities as they transform—just think of running water, or the
more accessible commodity infrastructure: mobile communication.
Taken together, the digital transformation of cities represents a profoundly
complex uncertainty, characterised by dilemmas, and it is a looming challenge for
the cities all over the world. The question is how to move responsibly forward.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 299
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2694-3
300 Epilogue: Co-creating a Humane Digital Transformation of Cities
For a long time, the dominant answer has been to plan and invest, like previous
successes of infrastructure development would indicate: water, sewage, electricity,
transportation, heating/cooling, telecommunications, etc.
The problem with this approach is that it does not seem to work well in the
digital age, for several reasons. First of all, while it would be technically possible to
build all-encompassing systems that cover every aspect of human life and activity,
they would be far more complex than anything else—much more difficult than the
proverbial rocket science. That would make them expensive, powerful, vulnerable
and, for a long period, full of errors and inconveniences. That is a bad cocktail. The
risk of getting it wrong and depleting resources with big bang investments is very
high.
Secondly, the existing infrastructures are closed systems, governed by sectorised
and siloed organisations. This technical and organisational architecture does not fit
the cross-cutting nature of data. Creating a new system of systems will potentially
reform every sector, including revenue streams, legislation and career paths. This
creates enormous friction to change.
Therefore, currently, the only way to actually introduce such massively inte-
grated systems that cover even the most basic functions is to roll them out in a
top-down fashion. That can be done in some political environments, but not where
there is a tradition for giving individual citizens and communities a clear voice in
societal development matters. In addition, very rigid and closed systems tend to
breed monopolies and provide poor conditions for innovation, because only a select
few experts hold the privilege of proposing and developing improvements.
This balance between giving direction and giving voice, of top down and bottom
up, of optimal operations and of innovation, is not a new challenge to societies, and
it is certainly not restricted to the era of digital transformation. However, one of the
great promises of digital and connected technologies is that they have the potential
to foster collaboration and co-creation—hallmarks of an inclusive society where
services and surroundings are shaped together by citizens in transparent delibera-
tion. We can all have a role in making the city, we, the people.
The Hackable City is an updated ambition to bring these prospects further into
reality, founded on a reflected understanding of contemporary and historical
parallels.
Technology has always transformed societies and shifted power. Famous is the
opening scene in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the image cuts from
a group of bone-wielding apes to a bone-shaped spaceship. Society is a reflection of
the opportunities provided by technologies at hand.
However, as the contributions in this book illustrate, it is not at all evident how
this societal interaction is best facilitated and orchestrated, and the best practice can
certainly not be deduced from the technology, if only because of the inherent
dilemmas of conflicting interests.
The goals and roles of those who have a stake in a community’s development are
incredibly diverse. To provide touchpoints to influence the system for all is a core
mechanism of governance. Too few touchpoints mean totalitarianism; too many
Epilogue: Co-creating a Humane Digital Transformation of Cities 301
mean anarchy. There is no universal optimal balance, as this is a cultural and

political question, even down to the local level.
While this book clearly shows how the existing old systems and old ways can be
hacked ad hoc by citizens and communities with the aim to appropriate and
improve them, would not it be interesting if the systems were designed to make it
easy and, even intended, to hack for good as a way to innovate and appropriate?
This is the next level of the Hackable City: the co-created city. It would require
the infrastructures and systems of the city to have points where components can be
added, modified, replaced and removed—with relevant levels of control for safety
and data protection. The result would be more freedom, where acceptable, for both
city administration, citizens, businesses, NGOs and academia to explore alternative
ways to getting things done.
The open innovation literature has long lauded methods such as living labora-
tories as a way to empower stakeholders around a situation or system to improve it
together. This is in a way similar to the ‘DevOps’ software engineering approach
which aims at linking development (change) and operations (service) closely
together. However, it requires not only agreement to allow innovation, it also
requires systems that actually support such component interoperability in what has
been conceptualised as the Internet of things (IoT) or Internet of everything (IoE).
The main barrier for such a situation is that there are no generally accepted
standards on IoT data processing and management across domains and across
sectors. And because there are no standards, public administrations cannot put them
into the requirements when they buy new systems, so there are no suppliers that
have developed such systems and services that are open for appropriation at an
urban and societal scale.
It is not because there is a lack of standards; there are tens of thousands, from a long
range of standards developing organisations (SDOs). But they are fragmented and
often specialised for certain domains and purposes, and they are usually not free
(because the SDOs earn money from the use and certification). This has the unfor-
tunate effect that standard-based interfaces are not made available during innovation,
which creates a considerable barrier for exploratory and co-creative approaches.
Some attempts are being made to open up cities to make experimentation easy
and to support standard-based innovation and procurement, i.e. to move from
hacking the city to co-creation and collaborative city-making.
A concrete example is the Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) initiative, which
is a global network of national networks of cities that work to maintain so-called
Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) based on emerging standards. Two
flagship projects focus on citizen co-creation and easy experimentation (Organicity)
and standard-based innovation and procurement (Synchronicity), both based on the
OASC MIMs.
Because of the chicken-and-egg situation, where the supply side of the market
(companies) cannot deliver systems that are open for appropriation and the demand
side (public administrations) cannot define precise requirements for the systems
they would like even if they wanted to (because it is not the job of a single city to
302 Epilogue: Co-creating a Humane Digital Transformation of Cities
create standards), there is a very important role to play for projects and initiatives
that strive to close the gap in the market.
Academia and research institutions are essential contributors to these efforts,
with both analytical and creative capabilities. The innovation that has to happen in
the digital transformation of cities resembles that of applied design research, and
when it reaches urban scale, it becomes impossible to intervene only to analyse and
understand—the research directly influences the reality it studies.
The disciplines within academia are as siloed as the departments and sectors in
the cities, and in the same way for good historical reasons. But researchers, with
their insights and skills, have an obligation to contribute to solving the global
challenges we face as a civilisation, and the digital transformation of cities and
communities is such a challenge. Therefore, academia must develop and refine
methods that match the needs of the world it is a part of, to be an active collaborator
and co-creator of the common future of us all.
It may start as hacking the uncertain complexity, but with a concerted effort, it is
the safest and fastest way to mature contemporary digitally saturated infrastructures
to support condensed human life.
Martin Brynskov
Director of the Digital Design Lab, Aarhus University in Denmark

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What are some of the challenges cities face with the speed of digital change?

What are some of the challenges cities face with the speed of digital change?

How can cities support open innovation and experimentation?

How can cities support open innovation and experimentation?

Michiel de Lange · Martijn de Waal

The Hackable City

ISBN 978-981-13-2693-6 ISBN 978-981-13-2694-3 (eBook)

London, UK Jarmo Eskelinen

Digital Cities 5 (C&T 2007, Michigan)

2016 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. We would also like to thank

Introduction—The Hacker, the City and Their Institutions:

Part I Design Practices in the Hackable City

Part II Changing Roles

Removing Barriers for Citizen Participation to Urban Innovation . . . . . 153

Part III Hackers and Institutions

Part IV Theorizing the Hackable City

About the Editors

Michiel de Lange is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Studies

Cristina Ampatzidou Department of Spatial Planning & Environment, Faculty of

Péter Kun ID-Studiolab, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft

Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange

Abstract In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down,

Keywords Smart cities · Citizenship · Civic media · Participatory urbanism

© The Author(s) 2019 1

1 The Parallels Between Hacking and City-Making

various activities, epitomising a broader reclaim-public-space movement in Brazil

practices and theoretical, critical explorations of collaborative city-making, usually

intelligence’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘open-source ethics’, or ‘sharing economy’. Further-

2 Hacking Against the Smart City

In this process, the metaphor of the hacker opens up an alternative deployment of

However, the normative debate around the implementation of a hacker’s ethos in

4 Hacking as a Practice of Collaborative City-Making

5 Hackability as an Affordance of Systems

6 Hacking as a Critical Lens and an Action-Based

7 Overview of the Book

Luke Hespanhol and Martin Tomitsch

Keywords Urban interaction design · Urban interfaces · Smart cities

L. Hespanhol (B) · M. Tomitsch

© The Author(s) 2019 25

Community engagement initiatives provide public venues for citizens to partake

Community engagement is an administrative strategy commonly used by govern-

Table 1 Theoretical angles informing plug-in interfaces

Fig. 1 Customer polling interface at Aarhus Airport, Denmark

In this chapter, we focus on plug-in interfaces that incorporate digital media. To

Fig. 2 Permanent parklets in Canberra, Australia

4 A Case Study on City Hacking for Community

4.1 Why: Motivation

Above, we defined plug-in architecture as a process of opening up city-making and

4.2 Where: The Locations

Fig. 3 Transport card readers at a rail station in Sydney, Australia

4.3 What: The Plug-In Interfaces

As indicated by Table 2, to address technology familiarity (Blackler and Hurtienne

Fig. 4 ATMs at a food court in Sydney, Australia

Fig. 5 Setups for the field studies

Table 2 Design scenarios addressing the contextual constraints

Fig. 6 Plug-in interfaces used in our studies

However, we were interested in investigating how strong a role technology familiarity

4.4 How: The Interface Configurations

4.5 Methodology and Results

Fig. 8 Percentage of participants per design scenario