Hacking Urban Space: The Agency of the Open Source City

Hacking is increasingly becoming a tactic used by many spatial practitioners who operate at theintersection of digital media and urban space. Information technology that has recently expandedurban systems has initiated new opportunities to hack the city. These opportunities—if recognizedby the individual citizen—provide a powerful tool for change through questioning, altering, orsubverting an existing system. Rather than waiting for city officials or private developers to takeaction, hacking could empower every citizen to participate in the construction of public space.As hacking has recently become a tool for a number of projects and organizations that speculateon the development of public spaces such as “Civic Hackathons,” one can assume that hackingwill increasingly develop as a strategy to empower the individual citizen to intervene in urbanenvironments. It suggests a new form for the citizen to navigate the city, to understand it, and tointeract with it in new and meaningful ways. This will not only change the urban environment butalso challenge urban planners, architects, and city officials to rethink the current instruments andmethods used to shape our cities.

Volume Editors
Robert Corser & Sharon Haar

ISBN
978-1-944214-03-6