The Hackable City: Citymaking in a Platform Society

Abstract

Can computer hacking have positive parallels in the shaping of the built environment? The Hackable City research project was set up with this question in mind, to investigate the potential of digital platforms to open up the citymaking process. Its cofounders Martijn de Waal,

The Evolution of City-as-a-Platform: Smart Urban Development Governance with Collective Knowledge-Based Platform Urbanism

“…In recent years, one of the significant developments was the coining of the concept of City-as-a-Platform (CaaP) as part of the platform urbanism movement [58][59][60][61]. The concept is rapidly gaining popularity, as more and more platform thinking applications become available to the city context-where open data and the participatory innovation opportunity of these platforms contribute to identifying and solving critical urban issues [62,63]. Nonetheless, this topic is an understudied area of urban research.…”

“…Lastly, the challenges for the implementation of CaaP are immense for governments and societies [63,69]. Nevertheless, tackling these challenges is critical, and opportunities are already here for researchers, since countless studies and experiments are on the rise in the fields of digital media, urban planning and development, open and big data, public services, sustainable governance, and smart collaboration.…”

Digital Twin Collaborative Platforms: Applications to Humans-in-the-Loop Crafting of Urban Areas

“…A Virtual Hackable City (VHC) hence amounts to a DT-Empowered Collaboration instance, enabling anyone to experiment with hacks in the urban space and eventually create value for the city, society, environment, and market (check Figure 1). Interestingly, the proposed paradigms appear suitable to implement the vision of De Waal et al [30]: create new participatory ways of governance which include advanced hacking, making, and prototyping skills, such as envisioning, translating, 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. Figure 3 reports the general VHC schema.…”

Building the Bridge to a Participatory Citizenship: Curricular Integration of Communal Environmental Issues in School Projects Supported by the Internet of Things

“…High urbanization of cities and communities, alongside huge population increase, presents societal challenges such as climate change. Technology can be a “game change factor” in sustainable development, as well as a facilitator of citizens’ resilience [ 43 ], providing citizens with a sense of ownership of their surroundings [ 44 ]. There is a need to change, and the power “needs to be challenged” to an “inclusive city” that is “governed by powerful place-based democratic institutions” and create an equal society, instead of what is happening in an era of strong globalization where “place-less leaders” are gaining ground [ 45 ].…”

“…The capitalization of technologies by smart cities paves the way for citizens to interact with cities’ physical infrastructure, services, and many more [ 40 ], transforming/fostering citizenship and enabling citizens’ right to the smart city. De Wall, Lange, and Bouw proposed The Hackable City research project as innovators regarding the “hackable city”, which put forward collaborative city-making approaches that empower stakeholders in an open and democratic community and can be “hacked” or appropriated by their citizens towards a common public good [ 44 ].…”