The hackable city: exploring collaborative citymaking in a network society.

Abstract

With the lens of the hackable city, we want to highlight 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. As a lens, the hackable city aims to bring out the underlying dynamics and (sometimes conflicting) values at stake in citymaking, as well as the concrete practices through which they are enacted. 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.