ifesto, so far we have given them only limited attention in our analysis of hackable citymaking practices. This ‘governance’ aspect of hackable cities should be an important aspect of future research into this area.
Most instances of hackable citymaking revolve around the organization of individuals in a collective or a public, usually through or with the aid of a digital media platform
Another core issue in the debate about hackable citymaking lies right in the centre of the diagram: the collective. How and by whom is this public organized? Who owns these platforms and sets their conditions? From what we have learned from our research, there currently is a fuzzy landscape of citizen initiatives, start-up companies and institutional pilot projects that take on this role, often with a central role for designers or architects as central organizers and campaigners, either from their business practice or in a more difficult to categorize role as ‘citizen-professionals’. In future research it’s important to form a better understanding of these organization models and their business models. After all, hackable citymaking does not mean that all citizens have to become hackers, devoting their free time to a higher common good. Neither does it mean that all amateurs suddenly can become experts in any domain if only they make use of digital platforms. Hackable citymaking is in need of economic models to run collectives and incentivize individual contributions, and these economic models can take many forms, with the idea of a civic economy as a promising perspective. Likewise, hackable citymaking is about organizing expertise in a self-learning system, and again professional experts could play an important role by contributing their expertise. Not accidentally, many of the projects we have studied are initiated by, or at least include, design professionals that have created tools to engage larger audiences around common issues of concern. Partly motivated by the economic crisis, they have started to look for other roles and positions, either as small-scale developers, as in the case of Buiksloterham, or as urban farmers and entrepreneurs, like Farming the City, or mediators and facilitators in novel civic processes, like Makers+co and Join the Pipe. Like this, they constitute a new type of citymakers that contribute to cities that are open and can be hacked. In short, for us hackability is a promising lens to explore urban design practices. It’s not a panacea for all urban evils or social problems. On the contrary, the practice of hacking the city could be problematic in itself. Yet it is also a concept that helps us to investigate new practices of citymaking that could contribute to more resilient, innovative and liveable cities.
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