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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 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956276 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is published open access. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adap- tation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publi- cation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore 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