The Spaces, Mobilities and Soundings of Coding. The Programmable City Working Paper 18

Despite its influences on urban spaces, software has largely remained a black-box for critical inspection, comprising specialist knowledge and reasoning and guarded against closer examination through compilation into executable files and by legal and intellectual property rights. However, there has been an energetic mobilisation of code writing beyond these legal, commercial, professional and knowledge confines. The mobilisation of software code for civic purposes, or civic hacking, has emerged as important everyday urban experiences. Opening up the black-box of software writing, however, leads to more issues that require further examination. This paper explores the processes of transforming everyday experiences into sequences of code by observing the social and sonic activities happening at a workshop where participants were learning a new programming language. It unpacks the complexity of code writing and indicates further complications when mobilising code for civic purposes

Uncertainty and transparency:augmenting modelling and prediction for crisis response

Emergencies are characterised by uncertainty. This motivates the design of information systems that model and predict complex natural, material or human processes to support understanding and reduce uncertainty through prediction. The correspondence between system models and reality, however, is also governed by uncertainties, and designers have developed methods to render ‘the world’ transparent in ways that can inform, fine-tune and validate models. Additionally, people experience uncertainties in their use of simulation and prediction systems. This is a major obstacle to effective utilisation. We discuss ethically and socially motivated demands for transparency

Civic infrastructure and the appropriation of the corporate smart city

Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovatons leading to, or consolidatng, technocratic urban governance and the tokenizaton of citzens. However, less research has explored how we make sense of ongoing appropriaton of the resources, skills, and expertise of corporate smart cites and what this means for future cites. In this paper, we examine the summoning of political subjectivity through the practices of retrofitting, repurposing, and reinvigoratng. We consider them as “civic infrastructure" to sensitize the infrastructural acts and conventons that are assembled for exploring inclusive and participatory ways of shaping urban futures. These practices, illustrated by examples in Adelaide, Dublin, and Boston, focus on capabilites not only to write code, access data or design prototype, but also to devise diverse sociotechnical arrangements and power relatons to disobey, queston, and dissent from technocratic visions and practices. The paper concludes by suggesting further examinaton of the summoning of political subjectivity from within established institutons to widen dissent and appropriaton of the corporate smart city

Hackathons, entrepreneurial life and the making of smart cities

Hackathons – quick prototyping events to create technical innovations for perceived challenges – have become an important means to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and the start-up economy in smart cities. Typically such events are organized by companies working in partnership with city administrations, and are predominately attended by technically literate participants who work in the tech sector. In this paper, we consider and critique the rationalities and practices of commercially-oriented hackathons. Drawing on Gabriel Tarde and recent re-engagement of his ideas, we analyse the spatiotemporal practices that modulate the passion and imitation in and around hackathons. We document how hackathon schedules and spaces are arranged in ways to extend but also exploit participants’ passions for digital innovation and entrepreneurship, act as sites of upskilling and career progression, but also reproduce neoliberal and entrepreneurial labour and urban development. We argue that hackathons interpellate by attracting participants to desire and believe in entrepreneurial life and technocratic rationality to the effect of furthering the precarity of work and life and intensifying the corporatisation of cities. As such, hackathons reinforce the neoliberal underpinnings and ethos of entrepreneurial and smart urbanism

Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives

Privacy, security, liberty:informing the design of emergency management information systems

Faced with life-threatening circumstances, many people would consider a loss of privacy a small price to pay for swift assistance. However, how societies handle, and how individuals can be aware of, and control, personal data are highly sensitive and consequential matters, deeply entangling security, privacy and liberty with technological potential. The design of emergency management systems (EMIS) and architectures for the assembly of emergency management systems of systems should be sensitive to challenges, opportunities and dangers. In this paper we explore key issues and some design avenues

Travelling with mobile machines

Contemporary social life is increasingly characterised by various practices involving mobile machines and humans that enact multiple forms of travel. Thus, there emerges a question as to whether such practices change the patterns of conducting social life. This thesis begins with identifying crucial aspects in social life that have gone through significant changes. By adopting the metaphor of passages, social life and various socio- technological processes of organising machines are examined to identify the crucial importance of enacting travel, time, places and sociality. To further explore these aspects, the research draws on the material obtained through crafting socially and technologically mediated methods, including various forms of interviews and observations conducted in Taiwan during July and December, 2006. Passages that enable the travel with digital cameras, Wi- Fi signals and satellite navigation systems are examined in this thesis to characterise crucial ways in which social life is performed. Interactions between humans and machines are reconsidered so as to demonstrate how co-construction, negotiation, improvisation and modification are crucial mechanisms in enacting different forms of travel. Through the research, diversified and complex ordering of social life is examined by exploring the dynamic interactions between innovative and omnipresent machines and heterogeneous assemblages of machines and social entities. By examining how various passages are enacted and how social life is reconfigured, this thesis argues that there emerges a crucial intensification of embodied interactions with mobile machines. With these interactions, a series of significant reshaping of the relationships between machines, bodies, places, temporalities and social connections is unfolding and thus the patterns of conducting social life are constantly being reconfigured through incorporating existing practices and developing new ones.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Travelling with mobile machines

Contemporary social life is increasingly characterised by various practices involving mobile machines and humans that enact multiple forms of travel. Thus, there emerges a question as to whether such practices change the patterns of conducting social life. This thesis begins with identifying crucial aspects in social life that have gone through significant changes. By adopting the metaphor of passages, social life and various socio- technological processes of organising machines are examined to identify the crucial importance of enacting travel, time, places and sociality. To further explore these aspects, the research draws on the material obtained through crafting socially and technologically mediated methods, including various forms of interviews and observations conducted in Taiwan during July and December, 2006. Passages that enable the travel with digital cameras, Wi- Fi signals and satellite navigation systems are examined in this thesis to characterise crucial ways in which social life is performed. Interactions between humans and machines are reconsidered so as to demonstrate how co-construction, negotiation, improvisation and modification are crucial mechanisms in enacting different forms of travel. Through the research, diversified and complex ordering of social life is examined by exploring the dynamic interactions between innovative and omnipresent machines and heterogeneous assemblages of machines and social entities. By examining how various passages are enacted and how social life is reconfigured, this thesis argues that there emerges a crucial intensification of embodied interactions with mobile machines. With these interactions, a series of significant reshaping of the relationships between machines, bodies, places, temporalities and social connections is unfolding and thus the patterns of conducting social life are constantly being reconfigured through incorporating existing practices and developing new ones.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Practices and politics of collaborative urban infrastructuring: Traffic Light Box Artworks in Dublin Street. The Programmable City Working Paper 33

Cities are transformed into sites of experimentation through large-scale smart city initiatives, but the visions and practices of establishing public, private and civic partnerships are often overshadowed by corporate interests, governance convenience and efficiency, with an overemphasis on technological innovations. Instead of relying on these partnerships, civic hacking initiatives seek to develop collaboration between programmers and community members, on the one hand, and government officials and organisations, on the other, for experimenting prototyping processes that foreground community needs. These initiatives are considered as pursuing open, inclusive and collaborative governance and is analysed through the lens of collaborative urban infrastructuring to attend to the dynamics, consequences and implications emerging from the prototyping processes. The analysis of the collaboration between Code for Ireland and Dublin City Council Beta suggests that the spatio-temporal scaling of prototypes lead to the continual and contested scaling of skills, knowledges, capabilities, organisational procedures and socio-technical arrangements. These heterogeneous scaling engenders desirable futures and future problems. The articulation and enactment of the values that attract diverse visions, viewpoints and practices into collaborative experimentation can be challenged by agonistic relationships arising from exploring practical arrangements for the mutual shaping of desirable governance procedures and the organisational expectations, obligations and constraints that are already in place. Furthermore, in the processes of scaling, there are constant dangers of enacting patriarchal stewardships and taking an all-knowing position for caring and evaluating impacts, which makes it critical to also experiment with ways of disclosing urban techno-politics that emerges continuously and in unanticipated ways

Shared technology making in neoliberal ruins: Rationalities, practices and possibilities of hackathons. The Programmable City Working Paper 38

Shared technology making refers to the practices, spaces and events that bear the hope and belief that collaborative and open ways of designing, making and modifying technology can improve our ways of living. Shared technology making in the context of the smart city reinvigorates explorations of the possibility of free, open and collaborative ways of engineering urban spaces, infrastructures and public life. Open innovation events and civic hacking initiatives often encourage members of local communities, residents, or city administrations to participate so that the problems they face and the knowledge they possess can be leveraged to develop innovations from the working (and failure) of urban everyday life and (non-)expert knowledges. However, the incorporation of shared technology making into urban contexts engender concerns around the right to participate in shared technology- and city-making. This paper addresses this issue by suggesting ways to consider both the neoliberal patterning of shared technology making and the patches and gaps that show the future possibility of shared city making. It explores the ways in which shared technology making are organised using hackathons and other hacking initiatives as an example. By providing a hackathon typology and detailed accounts of the experiences of organisers and participants of related events, the paper reconsiders the neoliberalisation of shared technology making. It attends to the multiple, entangled and conflictual relationships that do not follow corporate logic for considering the possibilities of more open and collaborative ways of technology- and city-making