During the past year, we started a process of guerrilla research in which we asked friends and collaborators of cities as diverse as Berlin, New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga and Toledo, what were the main needs they observed in their cities, what they thought Of the Smart City concept and how it should be a smart development from your personal perspective.
Their answers confirmed our intuitions about the idea that urban spaces, our cities, in short, need to be re-thought, re-designed, re-discovered. This process should be able to introduce the voice of citizens in the dynamics of urban development, since only in this way can you take advantage of all the flows and information that make a given city become a center of creativity and wealth,
This process should be able to introduce the voice of citizens in the dynamics of urban development, since only in this way can you take advantage of all the flows and information that make a given city become a center of creativity and wealth, Welfare and development. To support these insights we start a phase of urban ethnography. The team dedicated two weeks to make drifts in different areas of Madrid, identifying empty spaces and damages. They discovered so many spaces that could be taken advantage of, as well as various faults or defects within their daily journeys on foot.
In the wake of these inquiries and following a desire to intervene in some way, even if it was devising a possible micro action on the subject, we propose Hackity , a project guided by a strategy of rediscovering and rethinking spaces and urban flows from a bottom-up perspective, Which emphasizes the capacities of citizens to take sides in decisions and actions that directly affect the environment in which they live. A full-fledged urban empowerment initiative. In the search and review of experiences or projects that have been carried out within this line of action in urban spaces, we find the Drift Deck project, an algorithmic game to navigate the streets of the city using cards with instructions that suggest drifts in the city.
Within our process of ideation of Hackity, the concept of drift has been used as one of the methodological approaches of our proposal. As it is known, the drifts were a concept devised by the Situationist Movement in the second half of the last century and elevated to the category of art by some of its followers, like Guy Debord. If we dive into Art History, we can find examples of similar actions already in the early twentieth century, associated with the lifestyles of avant-garde artists, such as Futurism, or, of course, in passages of Baudelaire poems, among others:
A Paris mythical and phantasmagoric, is polysemic and polyphonic, Such as the modernity that gives it sustenance. “
Rooted in the urban landscape and framed in the broader concept of Psychogeography, the drifts posed a performative and critical alternative to urban routes standardized by phenomena such as tourism or established urban planning. They represented a conceptual pulse to the logics imposed on cities and their landscapes (also emotional) from the economy or politics. They transgressed these logics by imposing the force of chance, of spontaneity, of the unexpected. We want to rescue its potential to rediscover spaces and re-appropriation of information flows.
Now more than ever, our cities are drawn from an economic centrist vision, their walks, their streets, their galleries, parks, museums, unknowingly converge for a fundamentally economic purpose. We need to reverse and channel that flow. Cities must be people-oriented, rather than any particular activity. Today drifts, supported by new applications and technologies can serve to put people and their discoveries at the center of urban flows. This dynamic type serves to rediscover the urban, it is true. But also to denounce from the traffic, to draw new maps and routes in the cities, to give light in the backrooms of cities. You are looking for a city that listens to its citizens.
Hackity also takes as reference the experience of the project Hacking the City – Interventions in urban and communicative spaces that consisted in the implementation of more than a dozen projects of an intervention of hacking culture in urban spaces of Essen during 2010. In the twentieth century, humanity was immersed in an experiment of unprecedented urbanization, today that experiment is our reality.
We are an urban species. Cities are our natural habitat. We need tools and technologies that facilitate our participation and add our capabilities, make us Smart Citizens that inhabit Smart Cities. Let’s Hack!
