The aim of the research-by-design project The Hackable City is to develop a research agenda and toolkit that explores the role of digital media technologies for new directions for urban planning and city-making. How can citizens, design professionals, local government institutions and others creatively use digital technologies in collaborative processes of urban planning and management? The project seeks to connect developments of, on the one hand, city municipalities that develop smart-city policies and testing these in ‘urban living labs’ and, on the other hand, networked smart-citizen initiatives of people innovating and shaping their own living environments. In this contribution we look at how self-builders in urban lab Buiksloterham in Amsterdam have become ‘hackers’ of their own city, cleverly shaping the future development of a brownfield neighbourhood in Amsterdam’s northern quarter.
A major challenge for disaster scholars and policymakers is to understand the power dimension in response networks, particularly relating to collaboration and coordination. We propose a conceptual framework to study interests and negotiations in and between various civic and professional, response networks drawing on the concepts of “programming” and “switching” proposed by Manuel Castells in his work on the network society. Programming in disaster response refers to the ability to constitute response networks and to program/reprogram them in terms of the goals assigned to the network. Switching is the ability to connect different net-works by sharing common goals and combining resources. We employ these concepts to understand how the US Federal Emergency Management Agency organized its response in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Our conceptual framework can be used both by disaster scholars and policymakers to understand how networked power is constructed and utilized.
In this paper we present visual methodologies attuned to the networked nature of digital images. First, we describe approaches to image research in which images are not separated from their network, but rather studied 'en groupe'. Here, we contrast approaches that treat images as data, and those that regard images as content. Second, we focus on the production of images for digital research, presenting three of their functions: a) the creation of diagrams that facilitate collaboration in interdisciplinary research teams; b) the use of visualizations for cross-platform image analysis; and c) designing images for public participation. Most importantly, such visualizations are not used to form the esthetic culmination of analytical work, but are rather functional tools for digital research that serve parts of the entire research process, from its formulation and operationalization to the engagement of a broader public.
MULTIFILE
