This chapter explores the use of “responsive” or “interactive” urban media technologies as a tool or “building block” in the (re)design of urban public spaces. This is especially relevant as in the last two decades, urban development and digital technologies have brought out new types of urban typologies and practices often referred to as “networked urbanism.” These typologies and practices bring out specific challenges with regard to their functioning as public space. We argue that responsive technologies could reinforce qualities of public space in this condition of “networked urbanism”; however, their implementation demands new strategies and above all new forms of cooperation between disciplines such as architecture, urban design, and urban interaction design. To aid such an approach, this chapter introduces a heuristic of five mechanisms of responsive media. These are meant to function as a shared vocabulary aiding designers of various backgrounds to collaborate in an interdisciplinary design process for public spaces in a broader development of networked urbanism.
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This book discusses the way that a nature-driven approach to urbanism can be applied at each of the urban scales; architectural design, urban design of neighborhoods, city planning and landscape architecture, and at the city and regional scales. At all levels nature-driven approaches to design and planning add to the quality of the built structure and furthermore to the quality of life experienced by people living in these environments. To include nature and greening to built structures is a good starting point and can add much value. The chapter authors have fiducia in giving nature a fundamental role as an integrated network in city design, or to make nature the entrance point of the design process, and base the design on the needs and qualities of nature itself. The highest existence of nature is a permanent ecosystem which endures stressors and circumstances for a prolonged period. In an urban context this is not always possible and temporality is an interesting concept explored when nature is not a permanent feature. The ecological contribution to the environment, and indirect dispersion of species, from a temporary location will, overall add biodiversity to the entire system.
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In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.
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