Lessons from Urban Guerrilla Placemaking for Smart City Commons

The combination of digital technology and urban design provides a potent mix full of opportunities and challenges for increasing the wellbeing of citizens and the environment. Under the general rubrics of 'smart cities' and 'placemaking' various practices have emerged that all seem to suggest desirable urban futures for the common good can be created if only the artful integration of people, place and technology is achieved. Yet, the key question is how. Concerned with the notion of digital placemaking specifically, this paper dissects this premise in three steps. (1) It presents a critical review of placemaking both from a social and from a managerial point of view. (2) It then introduces a specific set of examples of 'urban guerrilla' placemaking interventions. (3) The assessment of these examples juxtaposed with the critique of conventional placemaking practices informs a nascent hypothesis: Cities are in need of reform that reconceptualises the role of regulatory frameworks away from inhibiting access and novel usages of public space and towards enabling participatory forms of citymaking.

[1]  Mark Bilandzic,et al.  Digital Storytelling and History Lines: Community Engagement in a Master-Planned Development , 2007 .

[2]  Martin Tomitsch,et al.  New media facades : a global survey , 2012 .

[3]  Jillet Sarah Sam.  Space of Flows/Space of Place , 2012 .

[4]  Andreas Huyssen.  Other cities, other worlds : urban imaginaries in a globalizing age , 2008 .

[5]  D. Ponzini,et al.  Place-making and Urban Development: New challenges for contemporary planning and design , 2014 .

[6]  Norman M. Sadeh,et al.  The Livehoods Project: Utilizing Social Media to Understand the Dynamics of a City , 2012, ICWSM.

[7]  E. Relph.  Place and placelessness , 1976 .

[8]  金源.  갱스의「People and Plans」 , 1996 .

[9]  Stewart Brand,et al.  How Buildings Learn , 1994 .

[10]  Mark Bilandzic,et al.  Towards Participatory Action Design Research: Adapting Action Research and Design Science Research Methods for Urban Informatics , 2011, J. Community Informatics.

[11]  Glenda Amayo Caldwell,et al.  DIY media architecture: open and participatory approaches to community engagement , 2014, MAB '14.

[12]  Martin Tomitsch,et al.  Middle-out design: collaborative community engagement in urban HCI , 2016, OZCHI.

[13]  Timo Ojala,et al.  Citizen’s Right to the Digital City: Urban Interfaces, Activism, and Placemaking , 2015 .

[14]  D. Harvey.  The right to the city , 2003 .

[15]  Kurt Iveson,et al.  Some critical reflections on being critical: Reading for deviance, dominance or difference? , 2010 .

[16]  Donovan Finn,et al.  DIY urbanism: implications for cities , 2014 .

[17]  Y. Tuan,et al.  Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. , 1978 .

[18]  Henri Lefebvre.  The Right to the City , 2012 .

[19]  D. Gans.  People and plans , 1968 .

[20]  Indre Grazuleviciute-Vileniske,et al.  The intercultural city: Planning for diversity advantage , 2010 .

[21]  Keith N. Hampton,et al.  The Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces: Internet Use, Social Networks, and the Public Realm , 2010, Public Space Reader.

[22]  G. Douglas,et al.  The formalities of informal improvement: technical and scholarly knowledge at work in do-it-yourself urban design , 2015 .

[23]  M. Foth,et al.  Participatory action research for civic engagement , 2016 .

[24]  N. Selwyn.  Apart from technology: understanding people’s non-use of information and communication technologies in everyday life , 2003 .

[25]  Keith N. Hampton,et al.  The social life of wireless Urban spaces , 2010 .

[26]  Nanna Verhoeff,et al.  Digital cities 9 workshop - hackable cities: from subversive city making to systemic change , 2015, C&T.

[27]  G. Douglas,et al.  Do–It–Yourself Urban Design: The Social Practice of Informal “Improvement” Through Unauthorized Alteration , 2014 .

[28]  Charles C. Bohl.  Place Making: Developing Town Centers, Main Streets, and Urban Villages , 2002 .

[29]  D. B. Bauer,et al.  Geomedia: Networked cities and the future of public space , 2018, New Media Soc..

[30]  Joe Podolsky,et al.  City of bits: space, place and the infobahn , 1995, CSOC.

[31]  W. Whyte.  The social life of small urban spaces , 1980 .

[32]  Glenda Amayo Caldwell,et al.  DIY/DIWO media architecture: The InstaBooth , 2017 .

[33]  Mike Lydon,et al.  Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change , 2015 .

[34]  Martin Tomitsch,et al.  The Role of Digital Screens in Urban Life: New Opportunities for Placemaking , 2015 .

[35]  Martin Tomitsch,et al.  From Users to Citizens: Some Thoughts on Designing for Polity and Civics , 2015, OZCHI.

[36]  C. Norberg-Schulz.  Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture , 1979 .

[37]  W. Dutton.  The Fifth Estate Emerging through the Network of Networks , 2008 .

[38]  Marcus Foth,et al.  Content sharing on public screens: experiences through iterating social and spatial contexts , 2012, OZCHI.

[39]  Derek Thomas.  Placemaking: An Urban Design Methodology , 2016 .

[40]  Laura Forlano,et al.  Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities , 2016, Design Issues.

[41]  Charles Landry,et al.  The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage , 2007 .

[42]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Beyond the user: use and non-use in HCI , 2009, OZCHI.

[43]  Darcy W. E. Allen,et al.  Blockchains and the Boundaries of Self-Organized Economies: Predictions for the Future of Banking , 2016 .

[44]  Glenda Amayo Caldwell,et al.  Guerrillas in the [Urban] Midst: Developing and Using Creative Research Methods—Guerrilla Research Tactics , 2015 .

[45]  Mirko Guaralda,et al.  Chaos and creativity of play: Designing emotional engagement in public spaces , 2012 .

[46]  G. Duranton,et al.  Diversity and Specialisation in Cities: Why, Where and When Does it Matter? , 1999 .

[47]  J. Jacobs.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1962 .

[48]  Simon Marvin,et al.  Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places , 1996 .

[49]  M. Foth,et al.  Urban Acupuncture: Hybrid Social and Technological Practices for Hyperlocal Placemaking , 2015 .

[50]  J. Potts,et al.  Cryptosecession and the limits of taxation : Towards a theory of non-territorial internal exit , 2022 .

[51]  Romanda Simpson,et al.  "Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution" by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, eds. , 2017, UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies.

[52]  Doug Schuler,et al.  Liberating Voices - A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution , 2008 .