TY - JOUR

T1 - We build this city on rocks and (feminist) code

T2 - hacking corporate computational designs of cities to come

AU - Voigt, Maja-Lee

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

PY - 2023/7/24

Y1 - 2023/7/24

N2 - Cities have long become interspaces, entangled in materialities and virtual worlds. However, as urban automation advances in cities increasingly made ‘smarter’, everyday processes are often controlled by oppressive standards hardcoded into technologies. Publicly neutralized as ‘objective’, corporately owned algorithmic architectures now function as urban gatekeepers. They determine social participation, possibilities of space appropriation on- and offline, and access to (social) infrastructures. Following five months of qualitative research on hacking and other tech-practices by German-speaking cyberfeminist collectives in 2021, my paper portrays their refusal of black-boxed, profitable, and biased technologies of classification. I argue that feminist hackspaces are important urban co-creators in digitized cities to come. They offer infrastructures to increase access to interfaces, (cyber-)spaces, and decision-making processes by sharing their tech-knowledge and tools. Their activism demonstrates how (urban) hacking is a crucial practice to break with non-democratically controlled digitalization processes: in favour of a city for all.

AB - Cities have long become interspaces, entangled in materialities and virtual worlds. However, as urban automation advances in cities increasingly made ‘smarter’, everyday processes are often controlled by oppressive standards hardcoded into technologies. Publicly neutralized as ‘objective’, corporately owned algorithmic architectures now function as urban gatekeepers. They determine social participation, possibilities of space appropriation on- and offline, and access to (social) infrastructures. Following five months of qualitative research on hacking and other tech-practices by German-speaking cyberfeminist collectives in 2021, my paper portrays their refusal of black-boxed, profitable, and biased technologies of classification. I argue that feminist hackspaces are important urban co-creators in digitized cities to come. They offer infrastructures to increase access to interfaces, (cyber-)spaces, and decision-making processes by sharing their tech-knowledge and tools. Their activism demonstrates how (urban) hacking is a crucial practice to break with non-democratically controlled digitalization processes: in favour of a city for all.

KW - Construction engineering and architecture

KW - Stadtentwicklung

KW - smart city

KW - urban design

KW - Gender and Diversity

KW - hacking

KW - feminism

KW - gender

KW - ferminism

KW - Culture and Space

KW - Stadtforschung

KW - hacking

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85154573047&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/5f0b619c-7d39-3e12-819f-1b82cb9b88aa/

U2 - 10.1080/14626268.2023.2205406

DO - 10.1080/14626268.2023.2205406

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 34

SP - 162

EP - 177

JO - Digital Creativity

JF - Digital Creativity

SN - 1462-6268

IS - 2

ER -