We build this city on rocks and (feminist) code: hacking corporate computational designs of cities to come

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalDigital Creativity
Volume34
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)162-177
Number of pages16
ISSN1462-6268
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24.07.2023

Bibliographical note

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

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Automation in Clinical Laboratories
  2. Promoting neighbourhood sharing: infrastructures of convenience and community
  3. Fallbeispiele Abflussbildung
  4. Complex Times, Complex Time
  5. Nothing lasts forever: Dominant species decline under rapid environmental change in global grasslands
  6. The determinants of CDS spreads
  7. A pluralistic and integrated approach to action-oriented knowledge for sustainability
  8. Telomere length and environmental conditions predict stress levels but not parental investment in a long-lived seabird
  9. Which Potential Linguistic Challenges do Pre-Service Teachers Identify in a Mathematical Expository Text?
  10. Kindergarten und Grundschule zwischen Differenzierung und Integration
  11. Public understanding of climate change terminology in Germany
  12. Re-investigating the insurance-growth nexus using common factors
  13. Neue Lektürefreuden
  14. Plant communities of the great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area, Mongolia
  15. Creating Social Existence Through Law. Laypeople’s Successful Struggle for a Certificate of Miscarriage
  16. Evidence for regional-scale declines in carabid beetles in old lowland beech forests following a period of severe drought
  17. Safe-and-sustainable-by-design roadmap
  18. Engaging with Three Predicaments of Transnational Migration Research in the Postcolonial Condition
  19. Governance for urban sustainability through real-world experimentation – Introducing an evaluation framework for transformative research involving public actors
  20. Feedback on creative ideas
  21. Inside honeybee hives
  22. Effect of Heat Treatment on the Microstructure and Corrosion Properties of Mg–15Dy–1.5Zn Alloy with LPSO Phase
  23. Wer spricht den Satz „Wir sind das Volk“?
  24. Vorstellungsänderung
  25. Fraktale Dimension natürlicher Objekte
  26. Global Sourcing
  27. Endogenous redistributive cycles
  28. „Round Robin“ oder auch Siegerbesieger
  29. So verknüpfen Sie operatives Controlling und Berichtswesen
  30. Klassenrat