Urban Co-Creation: Envisioning New Digital Tools for Activism and Experimentation in the City

With this paper we seek to shed more light on the use of digital tools in support of urban forms of civic participation. We outline a multi-faceted approach to urban issues and review different approaches to activism in the city. Based on this, we sketch out new opportunities for design and invention in support of a range of participatory practices in the city. While urban developments and planning processes may seem to be determined by abstract forces such as markets and bureaucracy, we argue that citizen activists can—and already do—get actively and concretely engaged in shaping their cities. We conceptualize these grassroots transformations of spatial, material, and social aspects of a city as urban co-creation involving—to borrow terms from computing culture—deciphering, debugging, and hacking the city. FROM COMPLEXITIES TO URBAN CO-CREATION The city has been for centuries an important locale of cultural creation, economic exchange, and political interaction. Mumford conceptualized the city as a “collection of primary groups and purposive associations” (p.93), and a ‘theater of social action’ with city inhabitants as its protagonists [14]. Today’s cities can be seen as strategic places for both the dominant forces of capitalist globalization, but also for ‘counter-geographies’ of local citizen networks using digital tools [18]. To better understand the complexity of cities as social and spatial phenomena, it can be helpful to draw from actor-network theory as a sociology of associations [12]. In urban actor networks, humans (e.g., citizens, planners, developers) and artifacts (e.g., streets, buildings, benches) interact with each other in complex, contingent ways. This means that neither physical characteristics nor social relations have ultimately determining influence on the other. Instead, humans and artifacts influence each other by being part of actor networks. Following actor-network theory, the concept of place can be framed as an entanglement of people and things associated by meanings and memories. For example, a particular actor network of a specific place like a park or community centre becomes itself an actor that is part of the neighbourhood and city. Phenomena often associated with place, such as memory and identity, resemble linkages between citizens and the locations they value.

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