Open Source Urbanism
Description
Excerpted from Saskia Sassen:
"Technologists, urbanists and artists are beginning to "urbanize" technology (see the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia, the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, and much of the work gathered at the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA). When this happens, the city becomes a heuristic space: it talks to the average resident or passer-by, it can make the most advanced applied technologies that can be used in cities visible. The city also makes visible the diversity of spatial forms through which these technological applications work, becoming legible even to the passer-by. I have long thought that all the major infrastructures, from sewage to electricity and broadband, should be covered by transparent walls and floors, so if you are waiting for the bus, you can actually see how the city all works and begin to get engaged. Today, when walls are pregnant with softwared capabilities, why not make this transparent? All our computerized systems should become transparent. It creates its own public shared domain.
Yet Open Source is different from those technologies and technological applications. I see in Open Source a DNA that resonates strongly with how people make the city theirs or urbanize what might be an individual initiative. And yet, it stays so far away from the city. I think that it will require making. We need to push this urbanizing of technologies to strengthen horizontal practices and initiatives. Leading urban civic institutions tend to verticalize this work of making the urban. But they do matter. Here the appropriate technology is more akin to developing an urban Wikileaks—vertical institutions that begin to leak and thereby enable citizens to work with at least some of what is useful in those leaks in the ways they see fit. This is akin to horizontalizing what is now vertical, imposed by top-down authority.
There is much work to be done. Recovering the incompleteness of cities means recovering a space where the work of open sourcing the urban can thrive. Developing an urban Wikileaks would take cities in a very different direction from the intelligent city model—and for the better." (http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/open-source-urbanism/)