Urbanism as hacking: the digital generation’s tactical urbanism
“What if saving a rundown city wasn’t about building expensive new infrastructure — hardware, so to speak — but instead reprogramming the existing infrastructure? …Changing the software of the place? Nimble, flexible approaches to improving the urban environment are emerging all over the United States — the Better Block projects that started in Dallas, the Park(ing) Day movement, the Pavement to Parks initiative in San Francisco. The new guide to Tactical Urbanism is filled with examples, and there are more coming along all the time, many spearheaded by people in their 20s and 30s. Maybe a generation that has come of age in a digital world is fundamentally predisposed to seeing urban space as hackable.”
Excerpted from Sarah Goodyear in Grist:
“What if saving a rundown city wasn’t about building expensive new infrastructure — hardware, so to speak — but instead reprogramming the existing infrastructure? Changing the software of the place?
That’s the analogy used by Marcus Westbury, founder of Renew Newcastle, an innovative initiative that has breathed life into the vacant downtown of that Australian city.
Newcastle, which grew up around the coal and steel industries, suffers from a lot of the same problems as Rust Belt cities in the United States. Its major employers shut down in the latter half of the 20th century, its transportation systems were dismantled, and retail decamped for the sprawling suburbs. The core of the city was vacant and neglected.
But Renew Newcastle has turned that around by making it easy for entrepreneurs and artists to move into vacant spaces and make creative use of them. The result? Lonely Planet recently named it one of the top 10 cities to visit in 2011.”
More information via an excellent piece by Westbury called “Cities as Software” (originally published in the Dutch architecture and design magazine Volume)
