There are many ways to hack the world. Graduate students at Parsons The New School for Design developed a guide for hacking the biggest piece of technology humans have developed – the city.
One of the things we love here at Hackaday is how hacking gives us a tool to make the world a better place for ourselves and those around us. Even if it’s a simple Arduino-based project, we’re (usually) trying to make something better or less painful.
Taking that same approach of identifying a problem, talking to the end user, and then going through design and execution can also apply to projects at a larger scale. Even if you live in an already great neighborhood, there’s likely some abandoned nook or epic vista that could use some love to bring people out from behind their screens to enjoy each other’s company. This guide walks us through the steps of improving public space, and some of the various ways to interact with and collate data from the people and organizations that makeup a community. This could work as a framework for growing any nascent hacker or makerspaces as well.
Hacking your neighborhood can include anything: a roving playground, a light up seesaw, or a recycling game. If you’ve seen any cool projects in this regard, send them to the tipsline!
Actually meeting my neighbors has directly lead to all of us hanging out watching the kids play out front, outdoors. Best hack. Rediscovered to be sure.
Warning: Toolkit is not a proper flowchart. You can wind up stuck, going backwards, or having two possible ways to go (two “yes” or two “no” paths).
I just read it as left to right
haha yeah that flow chart made me angry
anyways the endpoint is always restrict cars
Thing about it not as “restricting” cars. Rather, think about it as not requiring cars to live a normal life.
For your very own “They Live” moment, reread the above statement, but replace the word “cars” with the word “freedom”.
Cars are one solution to the mobility problem. But not the only one, and at rush hour, probably not the best one.
If you live out in the country, sure. But the article is about urban planning. Different thing entirely.
@Elliot I agree that overuse of cars is a problem but the opposing viewpoint tends to fail badly at inclusion. A car has climate control in a sealed cabin, so it doesn’t exclude people who can’t handle the hot/cold weather. You don’t need to be able to walk long distances or straddle and balance a bike; you can sit in a comfortable chair and use power steering with an automatic transmission and cruise control. Even if you’re normally in good health, it’d be odd to suppose you’ll never need to go someplace while sick or injured. There’s public transport, sometimes, if you can afford it and if it’s safe and it’s going to the right place at the right time, and if you can carry whatever you need to transport for however long it takes, instead of putting it in the trunk and moving on.
Now city cars and rickshaws and things would be good enough for that. Not all the benefits of walkability, but small and practical for an isolated city in a vacuum, as something to go alongside the bikes and such. But your city requires resources from a much greater area than its own footprint, that’s how cities work. They’re not self-sufficient; they consume a massive amount of resources and energy and emit a massive amount of waste. Ideally, all this consumption hopefully is used to produce things that provide compensating benefit to the people in areas whose resources the city has consumed, or simply in the surrounding areas. Less ideally, the things the city produces are used to claw back the money that was spent acquiring the resources to make them. The city needs to let people come in and out from such areas in order for those areas to continue participating in the arrangement. Since those areas are generally kept at a financial disadvantage in relation to the city, the people coming in have an even harder time affording to have a small second car just for trips to the city, or to pay someone else for transportation all the time. They have to get there in their non-city vehicles and if they’re buying something to take home directly instead of having it shipped, they have to be able to load their vehicle with it. Usually this happens outside of downtown of course, somewhere in the sprawl, where urban planners may or may not be paying attention.
Sounds like a flowchart for grassroots gentrification, use with caution
Nerd alert: wouldn’t the largest pieces of technology humans have created be VLBI radio telescope arrays? Those are comparable with the size of the Earth!
The world these days would actually really appreciate it if people quit trying to “hack” them, Harari-style. They are starting to get incredibly upset about that, actually. Might be a good time to pull your head up and look around.
I’ve seen how bleary-eyed utopians “help people” and “save the world.” I wouldn’t wanna live in such a city. Regardless, I’m sure in the future I will be forced to either do just that, or else become a hermit. Or maybe some secret third thing will happen when enough people are fed up with enlightened meddling and social engineering…
What is the point in making it creative commons and then disabling downloading on issuu?
Hacking cities is a stepping stone to hack the planet.