tactical urbanism

2 Articles

Flow chart containing directions on how to determine if you should use this toolkit as a resident, business owner, civic activist, or government official

Hackable Cities

February 24, 2025 by 13 Comments

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!

A child in a red shirt and blue pants balances on a board suspended across two small, green sawhorses. An astroturf hill and blue elephant-esque cart are in the background.

Popup Playground Roams Around

February 4, 2024 by 4 Comments

Going to the park is a time-honored pastime for kids around the world, but what if there isn’t one nearby? COMPA Teatro Trono and the International Design Clinic have designed a park that can come to you.

Working with a group of design students from Bolivia and America, the theatre troupe has iteratively designed a set of playground carts that can be deployed for kids to meet each other and play. El Alto, the city of 1 million where the playground plies the streets, has grown exponentially since its incorporation as an independent town in 1985. Infrastructure has trouble catching up with population jumps of 54% like that experienced from 2000-2010.

Starting with interviews with kids from the city about what was important for a playground, they found a trend of trees, slides, and the color green. Over the course of three summers, the design students went from janky prototypes to the more refined carts now seen roaming El Alto built around the idea of “exaggerated topography.” An elephant and “astroturf bee” are the two hand carts which disassemble into a variety of playground equipment once in place at a destination.

Not a ton of details are given in the article about the construction of the carts themselves, but we think this tactical urbanist approach to parks is a hack in itself. That said, be sure to point us toward some more info on the builds if you’ve found any. Know of another hack, that brings joy to your own neighborhoods? Send it to the tipsline!