The hack: What it is and why it matters to urban studies

Introduction

Emerging from early cultures of computing, ‘hacking’ is a process of problem solving which celebrates experimentation, creativity and openness (Maalsen and Perng, 2016, 2018). Since then, hacking as a term and practice has been applied to anything that disrupts or creatively engages with inflexible rules, regulations and infrastructures to find innovative solutions (Maalsen, 2019). There have been various interventions in the urban that have been framed as hacking or similar. Early accounts of ‘urban hacking’ romanticised the hack as a strategy that defied the capitalist utilisation of public space, often illustrated by practices of culture and ad jamming and DIY urbanism (Friesinger et al., 2010; Iveson, 2013). The materiality and governance of the urban has since changed, and so has the remit of the urban hack. The rise of the smart city, platform urbanism and the innovation economy has repositioned the hack, not solely as a site of citizen pushback but as a tool of governance, entrepreneurialism and civics. Despite the digitalisation of the urban, the hack itself does not have to be digitally enabled but can be conceptual and analogue. The hack’s broad reach across different materialities and conceptualisations is therefore key to hacking’s importance for urbanism.

Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that there is ambiguity and ambivalence surrounding the ‘hack’, which means the hack is a slippery object to define. The boundaries around what can be considered a hack are contested, muddied by the motivations (common good, neoliberal entrepreneurialism, illegality), the approach and materials of hacking (originality, creativity, digital or material) and by who is doing the hack (individual, community, government, private corporation). Rather than a detraction, such ambiguity is reflective of the generative capacity of the hack and its ability to materialise in diverse forms, address disparate issues, enrol a range of actors and lead to varied consequences.

For example, a grassroots urban hack, such as guerrilla gardening or repurposing vacant space, is different from a hack enabled by the State or corporations, such as piloting alternative regulations, programming urban space or crowdsourcing solutions. These political differences play into the hack’s ambiguity. Second, this ambiguity is further heightened because many of the key characteristics of hacking can be seen in the long history of workarounds, co-production, experimentation, informality and incrementalism. Thirdly, there is an ambivalence to the outcome of the hack. While it can disrupt or resolve a problem, it is often limited in its enactment of broader change, yet simultaneously it presents the possibility of doing things differently. Despite this ambiguity and ambivalence, there is merit in distinguishing the hack as something that is conceptually, empirically and methodologically of value for urban studies. Indeed, the hack’s generative qualities warrant further attention and research.

In this commentary, I advance the hack as an urban concept. The aim is to review and unpack the hack to understand how it is emerging as an urban practice and politics in order to identify its limits and possibilities. I posit the hack as a conceptual and empirical object useful for thinking through and around the urban. As both a site and method of research, the hack reveals flaws in existing systems, but it also reveals future possibilities and alternatives. I demonstrate the potential of the hack as a conceptual and empirical tool, with reference to the ‘housing hack’, and sketch out further applications for urban research. First, I provide a brief introduction to the hack and its relevance to urban studies. Next, I construct the hack as a conceptual framework, an empirical object and a method, before discussing ways of researching the hack. The commentary concludes by suggesting future applications of the hack for urban research.

What is a hack and why does it matter to urban studies?

Put simply, the hack is an ‘appropriate application of ingenuity’ (Hacker Jargon File, 2006). Hacking is commonly associated with computer programming cultures, including Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) and the Copyleft movement. However, the hack as a term and practice can be traced to earlier practices that emerged from MIT in the 1960s and 1970s, including activities such as software writing, practical jokes and exploring the forbidden infrastructure of the campus (Stallman, n.d.).

The application of hacking to new spaces and practices is facilitated by the idea that the logics and practices of hacking – the application of ingenuity and optimisation – are the ontological basis of a hack, although the extent to which everything in this wider scope can be considered hacking is debatable (Jordan, 2008). While the definition of hacks and of the practices of hacking is contested, there are constant characteristics which unify an otherwise heterogeneous thing: creativity, playfulness, efficiency and optimisation. Importantly for hacking, these logics are also deployed within the constraints of existing systems. Hacks are therefore not limitless but work around and within existing constraints.

Cities by their very nature are open to various micro-spatial practices that reshape urban spaces (Iveson, 2013: 941). The diversity of practices is manifest in different literatures on urban informality, experimentation and incrementalism. While hacking is inclusive of characteristics found in these literatures, it is different in important ways. Unlike incrementalism, hacking is not a temporary practice but is a permanent transmuting response to systematic problems – hacking allows systems to continue working without necessarily changing them. In hacking, unlike in informality and incrementalism, the logics of playfulness, creativity, efficiency and optimisation are prized. While these are not absent from other forms of urban experimentation, their celebration underpins the hack.

The hack is not new to urban studies, but I argue that the hack as it is emerging now opens up new ways of thinking with and through the city. Early references to ‘urban hacking’ positioned the hack as a strategy oppositional to the privatisation of public space (Friesinger et al., 2010). In this framework, activities including culture jamming, ad jamming and DIY urbanism were considered hacks (Friesinger et al., 2010; Iveson, 2013). Framing the hack as a radical intervention is still relevant, and Valjakka (2020) shows how urban knitting and digital hacking are mobilised as an artistic resistance in Hong Kong, using public space to create possible alternatives for sustainable social and cultural futures.

Urban hacking also emerges as a small-scale, everyday negotiation of urban life. In India, Rai (2019) refers to ‘jugaad’, a Hindi/Punjabi word meaning ‘workaround, hack, trick, or make do’ (Rai, 2019: 2). Understanding jugaad as ‘frugal innovation’ in postcolonial India, Rai (2019: 47) uses mobile phone ecologies to show how jugaad is enacted when ‘conditions of work or life come up against obstacles’. Jugaad, like hacking, is the ability to move from a ‘state of relative inaction or blockage to an improvisational situation’ (Rai, 2019: 47). Here, the hack is a cheap, playful and creative way to work around the existing limitations of the day-to-day, generating new opportunities and outcomes in the process.

By its very existence, a hack reveals an existing aporia as well as simultaneously pointing to alternative actions, one of many reasons underpinning the need for a cohesive research agenda around the hack. The hack is important to urban studies because, firstly, it is a concept and practice that transcends urbanism in both the Global North and South. As such, it has broad geographical depth and application. Second, the hack as both an idea and method is increasingly used by governments, corporations, entrepreneurs and citizens as a way to rethink and resolve urban problems. Third, the hack is useful in the way it reveals existing problems and shows possibilities for alternative futures. Fourth, it is timely. There is currently significant interest in smart and platform urbanism and the hack features in this literature, but importantly, and a key argument of this commentary, the hack has broader applications, many of which are beyond the digital.

The hack therefore is fundamental to everyday urbanism and beyond. How do we think about the hack conceptually, empirically and methodologically, and how do we research a hack? I turn my attention to that in what follows.

The hack as a conceptual framework for the urban

In this section, I advance the urban hack conceptually. First, I elaborate on the different logics of hacking and their mobility from computational systems to the urban. Second, I show that hacking is a response to this mediation and translation, but that there is also an ambiguity and ambivalence around this – the hack is becoming embedded in the urban as an almost permanent state of exception. And third, I elaborate on the consequences of the urban hack.

New opportunities for urban hacking have emerged alongside a change in the materiality and governance of the urban. The urban has been increasingly augmented by digital technologies embedded in the urban fabric (Kitchin, 2011; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2015). Although a continuation of the ‘urban as machine’ and ‘city as system’ that has persisted in some approaches to thinking about the urban since the late 1950s (Wiig and Wyly, 2016: 485), the application of computational logics to the urban is accelerated by rapid digitalisation, ubiquitous computing, the rise of the smart city and platform urbanism. The entanglement of code and the city means that more than just augmenting space, digital technologies actually produce and algorithmically govern space, producing what Kitchin and Dodge (2011) refer to as code/space. The uptake of digital governance, systems and technologies in the city is predicated on the assumption that these technologies do not just mediate the city, but actively make it knowable and governable. Reframing the city in this way is inclusive of not only technologies but also the processes and practices associated with computation, reconceptualising the urban as something which is programmable (Kitchin, 2011), prototyped, ‘in beta’ (Jiménez, 2014) and ultimately hackable. Core to this is a series of computational logics including automation, optimisation, efficiency and ‘the logic of data, of multiple efficiencies enacted through monitoring, in real time or not, of predetermined variables’ (Wiig and Wyly, 2016: 489). Underpinning this shift is the belief that computational approaches to and understandings of the city are somehow better than other forms of knowing and making decisions about the city.

Rather than producing the seamlessly governed city, the smart city rolls out in uneven and unexpected ways. Critical geographers have noted the messiness of the ‘actually existing smart city’ (Shelton et al., 2015) and have critiqued the ability of the digital and algorithms to understand and present an all-seeing view of the city (Kitchin et al., 2016). Producing, governing and knowing a city through code is, like code itself, imperfect:

Code is also not singularly written or deployed but may be a hodgepodge of just-effective-enough script written by multiple actors and running in momentarily viable ways on specific platforms. A change to any element of the code, hardware, or interoperability with other devices may shift the program and its effects. When code is meant to reprogram urban environments, it also becomes entangled in complex urban processes that interrupt the simple enactment of scripts. (Gabrys, 2014: 40)

Glitches, technological obduracy and infrastructural vulnerabilities leave the city open to hacking. Hacking itself translates computational logics to the urban and shows the mobility of hacking from computing cultures to the city. The idea of urban spaces as programmable illustrates the ways in which ‘computational logics are performed across material–cultural situations, even at the level of speculative designs or imaginings of political processes’ (Gabrys, 2014: 40). Similar to that of Zook and Graham (2018: 394), my concern here is to emphasise the ‘ethos and organisation … rather than the technology’ of hacking. The logics, processes and practices of hacking as part of the broader translation of computational thinking to the city are framed as a response to existing urban challenges. Hacking the urban can be done digitally, materially or as a hybrid of the two.

For example, Jiménez’s framing of ‘open source urbanism’ shows how computational logics translate to the materiality of the urban. For Jiménez, urban infrastructure is conceptualised as a hardware that can be made ‘open source’, and which reconfigures the politics and agency of this hardware through the social organisation of the ‘right to infrastructure’ (Jiménez, 2014: 342).

The hack is a ‘permanent’ state of exception (Agamben, 2005) as a generalised condition to address the rigidities and inflexibility of computational systems, and this translates to the urban. While the temporality of a specific hack may be short term, hacking as a practice of response is becoming embedded in the urban. Hacking’s permanence is due to the ambiguity and ambivalence that surrounds the hack, its outcomes and effect. Although a hack may provide a solution to a particular urban challenge, its ability to enact structural change is limited – it allows the existing system to continue and is open to co-option by government and corporate actors. This does not mean that a hack does not make a useful intervention. Hacking can be co-opted to advance neoliberalism, yet it can also co-exist with neoliberalism – it can disrupt and show alternative futures.

An example of the translation of these logics to the urban is the hackathon, which has become a popular activity in the open data, open source, prototypical and programmable city. The hackathon is an obvious site of the urban hack situated as an event in which citizens identify, prototype and iteratively solve urban problems (Maalsen and Perng, 2016, 2018; Perng, 2019). Commonly, these events are sponsored by a local government, NGO or technology company and are focused on a particular theme. Participants are either given a problem to address or identify their own, and they collaborate to develop, prototype and refine solutions. Engaging interested members of the community means hackathons are often framed as citizen agency. However, critics note that participation and agency are limited. Hackathons are gendered, classed and frequently run at times and in venues that exclude those with caring responsibilities or disabilities (Maalsen and Perng, 2016, 2018). Participant bias impacts whose problems are ‘hacked’ and may not be representative of the city broadly (Mattern, 2014). Further, despite the opportunity for citizen intervention, such events more commonly produce a neoliberal citizenship in which citizen efforts are constrained by the broader privatisation of the city and tinkering for social purposes is limited (Perng, 2019: 421). Despite this, the hack can co-exist as a tool of both resistance and neoliberalism, challenging and disturbing neoliberal framings through ‘repurposing and reconfiguring corporate and technocratic resources and practices’ (Perng, 2019: 431).

The hack as empirical object

As an empirical object, the hack is useful in that it reveals existing issues and proposes alternative possibilities. These reveals often materialise as ‘disruptions’ or ‘breaches’ of the system, or as simple workarounds. Urban hacks can be described as ‘disruptors’, as illustrated by the systemic changes to traditional systems of service provision often through entrepreneurial, digital innovations, such as Uber and Airbnb (hacks of transport and housing provision). Digital technologies accelerate this, with digital disruption emerging as ‘rapidly unfolding processes through which digital innovation comes to fundamentally alter historically sustainable logics for value creation and capture by unbundling and recombining linkages among resources or generating new ones’ (Skog et al., 2018: 432). Digital or not, the logics of the hack remain the same.

Rather than the cause of disruption, such hacks are useful for revealing the flaws in a system that made it prone to disruption in the first place. For example, the growth in platform labour, co-working and co-living spaces is a response to a labour market characterised by increased precarity and casualisation; and the growth in platform provision of services such as housing and transport is implicated by broader housing market trends, and systematic defunding of public services, themselves reflective of a trend of the privatisation of public assets and spaces (Barns, 2019).

Just as the hacking of software programs cannot occur unless there is a weak spot in the program that allows it to be breached, guerrilla urbanism’s repurposing of vacant space is enabled by the under-utilisation of those spaces. Policy hacks are only necessary because current policies or those that have preceded them have created problems, for example a decline in affordable housing or constraints on the provision of public services. Hacking is not the cause but rather a signifier of flaws and disruptions:

Hackers do not in any strict sense of the term, cause the disruptions or general system failures exhibited in and by the activities of hacking. Hacking only fixates on and manipulates an aporia, bug, and/or back door that is always and already present within and constitutive of the system itself. … Hacking is not some catastrophe that befalls an innocent and pure system as a kind of external threat and profound danger. It develops from a necessary and unavoidable deformity that always and already resides within and defines the proper formation of the system itself. (Gunkel, 2018 [2001]: 8–9)

In this sense, hacking does three things for urban researchers. First, it shows us where problems exist, and where to direct our questions: Where in the system is the flaw and why does it exist? What structural conditions have allowed it to materialise? Second, hacking provides us with an opportunity to see alternative possibilities, and multiple and heterogeneous outcomes and futures. The hack is a space of possibility (Massey, 2005). Thirdly, we must be careful not to assume that hacking always results in better outcomes. A hack could, for example, help to strengthen the status quo by showing where the system is vulnerable, catalysing responses that repair the system to its normative state. It could also be co-opted, and the hacks’ potentialities reincorporated into the existing system. But hacks are still useful in their political potential; as Iveson (2013: 955) notes in relation to DIY urbanism, a more democratic city can emerge if such interventions are politicised.

Hacking life and work through flexible and informal responses driven by austerity are illustrative here. Labour markets, service provision and housing have all been disrupted, and are characterised by increased diversity (Arundel and Doling, 2017) as people look for new ways to earn, work and live. The rise in shared spaces, objects and services (co-working, co-living, ride sharing, Airbnb) is celebrated by neoliberalism as entrepreneurial activity but speaks to a broader economic shift, disinvestment in social welfare and increased precarity. The platform-sharing economy also actively reshapes the urban by influencing regulatory and governance decisions, as tech companies reconfigure housing, labour and transport markets (McNeill, 2016).

Discussing the value of co-working spaces for freelancers, Merkel (2019) reads their rise as a response to economic crisis and austerity urbanism, but co-working spaces can also be read as a hack. The growth of such spaces reveals the decline in traditional work life and workspace models as political and economic paradigms prioritised by neoliberal mechanisms, yet also reveals interventions to work around this change (Merkel, 2019: 530). The spaces themselves make visible the often-invisible labour of freelancing, but also critique ‘neoliberal politics of individualization in creating a shared space where alternative modes of social relations and economic conduct among freelancers can be mutually developed and experimented with’ (Merkel, 2019: 527). Yet, as noted earlier, hacks can be co-opted and such spaces, while offering opportunity for collectivisation, can also reinforce neoliberal norms with their celebration of the entrepreneurial subject (Merkel, 2019: 531). Both outcomes are possible because of the existing weaknesses in the system.

The hack as method

If the hack is a way of thinking through and with urban problems, it is also a way of doing these possibilities. As a method, the hack revolves around practices of experimentation, creativity and iteration. The aim of a hack is to find alternative possibilities and interventions within existing systems. For Gunkel (2018 [2001]: 13), hacking proposes a mode of investigation that infiltrates under-examined systems, provides strategies for exploring their functions and flaws and reveals possibilities for alternative operations. Meanwhile, for Chandler (2017: 113), the hack as method means ‘creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency’. Cultures and practices of hacking reward creativity and repurposing and reworking of systems, and this approach is equally true for the hack as method beyond computer cultures. This is particularly visible in policy hacks and experimentation with regulatory mechanisms and planning laws.

Hacking as method is increasingly employed across cities globally, frequently manifesting as policy hacks, hackathons, living labs and innovation hubs. It materialises in the outsourcing of solutions to citizens through vehicles such as the hackathon as discussed above, a process which again reflects logics of efficiency and creativity. Using PetJakarta’s project on community-engaged responses to the threat of flooding in informal Kampung settlements in Jakarta as an example, Chandler (2017) shows how hacking as a set of experimental processes, practices and imaginaries enabled a reframing of the problem and thus opened up new solutions. Efforts to control the river through direct intervention such as concretisation have failed in part, Chandler (2017: 120) argues, because they are based on a modernist view of the river as linear and controllable. Rather than fixing the river, PetJakarta’s response was to find better ways of living with the river. This involved remapping the river within the city using participant Twitter feedback to show the river as dynamic and relational to those living with it (Chandler, 2017: 121).

In Chandler’s example, citizens are sensors, using digital technology to generate ‘geo-social forms of collective intelligence and using geo-social technology to re-envision the city and what it means to be a citizen of it’ (Chandler, 2017: 121). The flooding has not been stopped but it has been reframed, allowing for interventions which do not aim to control the river but which generate new ways of safely living with it – a solution that diminishes the threat to residents, while working within environmental constraints.

In this sense, the hack as a method is ‘doing’ and ‘inventing’ new ways to think about urban problems. There are similarities here with Gabrys et al.’s (2016) work on the inventive capacities of participatory, DIY and digital citizen sensing practices as method. Drawing upon citizen sensing of air pollution as an example, Gabrys et al. (2016: 12) show how citizen sensing can produce alternative data and data stories and, by extension, generate alternative possibilities for solving and living with urban problems. The citizen sensing practices described by Gabrys et al. (2016: 11) hacked the process of ‘expert’ data collection, analysis and interpretation, activating the data in ways that accounted for citizen experience and highlighting pathways of actionability. The hack is a way of doing research, of inventing new ways of thinking about a problem and a way of generating alternative possibilities.

As a method, hacking allows users to engage with problems and think through them in creative ways, reframing them and finding workarounds, rather than necessarily finding ultimate solutions. As an intervention, hacking is useful in helping to envision different possibilities within the constraints of the existing system.

Researching the urban hack

Having considered the hack as a conceptual object and method, I now address the hack itself as an object of empirical inquiry. This section sets out an analytical framework to support a programme of research around the urban hack, as a process and practice that is being incorporated into urban policy and service provision, as well as reconfiguring work and the everyday. This framework is structured by the ways in which the hack is doing work in the urban: (1) hacking policy; (2) hacking service provision; (3) hacking work; and (4) hacking living. Table 1 illustrates the proposed framework and focuses on the ways in which hacking is being framed.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

A framework for the urban hack.

Hack	Description
Hacking policy	Iterative and experimental approaches to policy and regulations that are tested in small sections of the city before being scaled up if successful
Hacking provision	Service provision is being hacked by ‘on-demand’ models, e.g. platforms such as Uber, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, which variously disrupt the provision of transport and food, by making it an on-demand service
Hacking work	The rise of entrepreneurial and start-up culture work models, generally in response to and characteristic of increased employment precarity. Includes gig labour, a highly mobile labour force and digital labour. Like hacking provision, often jobs are created around repurposing something as a service. It also has an impact on the way we think about, design and service the workplace
Hacking living	Alternative, ‘innovative’ and frequently digitalised mediation of living. This includes a growth in co-living, co-working and cooperative models, and the use of digital platforms to access and manage different aspects of daily life

The hack framework can be applied to all aspects of the urban. To better illustrate its potential as a research agenda, however, I refer to activities in the housing sector to show how the logics of hacking are informing contemporary responses to housing challenges.

Housing is an appropriate sector to illustrate the hack, as the past three decades have seen systematic disinvestment in public housing, increasing financialisation and systematic failure of the provision of affordable housing in many countries. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that contemporary housing thinking largely mirrors the obduracy of existing housing markets and governance. Concepts such as the classic housing trajectory and formalised landlord–tenant relationships are predominant in understanding digital disruptions like Airbnb and Rentberry. Such models are conceptually and empirically unable to grasp a diverse and agile system of housing in which housing providers and consumers are innovating with novel housing models, tenure, techniques and practices to ‘hack’ housing and drive the diversity of housing systems. The ‘reshaping’ of housing occurs through the mediation, facilitation, regulation and augmentation of housing that these shifts in trends catalyse to innovate housing model diversity as housing hacks. Housing’s reconfiguration is already emergent in four ways previously identified (Maalsen, 2019). These can be summarised as: (1) hacking policy and housing; (2) hacking housing provision; (3) hacking housing and work; and (4) hacking living. I briefly describe these below to illustrate the avenues for research that are opened up by thinking with and through hacking.

Conclusion

This commentary advanced the hack as an urban concept by highlighting its conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions to urban studies. The hack’s importance is underlined by its relevance to urbanism globally; its wide applications; its materialities and timeliness. Critically, it is the transmutation of the logics of hacking to the urban – creativity, efficiency and optimisation – that allows this broad reach. The hack signals spaces of possibility, is generative and foregrounds the possible city.

A broader research agenda for the urban hack is therefore necessary. I suggest future research directions which are neither prescriptive nor comprehensive but intended to move this agenda forward.

Firstly, considering the hack’s ability to reveal things that may have previously been unseen, ‘following the hack’ can assist us to identify issues, efforts to solve them and the effects of these responses. Because the hack only emerges in response to an existing flaw, it is a potentially powerful tool for urban researchers. What would urban research look like if we focused on spaces where the hack materialised, and how could this prompt us to ask new questions about the reconfiguration of urban space through experimental, creative and iterative approaches? Does hacking merely reframe business-as-usual or do hacks have the potential to be truly disruptive in a beneficial way? Can hacks both advance neoliberalism and contest it?

Next, what are the limits and potentials of the hack as transference of computational logics to the urban? Existing work both critiques the idea that computational thinking is somehow better and unbiased, and highlights the inherent messiness of the urban as ill-suited to the optimisation and efficiency frameworks that underpin such thinking. However, the literature also points to examples where hacking has successfully found new ways to live with or solve urban problems by experimenting and reframing the way problems are approached.

Thirdly, what is the geography of the urban hack? Does it emerge differently in the Global North and South, and are the practices and lessons of hacking transferrable across different urban spaces? We can look to the emergent literature on informality in the Global North growing out of the significant body of research that has addressed informality in the Global South as an indication of how this would be a productive project (Durst and Wegmann, 2017; Roy, 2005). How does the ambiguity, playfulness and generative nature of the hack materialise across geographies; how does this play out in contexts characterised by informality; and what lessons can be shared?

And, perhaps most importantly, can hacking fulfil its potential as a space of possibility? As possibilities that do not reproduce the status quo but are truly disruptive? What would that space of possibility – that city of possibilities – look like and how could the hack help us to envision better urban futures?