Abstract
This book projects itself in the form of an open call for challenging the given spatial categories and to liberate spaces by the power of imagination, as well as active engagements with our environments. It offers the work of 16 artists, academics, and thinkers to present an eclectic and unconventionally erudite approach to urban studies. The book holds together how-to-do ideas, genealogy of concepts, and case studies of the present era in order to explain urban hacking and its relationship with the right of citizens to spaces. However, its brief introduction does not indicate how these writings have come together. It isn’t until later chapters that readers get to know the book is the result of the Paraflows Festival that took place in Vienna in 2009. The editors have tried to invite imagination in readers by exploring the dynamics of cultural jamming and leaving meaning in-between the lines, instead of offering fixed definitions. The book is written with academic partisanship in order to show the tyranny of space and representation both in theory and practice. Hence, the book is divided into three sections: first, deconstructing the meanings of urban and space; then, the second part looks at the historical development of urban hacking; and finally, the third section suggests how we can hack the city, or basically, ‘putting-oneself-on-the-line’ (p. 10).
The book practices breaking structures, not only in theory but also by not forcing a rigid conceptual organization over the essays and articles. For instance, the editors have kept the introduction brief to allow the text to speak for itself. The introduction suggests space is a category that can be dealt with like a text that is authored by social relations. They emphasize how social relations ‘coordinate and control [the text]: technologically, economically, or juridically’ (p. 14). However, the approach does not elaborate on the transition of space to place and notions of belonging.
Schneider and Friesinger (‘Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Critique of Public Spaces’) begin the first section in a similar tone to the introduction by taking the process of transitions for granted. They suggest critiquing is a form of affirmation for tyranny of representational space because, by forming a counter-public, ‘we only become increasingly entangled in those structures’ (p. 16). However, they do not elaborate on how the entanglement occurs. This section is crafted to evince ‘hacking takes place wherever everyday life occurs’ (p. 43) and authors have chosen to seek life within urban spaces. Gadringer indicates (‘Urban Hacking as a Strategy for Urban (Re-)Planning/Designing’) that urban hacking is ‘humaning of a space’ (p. 54) through active participation of guerrilla art and artisans. ‘Wild spraying, guerrilla spraying, flash bombs, zombie walk and mass pillow fight’ (p. 42) are not only for the sake of breaking normativity but rather guerrilla style interventions which ‘occupy the public spaces from within’ (p. 23). Gadringer shows how urban hackers actually disappear into the city while performing the very act of subversion as they let their bodies become ‘anonymous shell[s]’ (p. 42). It is important for the author that these strategies appear in the form of high impact shocks and sustain themselves in everyday life, be it legal battles of P2P networks or WikiLeaks or billboard liberations.
Saitta (‘Playing with the Built City’) talks about the imaginaries of space and how they can be linked to the strategies discussed by Gadringer. However, I found her idea of ‘a common imaginary’ as shared experiences unsettling, since it discounts operations of subjectivity and multitude by not asking whose imaginaries are shared or permitted to be shared. She aptly points out that urban hacking is the demand to see how much a space supports everyday life or exposes the lack of support for everyday life in urban frameworks. Saitta explores the ‘demand’ through ‘affordances as an idea are rarely applied to city design’ (p. 51), but for some unknown reason she can afford to not cite James Gibson who coined the very idea. Affording not to cite seems to be a trend among other authors of the book too, like Edlinger (‘Please Love Banksy’), who also concludes with ideas from Deleuze as well as quotes from Andy Warhol, yet with no citation for any of them. It seems editors have encouraged this by including Thuner’s writing (‘The Most Dangerous Thing on the Air’) on the history of Vienna’s ‘alternative scenes’ (p. 164) or letting Ohier (‘cODE wRITING’) get away with not citing materials and resources which define Dadaism (p. 196).The second section explains how to cross the rhetoric of activism: the fantasmatic revolution is not coming, so let’s get to the work by interrupting the symbolic ‘core of the real’ and articulating challenges ‘by an aesthetic praxis in a guerilla war of representation’ (p. 19). Grenzfurthner (‘Guerilla.com’) suggests guerrilla communication can make people suspicious of the given information through versatile practices of cultural resistance. She asks, ‘why not use the CD drive in your office computer as a coffee holder?’ She insists on her question by adding, ‘ever tried it?’ (p. 100), because, for her, urban hacking and guerilla communication in every form suggest reflectivity, reconsidering belief systems and representation, particularly those formed around space and geographies of living.
This section continues on strategies like guerrilla gardening by Jahnke, Pirate radios by Thurner, or exposing potentials of creative communications within rigid spaces in an engaging interview with Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere. The authors confirm through their examples how urban hacking is comprised of ‘strategies that do not talk about public space but rather through it, in it and with it, through its disruption, interruption and opening’ (p. 24).
The third section exemplifies ‘aspects of risk’ (p. 10) and methods to bring activism out of demonstration and more into practice. This section is particularly aligned with the idea of refuting the fact that events like excessive surveillance, industrialization of the city, commercialization of public spaces and ‘utilitarian standardization’ (p. 18) in the late capitalism era are ‘occurring blindly’ (p. 14) without our interference. Therefore, people need to take responsibility and act, not just by demonstrating or recycling, but rather by hacking the city and reclaiming the spaces. Grenzfurthner, Friesinger and Ballhausen (‘Welcome to the Battlefield’) imply the risk is constant in urban spaces by emphasizing ‘power struggle’ (p. 18) for redefining them. This section shows how the book is an activist and a performer in its own right. For instance, it challenges the reader’s expectation with its last essay by Ballhausen (‘Control’), which stands as a summation and warns about the ‘parameters of control that [lead] to … loss of control’ (p. 216). It is a summation not in the form of a conclusion or structured remarks, but a parody of Shakespeare’s dialogue between Troilus and Cressida. The parody reminds us that the play, although classical, pushes us to rethink the embedded value system and imposed structuration.
Overall, the authors convey the idea that urban hacking is not a matter of grand gestures or shouting in the streets, but realizing that something ‘as little as a bed of flowers growing where they are not expected can change a stretch of street in the eyes of those who pass by making it a bit more friendly, a bit more human’ (p. 69).