We build this city on rocks and (feminist) code: hacking corporate computational designs of cities to come

ABSTRACT

Cities have long become interspaces, entangled in materialities and virtual worlds. However, as urban automation advances in cities increasingly made ‘smarter’, everyday processes are often controlled by oppressive standards hardcoded into technologies. Publicly neutralized as ‘objective’, corporately owned algorithmic architectures now function as urban gatekeepers. They determine social participation, possibilities of space appropriation on- and offline, and access to (social) infrastructures. Following five months of qualitative research on hacking and other tech-practices by German-speaking cyberfeminist collectives in 2021, my paper portrays their refusal of black-boxed, profitable, and biased technologies of classification. I argue that feminist hackspaces are important urban co-creators in digitized cities to come. They offer infrastructures to increase access to interfaces, (cyber-)spaces, and decision-making processes by sharing their tech-knowledge and tools. Their activism demonstrates how (urban) hacking is a crucial practice to break with non-democratically controlled digitalization processes: in favour of a city for all.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city
• gender
• hacking
• feminism
• urban design

Acknowledgements

A huge shout-out! … goes out to my interview partners and their hackspaces for generously sharing their time, knowledge and experiences with me. Danke so for opening up the door to your world during very challenging times! Special THX to Kathrin Wildner and Monika Grubbauer for unconditionally supporting my work and the ‘Automating the Logistical City’-team for making this paper possible. Also, thank you to Franziska Schämann and the editors for making it better through your caring remarks. To all those who have cheered for me during this process: 143.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 If not marked otherwise, these and following observations result from my own fieldwork and material.

2 With her demand for a metaphorical and actual ‘Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf argues that being able to take up space for people marginalized within a patriarchal society (in her case: women) is crucial for becoming independent, to be able to think, and ultimately overcome power structures that oppress them (Woolf 2002). Already a 100 years ago, she recognized the importance of space and the social implications inscribed into built architectures. I argue with Laugwitz that feminist hackspaces are a continuation of Woolf’s idea, giving space to people identifying other than cis-male where they can make room, establish their own rules, and curate access (Laugwitz 2014).

3 In German, the acronym FLINTA translates to people who identify as Frauen, Lesben, inter, non-binär, trans und agender.

4 For a more detailed review in relation to urban space see Vadiati (2022).

5 The land is nodding to material spaces and geographies.

6 Paradoxically, it still seems impossible to initiate the overcoming of binary (spatial) thinking without naming—and often reproducing—various dichotomies like virtual/material, digital/physical.

7 Today, processes of digitalization are inevitable, but not everybody has equal access to informational infrastructures. Tech literacy and especially decision-making power are (still) often exclusive to the privileged and tech elites, Benjamin explains (Benjamin 2019). Ironically, only having the most access to tech knowledge and being able to develop and decide upon technologies allows the luxury to digitally detox. People pride themselves for disconnecting today as much as ten years ago, when Jurgeson made his observations on an analogously led life as ‘more authentic’ and ‘real’ (Jurgenson 2012). However, this is only possible to the few privileged who can afford to stay offline and whose everyday work does not depend on being digitally available. This emphasizes the inherently classist hegemony encoded into technology.

8 All of the following interview quotes are translated from German into English by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project ‘Automating the Logistical City’, funded by Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture with funds from the Niedersächsiches Vorab as part of the ‘Digital Society’ call for proposals [Grand ID ZN 3752].

Notes on contributors

Maja-Lee Voigt

Maja-Lee Voigt is an urban researcher, Ph.D. student at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, and co-founder of the interdisciplinary city research collective Akteurinnen für urbanen Ungehorsam in Hamburg, Germany. Assisted by a methodological toolbox of ethnographic and critical feminist thinking, her work focuses on the automation of logistical cities, tackling questions about (resisting) algorithmic architectures of oppression, and hacking patriarchy towards more just urban futures.