Hacking the Urbe
AS LONDON has evolved over the centuries, one constant has been its title of being the ‘financial capital of the world’. Especially the past two decades saw a rapid ascent in the power and influence of the city’s financial sector, governed by a number of important factors, The consequence of these factors is that London acquired an impressive level of global reach and influence in terms of finance industry; it consolidated its position as the world’s Financial Centre and emerged as a genuinely ‘Global City’.
In this broader process of ‘neoliberal urbanisation’, the city is experiencing a ‘vertical urban turn’, undergoing massive vertical, aboveground transformations, growing and densifying in terms of dramatic scale and speed.
Taking into account the abovementioned context, the project builds on the idea of ‘hacking’ as a creative tool in order to re-code and re-program the spatial networks in the City. What makes hacking so interesting and powerful, is this mix of temporariness
and sharpness, a solution not designed to prevail in time, but left open for others too. In this light, drawing also on the idea of ‘place hacking’, the project begins to explore the subterranean world of infrastructure, ranging from the extended sewage system to the abandoned bunkers and tube stations, moving on to seek possible alternative ways to appropriate the City from below. Concluding, drawing on this ‘vertical urban turn’, the project tries on the one hand to enhance our vertical thinking of contemporary cities that exceeds the above ground realm and boundaries. At the same time, it envisions alternative ways of human and machine interaction in the era of artificial intelligence and automation, rethinking new forms of open
access and control. This kind of understanding of the relationship between the city and technology suggests also new modes of design and challenges new ways of space appropriation that involve both human and non-human actors.
- [year] 2018
- [Design Tutors] Enriqueta Llabres Valls, Zachary Flucker
- [H+T] Manos Vourakis
- [Student, Image and Text Credits] Efthymia Kasimati
Hacking the Urbe
AS LONDON has evolved over the centuries, one constant has been its title of being the ‘financial capital of the world’. Especially the past two decades saw a rapid ascent in the power and influence of the city’s financial sector, governed by a number of important factors, The consequence of these factors is that London acquired an impressive level of global reach and influence in terms of finance industry; it consolidated its position as the world’s Financial Centre and emerged as a genuinely ‘Global City’.
In this broader process of ‘neoliberal urbanisation’, the city is experiencing a ‘vertical urban turn’, undergoing massive vertical, aboveground transformations, growing and densifying in terms of dramatic scale and speed.
Taking into account the abovementioned context, the project builds on the idea of ‘hacking’ as a creative tool in order to re-code and re-program the spatial networks in the City. What makes hacking so interesting and powerful, is this mix of temporariness
and sharpness, a solution not designed to prevail in time, but left open for others too. In this light, drawing also on the idea of ‘place hacking’, the project begins to explore the subterranean world of infrastructure, ranging from the extended sewage system to the abandoned bunkers and tube stations, moving on to seek possible alternative ways to appropriate the City from below. Concluding, drawing on this ‘vertical urban turn’, the project tries on the one hand to enhance our vertical thinking of contemporary cities that exceeds the above ground realm and boundaries. At the same time, it envisions alternative ways of human and machine interaction in the era of artificial intelligence and automation, rethinking new forms of open
access and control. This kind of understanding of the relationship between the city and technology suggests also new modes of design and challenges new ways of space appropriation that involve both human and non-human actors.