Urban Co-Creation: Envisioning New Digital Tools for Activism and Experimentation in the City Marian D ¨ ork Department of Computer Science University of Calgary mdoerk@ucalgary.ca David Monteyne Faculty of Environmental Design University of Calgary d.monteyne@ucalgary.ca ABSTRACT With this paper we seek to shed more light on the use of digital tools in support of urban forms of civic participation. We outline a multi-faceted approach to urban issues and re- view different approaches to activism in the city. Based on this, we sketch out new opportunities for design and inven- tion in support of a range of participatory practices in the city. While urban developments and planning processes may seem to be determined by abstract forces such as markets and bureaucracy, we argue that citizen activists can—and al- ready do—get actively and concretely engaged in shaping their cities. We conceptualize these grassroots transforma- tions of spatial, material, and social aspects of a city as ur- ban co-creation involving—to borrow terms from comput- ing culture—deciphering, debugging, and hacking the city. FROM COMPLEXITIES TO URBAN CO-CREATION The city has been for centuries an important locale of cul- tural creation, economic exchange, and political interaction. Mumford conceptualized the city as a “collection of pri- mary groups and purposive associations” (p.93), and a ‘the- ater of social action’ with city inhabitants as its protago- nists [14]. Today’s cities can be seen as strategic places for both the dominant forces of capitalist globalization, but also for ‘counter-geographies’ of local citizen networks us- ing digital tools [18]. To better understand the complexity of cities as social and spatial phenomena, it can be helpful to draw from actor-network theory as a sociology of associ- ations [12]. In urban actor networks, humans (e.g., citizens, planners, developers) and artifacts (e.g., streets, buildings, benches) interact with each other in complex, contingent ways. This means that neither physical characteristics nor social relations have ultimately determining influence on the other. Instead, humans and artifacts influence each other by being part of actor networks. Following actor-network the- ory, the concept of place can be framed as an entanglement of people and things associated by meanings and memories. For example, a particular actor network of a specific place like a park or community centre becomes itself an actor that is part of the neighbourhood and city. Phenomena often as- sociated with place, such as memory and identity, resemble linkages between citizens and the locations they value. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0267-8/11/05...$5.00. We can also make sense of urban space as the superimpo- sition of many different dimensions. Sandalack and Nico- lai [17] proposed a layer framework that organizes urban as- pects along permanence including land, public realm, built form, program, and fashion. While street layouts are more constant, there is a degree of freedom when designing build- ings. After construction, there is flexibility in the activities that are carried out in buildings and in the aesthetic mod- ification of details. This framework could be used to de- scribe different levels of intervention, which is particularly useful in times when market forces and complicated regu- lation seem to make change in cities unlikely. Mapping ur- ban relations along levels of permanence helps to understand how people create, use, and transform the physical charac- teristics of a city. Inspired by the layer framework proposed by Sandalack and Nicolai, we propose a multi-faceted ap- proach that arranges urban issues according to different hu- man needs. For the discussion in this paper, we focus on sustainability, place, community, and participation as partic- ularly significant urban facets. Each of these facets can be seen as significant subsystems or actor networks of the city that are interconnected and in parts interdependent. Following the notion of the city as actor networks, we do not think that complex entanglements of people and places, i.e., cities, are designable objects. Design often implies a holistic vision of the object to be designed, but there are al- ways multiple, partial views of streets, neighbourhoods, and cities. Furthermore, a city is also its population, whose be- haviour cannot be prescribed by planners or designers. How- ever, if we see urban planning and design as a participatory process involving many different actors (e.g., citizens, de- velopers, architects, planners), we think there is great poten- tial for change from different perspectives at multiple lev- els. For such a multi-player process, the term urban co- creation is possibly more appropriate than urban design. In- stead of creating all-embracing master plans as results of conventional urban design and planning procedures, urban co-creation strives for a mosaic of transformations requiring loosening control and spreading power. The idea behind ur- ban co-creation is to bridge the gap between professionals and laypeople and allow for intervention, participation, and engagement regardless of social or professional background of participants. The situated knowledge of those inhabiting urban environments should have at least the same level of au- thority as the experience of professionals. The role of urban designers, city employees, and other professionals in urban co-creation can be stimulating new ideas, facilitating partic- ipation, and providing advice to citizen activists. 1