Coding alternative modes of governance: learning from experimental “peer
to peer cities”
Alison Powell
London School of Economics and Political Science
Prepared for the “Code and the City” workshop – NUI Maynooth
24 July 2014
Introduction
Cities are by nature mediated, as well as mediating. As complex human-built
environments, they filter experience and present many different ways for
communication to take place. Urban communication scholars have often talked
about the inherent dynamism of urban spaces where different people come
together and where new ideas and interpretations are born. Urban scholars have
started to consider this as a recombination of the technological and social
aspects of the city.
In the past twenty years this recombination has focused on the coded city, from
Gibson’s ‘city of bits’ to Kitchin and Dodge’s (2006) assessment of coded passage
points underpinning passage through and presence in space. The techno-city and
its new infrastructures do perhaps create alternative or novel modes of
expression or different ways of living together with others. These modes may,
however, have much to do with how new communication technologies are
imagined as fitting into existing cities, both by the institutional actors who are
often the object of political economic analyses, and by other city dwellers,
including artists and activists. New technologies are sites of social construction
and cultural debate, so their impact in cities should be considered not only in
terms of dominant or alternative modes of construction or use of communication
technologies, but in terms of the semiotic, affective and relational process of
meaning construction, which now must take place within cities equipped with
coded infrastructure that ambiently records information within the city but also
information about its individual residents.
Undoubtedly, coded infrastructure impacts city life, in ways that can largely be
unconscious. Yet coded infrastructures do not necessarily have to be imposed on
the city from outside of it. They may emerge from within the city, and by doing so
demonstrate the connection between different ways of considering the urban.
Coding can be sense-making, and building coded infrastructures, especially
outside of large institutions, can in turn require sense making – including
decisions about how the code-work should fit into a particular urban space, and
how it ought to be managed and sustained. This paper develops a perspective on
peer-to-peer engagements on the coded city by analyzing how coding practice
(in terms of creating infrastructure) is related to the development of other social
and cultural ‘codes’ that propose alternative ways of integrating technology into
space. It argues that peer-to-peer coded cities are most significant because they
suggest alternative ways of governing the interface between technology, the
social, and the spatial.
To develop this perspective, we need to look at the dominant visions of how
‘smart’ or ‘coded’ cities are imagined as being governed - through reinforcement
of top-down governance via centralized control, or through facilitation of
bottom-up engagement in urban space and politics through the use of
information, sensors, and data processing as part of citizen engagement. We then
position these imaginings historically, considering how ICT projects of the past
were imagined as providing opportunities for collaborative development and
governance of particular urban spaces, in opposition to top-down efforts at
urban communication governance taking place at the same time. We will see
how these past projects, which often focused on providing access to
communication, link with a ‘politics of the minor’ (Feenberg, 2011; Osborne and
Rose, 1999) that introduces more nuanced ways that individuals, through the
development of technologies, can contribute to effective governance.
This perspective draws from a broad definition of governance as "all processes of
governing, whether undertaken by a government, market or network, whether
over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization or territory and whether
through laws, norms, power or language” (Bevir, 2013). In this case, the object of
such governance is the city – or more precisely the code-mediated city - and the
governance itself consists of a set of norms, frameworks or decisions that
configure how ICTs ought to be integrated into city space and life. While a
narrow view of civic governance might focus on the role of a formal organization
(the government), our broader view of governance here is concerned with the
role of informal organizations, including loose, peer-to-peer organizations who
use peer-to-peer methods to develop coded infrastructures that they establish in
city space.
Peer-to-Peer Urban technology visions
A number of different ICT-enabled projects have tried to establish a ‘peer to peer
urbanism’ that would counteract or disrupt more conventional efforts to bring
ICTs to cities. This alternative imagination of ICTs has developed simultaneously
through discourses, practices and architectures. The outcomes of the attempts at
creating peer-to-peer urbanism suggest that ICT-enabled cities need meaningful
governance of the integration of technologies into cities – which encompasses
how projects are conceived and discussed (discourse), how they are established,
in space (practice), and how they are built (architecture). These three elements
are all simultaneously co-produced, and all of them have impact on the ability of
people who live in cities to speak and be heard. We use the framework of coproduction to investigate how peer to peer urbanism, as represented by
community wireless networks, establishes alternative governance modes
through discourse, practice and architecture. This analysis will help to construct
a framework for good governance than can then be applied to future coded or
‘smart’ cities.
The top-down ‘smart city’
Smart cities” projects have emerged over the past decade in an effort to apply
technology to improving the urban experience. Most smart cities projects have
involved, to one extent or another, the integration of networked communication
or data transmission devices into urban spaces. Dodge and Kitchin (2006)
describe the ways that these types of projects layer software-controlled spaces
over physical and geographic spaces, providing interfaces and data processing
layers that become embedded into the experience of particular kinds of spaces.
These software elements sort and control the people and things that move
through spaces, altering their relationships. Smart cities projects promise to use
the software layer to positively augment the experience of urban space, for
example by using mobile apps to provide location-specific information. The
software-controlled layer is often perceived as being able to provide information
and calculation that are of broad social benefit: a 2012 collection edited by Foth
et al identifies a number of social and political projects that employ software
layers including community sensing (Salim 2012) and data visualization (Moere
and Hill 2012).
“Smart” systems are intended to augment urban spaces: as Aurigi and De Cindio
write, “the gradual development of an enriched media environment, ubiquitous
computing, mobile and wireless communication technologies, as well as the
Internet as a non-extraordinary part of our everyday lives, are changing the ways
people use cities and live in them” (p. 1, 2008). These augmentations include
blending mediated data with built spaces, presenting media on large screens or
on personal devices, and providing ways to visualize movements, decisions, and
contextual information.
These technological layers create data that is available for use by various actors
in various ways. Smart cities are seen on one hand as being able to enact more
efficient control of the complex systems of cities by creating more data for
cybernetic control systems (Townsend, 2013) and on the other hand, to improve
the day to day decision-making of individuals through ‘street computing’ that
allows everyday users to take advantage of otherwise-hidden computational
interfaces within the city. This is achieved by building or gaining access to sensor
networks, tapping into publicly collected open data, or employing APIs to
capture, use and remix data collected by mobile phone companies. This apparent
opposition between smart cities facilitating better cybernetic management and
smart cities providing more opportunities for citizens to improve their own
experience seems straightforward, but both the dominant paradigm of centrally
governed cities AND the alternative paradigm of emergent citizen use of datacollecting ICTs depend on strong interlinkages with commercial infrastructure
and processing power.
One of the main questions at issue when considering this ‘augmentation’ is the
way in which particular values are put forth within proposals for one
technological strategy or another. The ethic of ‘street computing’ is on one level
participatory and empowering, as it seeks a way for individuals to make sense
out of data flows, but on another level it is deterministic and celebratory – like
most authors in this area, Moere and Hill (2012) introduce their perspective on
the opportunities afforded by smart cities with a description of technological
possibility: “recent advances in sensing devices, wireless network connectivity,
and display hardware have made the ultimate vision of ubiquitous computing
finally possible, in which the ‘computer’ as we know it becomes embedded in
physical objects and surfaces of everyday life” (p. 28). Not only does this framing
imply a technologically-driven vision for the city, it also implies some linear,
forward motion towards that vision, which is evoked as not just being desirable
but inevitable.
Dominant perspectives: technology and cities as neutral
Dominant smart cities rhetoric and smart city projects imply a neutral, if not
straightforwardly positive role for technology within the city. The city
augmented by technology is normally considered as an improved city, with
improvements not only in the efficiency of service provision created as a result
of data collection architectures, but without much of the messiness and
dynamism that scholars of the urban normally associate with city life. This
means that smart cities are often commercial cities or cities of privatized
technology, when vendors deploy particular systems into urban spaces. In his
critique of the dominant imaginary of smart cities, architect and urban scholar
Adam Greenfield suggests that one problem with smart cities narratives is that
they seem to refer to cities as if they were not real, actual, different places. He
writes, "“the canonical smart city almost has to be staged in any-space-whatever;
only by proposing to install generic technologies on generic landscapes in a
generic future can advocates avoid running afoul of the knotty complexities that
crop up immediately any time actual technologies are deployed in actual places”
(Greenfield, 2013). Greenfield notes how the discourses used to describe smart
city projects by their promoters encode an hypothesis that the contemporary
urban environment is too difficult for ordinary, unaided human beings to
understand and manage, and that some higher power (in this case, information
processing and computer-aided decision making) need to step in. One of the
consequences of this hypothesis sit that the dominant vision for smart cities
smart cities imagines them as as ‘clean’ and ‘legal’ places where data calculation
systems pre-empt disruptive or illegal activity. Data collection is perceived as
operating in much the same way that centralized surveillance systems do: as a
system of discipline in which the fear of being observed drives exemplary
behavior. Idealizing cities as entities that can be abstracted and rationalized has
a long history that encompasses but extends past modernity. Expectations of
both abstraction and rationality characterized imaginings of the 19th century city
– the industrial, well-ruled and orderly city – as the model for government, even
while representations of the time returned over and over to the actual city’s
problematic immanence; its ungovernability, crime, destitution, vice, gambling
and drunkenness (Foucault 1984; Osborne and Rose 1999). But because there is
more than one way of imagining the data city, and more than one way of
structuring the systems that are part of it, there are alternative visions for smart
cities too – much as there were alternative visions for previous visions of
exemplary city life.
Competing imaginaries of governance: a coded city of ‘minor politics’
Some of these alternative visions concern the ability for citizens to leverage
features of new technologies to experience urban life differently. Urbanist
Anthony Townsend suggests that the technologies behind the smart city,
including the sensor networks and mobile technologies (especially including
smart phones) have made it possible for “a motely assortment of activists,
entrepreneurs, and civic hackers” to tinker with technology as a means to
“amplify and accelerate the natural sociability of city life” (2013, p. 9). Instead of
centrally controlling data collection, Townsend focuses on how these people
imagine a different kind of data city – one that builds mechanisms to share data
and creates interfaces that allow different perceptions and navigations of city
spaces. This creates a new kind of ‘lattice’ that interconnects local space and
technology. This architectural layer forms one element of peer to peer urbanism.
Moving beyond Townsend’s concerns about the technological capacities of the
alternative smart city, we can also consider the ways that peer to peer
alternatives engage in alternative organizational practices, and promote
different kinds of spatial engagement. These two additional aspects are essential
components of an expanded concept of peer-to-peer urban governance.
Peer produced or grassroots ICT projects suggest that instead of a centralized
ICT-enabled city with established top-down governance, it might be possible to
develop a peer-to-peer smart city featuring heterarchical organizational
practices and distributed modes of architecture. These notions about the role of
organization and indeed architectural choices are part of an alternative way of
imagining city governance as occurring in other ways than simply through
institutional, top-down approaches. This perspective resonates with the notion
of a ‘minor politics’ of urbanism (Osborne and Rose, 1999) that stresses the local
and contingent nature of urban experience, a point of view echoed by Thrift
(2013) who notes that although information practices are presented as if they
were generalizable, they are in fact very local and contingent. The real variation
of experiences at the point where technology, organization, culture and place
combine suggests that the small, messy or unsustainable interventions enacted
through peer-to-peer urban projects like community technology projects
networks have significant value in rethinking ideas of governance in the era of
the smart city. In the code-saturated space of imagining occupied by the smart
city, the peer-to-peer dynamics first developed as methods of creating and
commenting code appear again as frameworks for broader governance work.
Peer-to-peer: from coding practice to governance norm?
Peer to peer refers to a relational dynamic based on equipotency between
members. Originally referring to a modification of client-server information
processing architecture that partitions processing work between a number of
interlinked nodes, the concept has been extended into social and economic fields,
reflecting the influence of ideas about society's networked organization (Castells,
2001). The success of peer-to-peer music sharing platform Napster focused
attention on the social and economic influences of peer-to-peer practices,
including the influence of distributing digital goods across a network of
individuals. 'Peer-to-peer” came to describe the relational dynamics at work in
distributed networks within organizations or communities of practice. Yochai
Benkler (2006) develops the concepts of commons-based peer production to
refer to the economic and social impacts of collaborative and contributory
projects including free and open-source software production and the
development of Wikipedia. He claims that the network form and peer production
practices create a networked information economy where freely given peer-topeer contributions also contribute to markets. Such a networked information
economy supports individual autonomy and other liberal values. In the wake of
Benkler's work, theoretical and empirical critiques have focused on the
relationship between peer-to-peer processes, economic and organizational shifts
and the value systems of liberal and neo-liberal capitalist systems. Peer-to-peer
contribution systems have been perceived as more democratic than other
systems of production for software code or knowledge in general, as
oppositional to contemporary neoliberal information orders, or as disruptive to
existing intellectual property regimes. They have also been imagined as
intrinsically linked with a minor or “micro-politics”. Andrew Feenberg writes,
Micro-politics is distinguished from such large scale interventions as
elections and revolutions that aim at state power. It may lack long term
organization and is often focused on a single issue and sometimes a single
location. Nevertheless, the effects of micro-politics are not trivial.
Democratic interventions are translated into new regulations, new
designs, even in some cases the abandonment of technologies. They give
rise to new technical codes both for particular types of artifacts and for
whole technological domains.(Feenberg, 2011, NP).
Feenberg stresses the notion that politics provide codes, not only through social
organizing principles and regulations, but also through designs for technology –
modes of coding space. Thus, the alternative imaginings of peer to peer urbanism
are re-coding civic space by adding a technological layer, but they are also
instituting alternative and emergent social, cultural and organization codes of
practice that are co-produced along with their coded interventions.
This promises a different locus of control for the coded informational layers of
the city that might include a kind of opposition to centralized data collection and
control. This is due to the way that social and organizational codes are coproduced along with the technical codes that manage flows of information in the
city. Developing from the modes of sharing that are an intrinsic part of writing
code within free and open source software (F/OSS) production, ideas and
processes are imagined as collective productions that highlight particular ways
of being in space. The rapid expansion of F/OS modes of production outside of
software is one aspect of this, typified by the expansion of open or peer produced
engagements with city space beyond the realm of code (Corsin-Jimanez, 2014).
Second, collaboration on producing code is paralleled by collaboration on the
coded environment required to produce that code in the first place – what Kelty
(2006) refers to as the ‘recursive’ aspect of F/OS production. This techno-social
mode of thinking valorizes the development of architectures for coded
information delivery in cities – for example, self-organizing networks as
opposed to centralized networks. Finally, peer to peer culture implies a different
mode of organization and legitimation, based not on institutional power but on
collective authority as negotiated among participants. This alternative legitimacy
is built into the structure and practice of networked collaboration as it has
emerged from coding work. It involves the generation of collectively produced
knowledge, and the legitimation of ideas by communities of practice who work
together on topics of their expertise.
The way that these three aspects: F/OS modes of peer production expanding
from coding to other practices, the use of coded architecture to illustrate
alternatives, and the experimentation with alternative social modes of
organization to re-code civic life are illustrated through an assessment of the
history and legacy of community wireless networks.
History and Legacy of CWNs – peer to peer coded urbanism
Community wireless networks (CWNs), based on local experimentation with
wireless radio technology, emerged around the world in the years following the
drop in price of radio communication equipment that used unlicensed or licenseexempt radio, which could be re-configured using free and open source software
(F/OSS). These projects perfectly exemplify the interplay of culture, organization
and technical production that characterize the potential importance of peer-topeer coded cities and their minor politics of governance. This section reviews the
particular genesis of CWNs and reflects on the ways that, a decade later, their
legacy might be perceived – particularly in the knowledge that few of these ‘peer
produced’ projects remained sustainable.
In 2002, the first ‘free information advocates’ met in Berlin to talk about free
information infrastructures. In 2003 Friefunk (“free radio”) was founded with
the goal of providing internet connectivity across underserved areas of East
Berlin. In the intervening decade hundreds or perhaps thousands of these
community based networks were set up, bringing together people interested in
experimenting with open wireless technologies and those interested in
improving civic life. Hundreds of these networks were established around the
world, and shared over the internet on maps or directories also maintained by
volunteers. In general, projects embraced one of two general architectural forms:
either using wireless as a means of broadcasting a single point of internet access,
or as a means of establishing meshed networks that interlinked individual
wireless routing devices. Like other alternative imaginations of technologyenhanced cities, they influenced dominant imaginations, in some cases inspiring
the development of municipal scale wireless connectivity projects.
These projects espoused a range of aims and goals that included providing
internet access to underserved areas or using wireless networks as a mechanism
for social engagement, but also focused on F/OSS development, open hardware
(in a nascent form), re-use and repurposing of computer technology, and public
engagement with communication policy issues. CWNs depended on some form of
community contribution, of expertise, time, money, hardware or software
(Abdelaal and Ali, 2008). A research paper from the New America Foundation
features a dozen networks considered to illustrate best practice (Forlano et al,
2011). This, along with other work (Powell, 2008; Shaffer, 2009; Gaved and
Mulholland 2008; Antoniadis et al 2012) illustrates the range of ways that CWNs
experimented with peer to peer urbanism through cultures of peer production
derived from F/OSS development strategies, by positioning alternative coded
architectures as alternative spatial engagements, and through the promise of
alternative legitimacy through different modes of social engagement. In this
brief review we consider the links between the codes of F/OSS development and
the imaginations of space, revealing how alternative imaginings of the coded city
establish often very different engagements with local space. This sets the scene
for a valorization of unstable, temporary and contingent encodings of urban
space, which permit us to think about governance of the smart city as a form of
politics of the minor.
Peer to peer production and modes of participation
CWN projects depended on the existence of F/OSS software that permitted
modification of wireless equipment in order to effectively run their projects. This
software was collaboratively developed by an international community of
practice who shared the code online, and by local activists who subsequently
modified it and (not always legally) installed it on to wireless networking
hardware. The different options for F/OSS wireless networking software also
linked with the different ways that activists imagined that CWNs could fit into
their city neighbourhoods – from the expansion of convivial ‘third places’
imagined by participants at Montreal’s Ile Sans Fil (ISF) network to the
alternative media and file-sharing network constructed using high-powered
wireless technology by the members of the Athens Metropolitan Wireless
Network (AMWN). The AMWN was built by friends who lived around the hills in
the centre of Athens, and used antennas mounted on the tops of apartment
buildings to link together these private spaces in a network that never connected
to the public internet. In contrast to the provision of internet in existing public
spaces imagined by ISF, this presents a highly private view of the city. Other
networks imagined wireless connectivity as a form of media (in Lawrence,
Kansas the CWN launched a local online newspaper) or security infrastructure
(in Lompoc, California the network managers installed virtual networks so police
and fire services could use it for their work, and also provided temporary service
to contractors at the local air base and prison).
Social organization and legitimacy
This range of ways that F/OSS was imagined to be able to augment space acts a
reminder that the social dynamics within peer to peer processes are also
variable. Peer-to-peer processes are often described as being inherently more
democratic than other modes of engagement. Bauwens (2008, 2009) is a key
proponent of this perspective, arguing that distributed forms of engagement like
peer-to-peer provide more opportunities for people to participate, because they
are often structured to invite many levels of participation. Within various forms
of F/OSS there are significant organizational hierarchies, often linked to the
availability of time and resources to complete projects or coordinate distant
participation as required (Mansell and Berdou 2008). In the expansion of coded
work into city space, some parallels with the dynamics of peer to peer
production online emerge. Although some CWNs (especially smaller projects
instigated by one or two enthusiasts) developed their technical projects using
hierarchies where one person was ultimately responsible for the quality of the
code, other strategies were required in order to maintain interest and
participation in projects over the long term, as well as to secure the roll out and
maintenance of WiFi infrastructure. These included distributed, heterarchical
models of organization, characterized around strong participation in developing
either the physical wireless access network or the social, organizational and
cultural capital also required to make it ‘go live.’
The different strategies required to institute alternative coded infrastructures
into space can be understood in terms of what Haythornthwaite (2009)
identifies as the two forms of peer production. The hierarchical management of
the production of code, as well as the instigation of many local projects to
augment streets or neighbourhoods with WiFi is a form of “heavyweight peer
production” characterized by “strong tie affiliation with community members
and community purpose, enacted through internally-negotiated peer reviewed
contribution”. In contrast, ‘lightweight peer production’ functions “by weak-tie
attachment to a common purpose, enacted through authority-determined, rulebased contribution” (p. 1) – and this kind of participation was well represented
in CWN projects through early CWN projects that invited people to list their open
WiFi hotspots (see XXX for example), but also in projects that required only
technical interconnection to become ‘part of the project.’ Early on at Berlin’s
Freifunk network, participation in the network was both limited to and required
the construction of a mesh network node – although in the end this was such a
difficult task that for many it transformed into a form of ‘heavyweight peer
production’. Regardless, the instigators of the Freifunk network were clear that
anyone who was willing to build a network node was welcome to participate in
the construction of the network: “Freifunk is just a concept, it is not an entity,”
reported one of the network’s founders (Forlano et al, 2009). Each node host
owns an equal portion of the network, making the network the property of its
participants. This architectural heterarchy persisted for some time in this project
in its earliest days Freifunk had no traffic peering arrangement with any other
network operator, and it took almost a decade for the activist network to
negotiate with the city to expand access to free wireless.
In contrast, other CWNs employed more structured and hierarchical
relationships. This happened both through the choices made about project
architecture and through organizational structures. In rural Denmark, the
Djursland project secured anchors. Finally, some CWNs moved from grassroots
organizational forms to hybrid organizational forms including communityuniversity partnerships (Vienna, Austria), municipally-owned networks
(Fredericton, NB, Wireless Philadelphia), and municipal-community
partnerships (Montreal, QC) (Tapia et al, 2009). These structural relationships
encoded methods of collaboration between very different kinds of entities, with
the shared project of extending the communicational benefits of coded
infrastructure to all.
Architectural choices
In addition to showing the variable ways that F/OS might augment urban space,
and the intersecting modes through which legitimacy is constructed for CWN
proponents, CWNs also demonstrated the extension of code into space by
attempting to politicize architectural choices. These political positionings
worked with the architectural possibilities available for setting up wireless
networks. Two architectural forms – broadcast and distributed networks –
combined with the social structures that developed around CWNs established
frameworks for an alternative diagramming of the city. Broadcast networks
require internet connectivity at a central point that is of high enough quality to
transmit a signal to receivers in the area, bearing in mind that the radio
spectrum used by community wireless networks is of low quality. In contrast a
distributed network architecture in which wireless routers are linked together,
each sharing a portion of their connectivity, suggests a reciprocal, peer-to-peer
diagram of civic relationships. These different modes may also imply different
relationships between people within the city, and even different conceptual
frames for civic relations. Osborne and Rose (1999) use the concept of
‘diagramming’ to suggest the relationship between space and government of
cities. They write, “the vicious immanence of the city is a never-ending
incitement to projects of government. Such projects seek to capture the forces
immanent in the city, to identify them, order them, intensify some and weaken
others, to retain the viability of the socialising forces immanent to urban
agglomeration whilst civilising their antagonisms” (738).
We could take community networks as literal ‘diagrams’ of cities, which propose
alternative spatial tendencies by establishing nodes and links that connect
different kinds of spaces, some physical and some virtual. We could also take
them as invitations to employ the different ‘diagramming’ modes as proxies for
understanding the social and relational aspects of local city governance. A
‘broadcast lilypad city’ might valorize centres of exchange such as local
community centres (used by many CWNs as installation points for wireless
broadcast antennae) and more aggregate modes of social relation in keeping
with the traditions of social mapping derived from the Chicago School of
Sociology in the 1930s. These modes focus on a knowable city that can be
mapped and whose community institutions. In contrast a ‘distributed, peer-topeer city’ might valorize more informal social links not based around cultural
institutions, or the creation of hybrid, commercial/community ‘third spaces’
(Oldenberg, 1996).
Spatial engagements: a coded city’s alternative diagrams
CWNs reiterate how such diagramming of the city can be a sociotechnical project
explicitly linking new infrastructures to existing social and spatial practice. For
CWN researchers, network architecture is seen to both stand in for and reflect
alternative social and spatial relations, which in some cases is valorized above
the network architecture being technically robust. In other words, CWNs and
their interventions created a way for advocates to talk about and explore what
their cities meant to them. For example, in his report on the Consume network
active in London in the early 2000s, Julian Priest argued that attempts to map the
location of Consume network nodes was actually more successful as a proxy for
measuring the location of geeks living in London, since geeky participants in the
Consume project were likely to have wireless network nodes on their personal
property. Unfortunately for the ‘success’ of Consume, the distribution of geeks
was concentrated in particular areas of the city, and outside of these areas their
density was simply not high enough to create a functioning wireless network
(Priest, 2004). In analyzing Adelaide Wireless in southern Australia, Jungnickel
(2012) focused on the messiness of aims to create a meshed network linking
individual residences, which by necessity included ad hoc and informal meetings
of wireless network creators in backyards and on rooftops. These meetings were
social and in addition to helping to create wireless networks they were also
places where people could tinker with other technologies (like bicycles).
Outcomes and Implications
The proliferation of CWNs as code-based civic interventions in particular urban
spaces was short lived. By some measures, the vast majority of these projects
failed: in 2005 individuals added thousands of wireless nodes to collaborative
online maps like nodeDB or the Wikipedia page for community wireless
networks. At present only a fraction of these networks are still in operation. This
lack of sustainability also suggests some lessons for a valorization of governance
within ‘minor politics’. CWNs were not intended to be ‘temporary autonomous
zones’ (see Bey); in some ways they were all attempts at building infrastructures
reposing differentially on social or technical aspects of their formation. Some
legacies are thus social: the network of people who initially set up Serbia’s
BGWireless network found that their monthly picnic hackathons were more
valuable than a functioning network and have carried on holding the parties
without supporting the code. Other legacies are technical: CWNs actively
contributed to the development of free and open software and hardware,
including gateway software like WiFiDog, and open-source protocol software for
creating autonomous self-organized networks, like the Mesh Potato software,
and the CONSUME mesh routing protocols that allow easy configuration of
servers. These collective efforts go quite some distance to establishing an
information commons: “the ‘open and free’ availability of the raw material;
participatory ‘processing’; and commons oriented output” (Bauwens, 2009 p.
122). Since these products of peer produced efforts remain in commons, they
maintain the possibility of peer produced F/OSS code production. Finally, the
many projects that achieved some sustainability through encoding new social
relationships among techno-enthusiasts, small businesses, city governments and
NGOs demonstrated the most interesting consequence of the CWN version of
peer to peer urbanism: locally specific modes of integrating technology into the
minor politics of the urban. The fact that it is impossible to generalize about the
outcomes of any of these efforts is actually quite important. They succeeded in
producing technology in space, as engagement with space, in ways that were
appropriate to the spaces they were in, for as long as it made sense to be there.
Some remain, as parts of infrastructure and others leave traces in the cultural
and social spaces of cities, and in the codes that can still be used to augment
them.
Conclusion
This paper contrasts two modes of combining citizenship, technology and space,
the ‘hierarchical city’ espoused in many ‘Smart city’ technology projects, and the
‘peer to peer’ city suggested by establishing four modal scales that, in
combination, can help to describe the different elements that comprise such
socio-technical systems. Community wireless networks give us a range of
alternative means of organizing access to communications. The ‘coding’ work
they do is not only so much in the coded architectures they produce but in the
kinds of social or cultural codes that align with the way the F/OSS architecture is
adopted and the way that the wireless architecture is imagined as being
integrated into the city.
The extent to which projects oriented around the smart city can produce forms
of ‘technological citizenship’ depends on how citizenship, space and technology
are combined. Although it is tempting to automatically oppose dominant and
alternative visions of cities, history has not always worked that way. The
alternatives of the peer to peer city have also influenced the dominant
imaginaries, at least in the way they have organized infrastructures and
positioned discourses that facilitate the development – temporary, contingent –
of coded city projects that can generate alternative modes of imagining a smart
city.
There are, as always, a few caveats to this assessment. CWNs offered only an
alternative to technological citizenship based around consumption of ICT
connectivity. Another way of looking at the partnerships created as these
networks became more sustainable would be as an appropriation of the
alternative into the dominant (Cammaerts, 2012). Indeed the very notion of
citizenship has now been challenged by the dominant neoliberal political order.
Therefore, there is a compelling question about whether peer to peer forms of
production can help to address this political lack.
This appears to pose a particular problem for the emerging forms of encoding
that are bound in to the contemporary city. Is the nature of the ‘smartness’ is
changing? In either imagination, the augmentation of the city through technology
is now based less on the opportunity to be ‘connected’ (as it was for CWN
projects) and more on the production and processing of data via information
networks.
As the technological city shifts from being a place where new innovations are
discussed as creating new ways to listen and speak, and towards a place where
subjects produce and clients consume data, the alternative modes of technosocial governance sketched here will need to be better developed. In the coming
re-iteration of the smart city, who writes the codes? How open will they be and
in what way? How will data be able to speak for people’s interest? The
architectures of WiFi and the augmentations of space they promised have given
way to architectures of management of other kinds of information. As these
develop and mature we need to examine how they, too, might be governed – and
what techno-social alternatives remain.
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