I have focused my last two posts on how urban planning can and should help create a welcoming city. Perhaps beyond ensuring affordable housing and temporary shelter options, or designing recreational public areas appealing to residents of all socioeconomic classes, we need to rethink the process by which we produce urban space. After all, a city will not feel welcoming to all sectors if those designing it are only representative of a single demographic. This highlights the need to create new pathways influencing political decision-making and governance. In his article, “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism,”1 Alberto Corsín Jiménez presents a revolutionary idea about how to do this: through open-source/open-access infrastructure. Jiménez notes that open prototypes are at their core a symbol of what the production of cities should look like: they are an ongoing discussion, trial, and revision, and a process anyone can participate in. Allowing open-source infrastructure is, in Jiménez’s words, an “investigation into the very nature of the city as an open educational frontier.” By implementing open-source infrastructure in New York City or Portland, we would transform the way the city is produced by bringing previously disregarded voices, speaking about how they envision the future of their city, to the forefront of the conversation.
One of the first days of class, we reflected on whether a resident could feel as important to the production of New York as they could to the production of Bowdoin. We came to the conclusion: “We, the students, are Bowdoin, we make Bowdoin; in New York City, each person is only one peon among millions.” Upon further reflection, I disagree. The identity of New York City is no less dependent on the wonderful contributions of its myriad residents than is the identity of Bowdoin dependent on the contributions of its students.
Humans of New York founder Brandon Stanton has, through photography, found a way to highlight the paramount contribution of the individual New Yorker to the vibrant mosaic of the New York identity. He would not have been successful without the open-access online platform, Facebook.
Bowdoin feels more inclusive because the way it is structured allow students to play a bigger role in deciding how the college functions. Some would argue New York has too many residents to allow each to play a bigger decision-making role, but with the advent of technology, this is no longer the case. In cities including Portland and New York, with an open-access internet-based platform as well as more powerful and efficient ways of screening data (a la “How to Read a Million Books” seminar), crowdsourcing for infrastructure is not only a viable way to incorporate city voices in a completely new way, but also economically favorable.
Open-access infrastructure platforms would echo AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure.2 Given the Mirriam-Webster definition of the term infrastructure, “the basic equipment and structures; the system of public works; the resources (as personnel, buildings, or equipment)… needed for a country, region, or organization to function properly,”3 Simone goes one step further by thinking about ordinary residents––innovate, determined and unyielding––as the “resources” needed for the city to survive. In Portland, implementing Jiménez’s open-access platform would amplify residents’ ability to shape the culture and experience of the city, while simultaneously saving the city from paying over-charged design fees and patents. I strongly advocate that Portland implement open-access infrastructure; doing so would be a step towards simultaneously creating a Smart City and one concerned with the common good.
References Cited
1 Jiménez, Alberto Corsín. 2014. “The Right to Infrastructure: a Prototype for Open Source Urbanism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 342–62.
2 Simone, AbdulMaliq. 2014 [2004]. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 241–46. New York: Routledge.
3 “Infrastructure.” Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Accessed October 6, 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infrastructure.