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City Making / City Hacking at MacroCity
IFTF is proud to have co-sponsored the MacroCity Conference, a two-day event developed by 2014 IFTF Fellow Tim Hwang with his Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory project and the National Day of Civic Hacking. MacroCity (May 30–31) gave participants a chance to lift the veil on the urban infrastructure that is all around us but is often hidden due to its very ubiquity in our lives.
The conference kicked-off with a day of field trips around the San Francisco Bay Area to give attendees a first-hand view of past, present, and future infrastructure projects, followed by an evening reception at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). The conference continued on day two at the historic Brava Theater with a series of expert talks and panels to that allowed participants to delve deeply into the world of urban infrastructure.
MacroCity delved into a range of topics as broad as infrastructure itself—everything from the rehabilitation plans for toxic waste sites around San Francisco Bay, to the current state of California’s water reservoirs, to the ways urban environments will be forced to adapt to the increasing demands of climate change. What’s more, the conference presented attendees with a challenge to think about where current infrastructure isn’t meeting our modern urban needs and how we can hack our civic sectors.
In her talk on Evolving Data-Driven Urbanism, IFTF’s own Bettina Warburg challenged attendees to think about urban and civic challenges in the context of the Do-It-Yourself Maker Movement. Attendees were then asked to use what they had learned and contribute their ideas to improve their communities to the MakerCities Game.
How would you improve your city? How can the DIY movement affect urban development? Share your ideas now at Makercities.net!
This post is part of a series related to IFTF's Maker Cities, an early prototype of an online multimedia conversation platform for global makers. Our Technology Horizons program developed this lightweight crowdsourcing site to ask the public, “How will your city be a Maker City in 2025?” Built with repurposed open-source software from Ushahidi originally designed for post-disaster mapping, Maker Cities is the first such platform to quickly capture makers’ on-the-ground signals and future visions for more participatory Maker Cities. Now is your chance to play the game! Contact Alex Goldman ([email protected]) for more information.