{"id":8678,"date":"2020-05-15T10:27:41","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T10:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=8678"},"modified":"2020-06-02T07:10:50","modified_gmt":"2020-06-02T07:10:50","slug":"central-urban-space-as-a-hybrid-common-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-14-infrastructuring-the-commons-today-when-sts-meets-ict\/peer-reviewed-papers\/central-urban-space-as-a-hybrid-common-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"Central urban space as a hybrid common infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Ileana Apostol and Panayotis Antoniadis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Download as PDF<\/a><\/p>\n

Abstract<\/h2>\n

In this paper we document and reflect on an ongoing co-design process of a new urban space, by the name L200, located in a very central and precious location in Zurich. L200 has the characteristics of an urban node at the confluence of many networks, a hub like railway stations provide these days but at a different spatial scale, acting as a much needed infrastructure for various commoning activities, among others. L200 is designed as a hybrid space, hosting a DIY digital platform, which is being co-created as a commons itself through a long-term participatory process and provides a building block for an alternative, bottom-up, vision to the \u201csmart city\u201d. In terms of participatory design, we experiment with, and advocate for, a structured laissez-faire<\/em> methodology that frames both the physical and digital space as interconnected common infrastructures that the members of the association are free to use \u201cas if it was their own\u201d for limited periods of time. This participation through action<\/em> approach allows for needs, ideas, and interventions to manifest naturally without any pressure or expectations. This means that the corresponding research for producing tools, methodologies, and designs need to advance in a slower than usual pace, and integrate many perspectives that use different languages and have different priorities. This slow design process allows for various forms of peer learning to occur. The paper lays out the overall L200 project in its full complexity through the dual role assumed by the authors, as researchers and activists, highlighting specific decisions, actions, and methodologies that contribute to the on-going research on infrastructuring the commons.<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n

L200<\/a> is a new collective space in Zurich\u2019s city center, initiated and run by an association of citizens without external support. Its design, governance, and implementation have many interesting characteristics for researchers in various disciplines like urban studies, political theory, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, computer science, Science and Technology Studies, and related specific research fields like the right to the city, Participatory Design, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, digital commons, self-organization, and more.<\/p>\n

L200 has the potential to serve as an exemplary showcase of three different ways of bringing together the concepts of commons and infrastructure. First, L200 space is designed and governed as a common infrastructure<\/strong>. It is an urban space conceived across both physical and digital domains, whose cost, use, and operation are shared between the members of the L200 association. Second, since its first days of operation L200 has been infrastructuring the commons<\/strong>, having become the home of various local initiatives promoting urban commons solutions to key areas like food, housing, sustainability, digital platforms, and more. The space has the potential to provide high visibility to a wider audience and to facilitate exchanges, cooperation, and synergies between initiatives that, although very like minded and prone to networking and working across networks, often stay isolated being kept too busy with their own struggles. Third, L200 is conceived from the beginning as a prototype that is meant to be easily replicated; this is why its name refers to its physical location and not any other \u201cbrand\u201d. So, L200 is developing a model of a collective central space, through a continuous participatory design process. The question is then not only how to design L200 but how to easily create such places in other locations as well. How to devise a way of infrastructuring a common infrastructure (L200)<\/strong>, an easily replicable model of a shared, hybrid, central, and self-organized urban space.<\/p>\n

All the above threads follow individual paths with their own temporalities, which cross from time to time, along three main processes that play a key role in the development of the space, and in shaping its identity over time. These threads are governance, community, and peer learning.<\/p>\n

The governance<\/strong> process is very close to the participatory design of a common infrastructure, a common space, containing the high-level values of sharing and co-existence (e.g., Stavridis, 2016), and the more concrete rules for the everyday management of the space. More specifically, the aim is to follow core commoning principles, being based on fairness, transparency, openness, diversity, and other key values protecting the L200 space and its identity from being dominated by certain actors. L200 space is used by a wide variety of actors, including small shops, neighbourhood associations, individuals, activist groups, start-ups, media organizations, and commoning initiatives in various fields. By claiming their right to centrality (Lefebvre 1991) –to be present and have a voice in the political life of the city– these members associate as a non-profit organization to rent the space at its market price. But they treat it internally as a commons, increasing the density of use and sharing its time-space in creative ways. This sharing strategy not only reduces dramatically the cost for each individual member, but at the same time makes available, again at low individual cost, a pool of resources necessary to run the space successfully and take advantage of its particularly high visibility.<\/p>\n

The manifestation of community<\/strong> refers to a wider process of building collective awareness, and of co-producing a common identity, agreed upon between the association\u2019s members and the wider neighbourhood. The infrastructuring aspect of this process concerns the support of commoning initiatives through 1) the design of physical and digital space in a way to facilitate their activities, 2) the provision of common services like the maintenance of opening hours, the establishment of a wide audience in social media, creative use of the street windows, etc., 3) the creation of an ecosystem through, for example, regular open gatherings on specific topics like sustainability and digital self-defense, workshops, cooking groups, and more, that allow for synergies between complementary projects but most importantly for contact with a wider population with diverse views and perspectives.<\/p>\n

The peer learning<\/strong> process is structured through regular gatherings and documentation of design choices, collective activities and experiments. It goes beyond the abstraction of knowledge produced through the governance and community processes, and includes guidelines for the acquisition of places like L200, know-how on financial sustainability without dependencies, communication and marketing strategies, and more. Of course, the guidelines stress that local contexts are of critical importance. The long-term goal is to prototype them as such to be useful across-the-board in order to provide local groups and communities with an entry point on how they can focus on the use value rather than on the exchange value of space, and transform an urban location into a hybrid common infrastructure rented at its market price. That means that the successful application of the prototype does not depend on subsidies, neither from local authorities nor from global digital platforms. This way, it may be easier to scale through replication, and to reach a more mainstream audience, than today’s exceptional urban and digital commoning projects.<\/p>\n

Note that all these processes regarding the L200 space are still on-going and their starting points and final objectives differ among the actors involved. For some of them, L200 was conceived as a means to fight neighborhood gentrification. Thus L200 would provide an affordable location supporting small local shops and businesses, which are incrementally closed down or assimilated by big commercial players. For others, L200 is part of a wider claim for the right to the city and the right to centrality, providing a central venue with good visibility, for promoting commoning practices as alternatives to the market and the state. From a global perspective, L200 is seen also as a laboratory for developing sustainable models for addressing the urgent climate crisis, reflected by the high number of initiatives on sustainability, food waste, cooperative housing, active today in L200. Finally, community places that promote social cohesion, conviviality, and collective awareness –a necessary ingredient for a democratic society– are disappearing when are most needed, in times when urban demographics change rapidly and become more and more diverse, while digitization leads to more alienation and polarization. It is not difficult to see that all these narratives and perspectives are actually overlapping and depend on each other.<\/p>\n

In this paper we present the perspective of NetHood Zurich<\/a>, a transdisciplinary research organization co-founded by the authors, which has contributed during the last six years in research and action around the concept of the right to the hybrid city (Antoniadis and Apostol, 2014) and the organic Internet (Antoniadis, 2018). Using the terminology of participatory design, we argue that a requirement for sustainability is the infrastructuring approach within the hybrid condition of space.<\/p>\n

For NetHood, L200 is a building block toward a viable counter-proposal to the \u201csmart city\u201d narrative, in which digital infrastructures and platforms are not landed from above, but are planted from below through face-to-face democratic and participatory processes. NetHood advocates that the so much praised decentralization of the Internet cannot be only at the technical level; free software, self-hosting platforms and federation protocols, blockchain-based systems, and the like, are not enough for that to happen. Democratically digital platforms need to be literally grounded in physical locations, which can host face-to-face participatory practices around the design and governance of the tools mediating the interactions of local communities (Antoniadis, 2016). Instead of a distant facilitator of commoning practices –often too distant, since many \u201csharing\u201d platforms located typically in Silicon Valley orchestrate collective processes that take place far away– the digital domain needs to be approached as an integral part of the commoning practice itself, also subject to decision making, governance, and citizen participation in design.<\/p>\n

NetHood became a key actor in L200, through a long trajectory of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary EU projects [1]<\/a>, whose outcomes have led to some of the ideas that influenced the design of L200 and its development as a hybrid space. The experience gained through these projects and the active participation of NetHood in the International Network of Urban Research and Action (INURA) [2]<\/a> have challenged the researcher\u2019s position of its members, who shifted over time closer to action. Indeed, it is through this role that the authors got involved in different local groups who co-founded L200, and serve today as the general manager and vice-president of the board. [3]<\/a><\/p>\n

The ability to engage in an action research project without external dependencies [4]<\/a> is a particularly luxurious situation both for the researcher and activist roles, which allows to experiment with a structured laissez-faire<\/em> methodology of participatory design. This does not pose any constraints on the use of the space, except from a strict rule of non-domination of its identity as explained in Section 3. L200 offers thus a hybrid platform for citizens to express their needs and ideas, not through answering an online questionnaire or raising their hands in a public meeting, but through a direct action of their choice. Then the main role of the researcher(s) in action is to be reflective (refer to Section 5) and to analyze the process informed by different fields and disciplines, toward the generation of knowledge for the infrastructuring of the space itself. As space coordinator, the main role of the activist is to make sure that the members of the association feel the space as their own, free to use it as they wish, through carefully designed tools, rules, and processes, both physical and digital, for supporting the commoning activities that take place on \u201ctop\u201d of the common infrastructure, L200\u2019s physical and digital space.
The paper reflects on this dual position of its authors, trying to bring together both dimensions, also in the writing style, combining the theoretical and practical aspects in the narrative. First, we identify three important theoretical concepts, infrastructuring, commoning, and transdisciplinarity explaining how the L200 project contributes to the related research work. We then describe important details and design choices structured around the three ongoing processes identified above, governance, community, and learning.<\/p>\n

Key theoretical elements and related work<\/h2>\n

L200 being a transdisciplinary project draws inspiration and relates to a wide body of literature from various fields. The authors\u2019 \u201chome\u201d disciplines –urban studies and computer science– meet around the concepts of hybrid, digital and physical, space and the \u201cright to the hybrid city\u201d (Antoniadis & Apostol, 2014), which bring together research on the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996) and on community networks (Schuler, 1996). In both domains the role of participation in design is central, as well as the \u201cinfrastructural\u201d way of thinking, since the attention is brought to the critical importance of the city\u2019s social and digital infrastructures that are mostly owned and operated by big corporations. [5]<\/a><\/p>\n

On infrastructuring<\/h3>\n

Promoting structures and institutions that treat urban infrastructures as a commons, designed and managed through democratic processes, leads naturally to the field of infrastructuring in Participatory Design (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Star & Bowker, 2002; Karasti, 2014) The authors became familiar with this literature through their interdisciplinary collaborations in the context of the MAZI project (Antoniadis & Apostol, 2018). From the various forms of infrastructuring in Participatory Design analyzed by Karasti (2014), our approach has elements that resonate with the infrastructuring strategies analyzed by Ehn (2008), like design-in-use, DIY toolkits, configuring, design patterns, protocolling, or LEGO block approach. Such strategies empower the users of technologies to appropriate them along the way, according to their actual needs that might change over time, but also according to the overall environment before the design interventions. The term infrastructure highlights exactly the fact that \u201cDesign comes \u2018from somewhere\u2019 as opposed to being \u2018from nowhere\u2019\u201d (Hakken et al, 2016, p.184).<\/p>\n

In this context, the question of scale appears as critical (Lyle et al., 2018) and infrastructuring by itself, as defined in the STS literature, is only part of the solution. The flexibility of a software platform to be later configured and adapted to different situations, for example, need to be combined with the capability to fork (e.g., to copy the code to create variations of it) and replicate (e.g., to self-host), if scale is to be achieved without powerful, even if well-intended, intermediaries (Antoniadis, 2018). This design culture promoting scaling through replication instead of growth resonates with the \u201cDesign Global Manufacture Local\u201d concept introduced by Kostakis et al (2015).<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most important novelty of our approach compared to action research for infrastructuring in Participatory Design like the Urban Mediator by Botero & Saad-Sulonen (2010) or the Smart Campus by Teli et al. (2015), among many others, is that we bring forward the critical role of the physical urban space, as a host of digital platforms that are built as, and promote the commons. It is not only that physical space is the container of the necessary face-to-face interactions for the collective awareness, deliberation, and decision-making processes that participatory design is based upon. Physical space, mostly when we refer to central locations in the city, is also a very powerful information infrastructure itself, and at present such central locations are more and more dominated by corporate actors.<\/p>\n

In a recent attempt to define the term \u2018urban living labs\u2019 and establish their characteristics, from related literature and a large sample of sustainable urban innovation projects in Amsterdam, Steen & van Bueren (2017) note that it refers to \u201ca variety of local experimental projects of a participatory nature. It is often used interchangeably with the terms \u201ctesting ground\u201d, \u201chatchery\u201d, \u201cincubator\u201d, \u201cmaking space\u201d, \u201ctestbed\u201d, \u201chub\u201d, \u201ccity laboratory\u201d, \u201curban lab\u201d, or \u201cfield lab\u201d\u201d (p.22).<\/p>\n

In this sense, one could see L200 as an example of a \u201cliving lab,\u201d where the space per se becomes subject to design and infrastructuring: its rules and governance, its interior and exterior design, the digital platforms that support its operation, its corporate identity, the content placed on the sidewalk interface like on its windows etc.<\/p>\n

Bj\u00f6rgvinsson, E. et al. (2012) provide a very interesting case study of \u201cagonistic participatory design\u201d in a network of living labs in Sweden, the Malm\u00f6 Living Labs (MLL). Interestingly, they bring forward the political dimension and role that living labs can play, promoting agonistic narratives (Kioupkiolis, 2019). The notion of public design (e.g., Teli et al., 2015; Bassetti et al., 2019) addressing the \u201cmatters of concern\u201d (DiSalvo et al., 2014) and \u201cDesign for friction\u201d (Korn & Voida, 2015) are also relevant in this context. Our approach addresses issues of representation, agonism, and matters of concern, which in general require long decision-making and conflict resolution processes, by enabling unmediated access to the L200 space: a common hybrid information infrastructure.<\/p>\n

In other words, at L200, we take a step back and simply \u201cdesign for contact\u201d, before deliberation, conflict or friction. The reason is that in our experience the most challenging task today is to create truly \u201cin-between\u201d spaces, which \u201cmight mean creating spaces of encounter between identities instead of spaces characteristic of specific identities.\u201d (Stavridis, 2016, p. 239). In a way we promote a \u201chybrid community activity\u201d, which \u201ccan be accomplished using pre-existing resources that are not tied to any particular research agenda, and the role these can then play in enabling and facilitating thriving local communities.\u201d as Mosconi et al. (2017) describe the way citizens of Bologna appropriated the Facebook platform to facilitate neighbourhood interactions; what became the Social Street movement. In our case though, the goal is to design both the corresponding physical and digital space as a commons, trying to defend citizens from the manipulative power of global corporate platforms like Facebook (Antoniadis, 2018).<\/p>\n

On commoning<\/h3>\n

But what means infrastructuring for the commons and as a commons? What type of commoning processes need to be facilitated by design (technological or not) and in what ways? [6]<\/a> One could say that the well-known commoning principles by Elinor Ostrom (1990) provide already a powerful “infrastructuring” approach toward commoning, offering a flexible framework that could be used as a basis for the self-management of common-pool resources.<\/p>\n

Within a vision of sustainability, spatial development may become an ongoing process of co-design supported by urban policies that value and promote diversity. By acknowledging that \u201cthe city is where social differences collide and become productive\u201d (Schmid, 2006, p.172), ideally such urban processes will include a multitude of actors, also in partnership with the state or the public sector, who will cooperate to infrastructure the urban commons.<\/p>\n

There is a constantly growing literature on the (urban) commons as the third way to engage and emancipate citizens beyond the state and the market (e.g., Ramos, 2016; Borch & Kornberger, 2016; Dellenbaugh et al., 2015). Numerous inspiring projects on housing, energy, digital platforms, around the world are helping to build a knowledge base on best practices, typologies etc. But no matter which is the common resource or process, commoning always requires structuring a process that implies deliberations, participatory practices, negotiations, conflict resolution and reaching consent.<\/p>\n

For all these to take place, a common space is required. Open and inclusive spaces are themselves among the most important infrastructures for commoning activities. At the same time, when an urban space is produced and used in common, instruments for cooperation must be devised to enable its operation. It was out of these needs, among others, that the L200 project came into being.<\/p>\n

In terms of specifics of shaping spaces as commons, Stavridis (2016) notes that the co-creation process determines the rules about how this sharing is to be performed. Likewise, to keep the space common \u201cthere must be developed forms of contestation and agreement about its use and character which explicitly prevent any accumulation of power. Especially, any accumulation of situated, space-bound power\u201d (Stavridis, 2016, p.106). On the emancipatory role of common spaces that may be considered as \u2018in-between\u2019, Stavridis [7]<\/a> makes use of Georg Simmel (1997) dialectical relation between connection and separation. [8]<\/a><\/p>\n

In this sense, L200 is an exemplary case of a \u201ccommon space\u201d as defined by Stavridis (2016), certainly only one among many. There are also many examples of urban self-managed spaces, others focusing mostly on culture like Magacin in Belgrade [9]<\/a> or Pogon in Zagreb (\u017duvela, 2018) and in Rojc Community Centre in Pula (Toma\u0161evi\u0107, 2018); others on politics, like La Casa Invisible in Malaga [10]<\/a>, L\u2019Asilo in Napoli (Cozzolino, 2018) or Navarinou Park in Athens (Stavridis, 2016), and others on sustainability like the R-Urban project in Paris (Petrescu et al., 2016) and Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin (Sobral, 2018). The main difference between L200 and these grassroots initiatives is that many of these spaces are very large (some of them over 2,000 sqm) or they are located in the city outskirts (e.g., R-Urban), and are used without or very small rent, either through a direct collaboration with the City (e.g., a public-civic partnership in the case of Pogon) or through permission (e.g., using the law on Civic use in the case of L\u2019Asilo). Moreover, none of these initiatives is engaged explicitly with digital sovereignty as an integral part of the space\u2019s governance and identity.<\/p>\n

In more detail, what makes L200 special compared to other similar collective spaces, is a few important characteristics and key design choices, which are rare to find in such projects, especially when combined all together:<\/p>\n