Urban Hacking, as a book, tracks numerous strategies, including
Augmented Reality interventions, billboard alteration, graffiti, tags,
and greening, as a kind of “programmable literature”, made possible
through open sourcing of code and the artistic re-use of place. From
this admixture, we have the foundations of an urbanism made by and for
“the people” which, at the same time as interrogating the fabric of
spaces overtaken, outsourced, managed and mined, hales radical, digital
cultures, and opens surfaces for dialogue with urban environments from
within a post-colonial critique. The book is an attempt, I would argue,
to identify strategies for the problem spaces which might be creatively
detourned, delimited, or re-designed. It articulates the problem of
politicized urban art as requiring a much-needed re-invention of itself,
on toothier terms.
But, the book is, also, self-consciously, historical. There is a
chapter on Lenin’s vision for the center of Lviv, for instance, which
shows how he re-engineered the monuments and central squares of that
city.