Coding alternative modes of governance: learning from experimental “peer to peer cities”

Alison PowellLondon School of Economics and Political SciencePrepared for the “Code and the City” workshop – NUI Maynooth24 July 2014

IntroductionCities 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 co-production 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 data-collecting 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 neutralDominant 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-to-peer 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 co-produced 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 license-exempt 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-to-peer 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 technology-enhanced 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 legitimacyThis 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, rule-based 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 community-university 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 choicesIn 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-to-peer 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 ImplicationsThe 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.

ConclusionThis 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 techno-social 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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