Urban Hacking Machine

Lo-Fi, Wired Next Fest, from 30th May to 1st June 2013, Giardini di Porta Venezia, Milan.

The city with its systems of bureaucracy and planning demonstrated to be too much strict and close to indulge and follow the continuous and fast changes which characterise the era we live in. The real estate speculation, in Italy, appears as the main character in determine the shape of the cities. It buys, in the form of planning fees, the acceptance of the public administrations, no more able to sustain economically the urban transformation. Milan, pushed by the Expo 2015 fever, progressively sold the city to the speculators which in the last years deeply defaced some urban spheres. The municipality doesn’t oppose any resistance to the commercialization of the city, fallen silent by the tasty planning fees. In the urban areas under transformation, for instance City Life, the failure of the new urban planning methods and of the globalization, which exports branded skyscrapers as if they were junk food, is extremely visible and tangible. The economic crisis and the low sales rate of luxury apartments denied the construction of two skyscrapers, designed by Libeskind and Hadid. These facts suggest us to work with new models and for guidance of the urban transformation, no more for profit. They have to restart considering every citizen. The proliferation of free and open movements for the popular emancipation with the aim of organizing new systems, disconnected from the ones we already know, shows the will of taking our world back to a human dimension. The maker movement and the open source culture low the standards and make everything more suitable for all the users, preparing the ground for a new archaic world, for a Primitive Future where the man won’t be anymore passive to the structures which surround him. The project fights the oppressive and perverse urban planning, in order to bring back to the hands of the citizens the city and its project, with a popular, ignorant and bottom-up knowledge. The Urban Hacking Machine is a device dispensing techniques and tools for a new parasite urbanism. A machine to hack the metropolis and prepare the man for the Primitive Future and its new architecture, with poor materials and techniques for all.

Curated by Elian Stefa
Ph. Parasite 2.0