ABSTRACT
Much of the work of forcing deregulation, privatization, and new fiscal and monetary policies on governments actually took place in the corporate sector of global cities rather than in legislatures and parliaments. Powerful actors can remake cities in their image. But cities talk back as a type of open-source urbanism. There are diverse versions of this at local and immediate levels: do-it-yourself urbanism, tactical urbanism, urban guerilla tactics, urban acupuncture, urban prototyping. Neighborhood actors seen as marginal by authorities—a child or homeless person or grandmother—can bring their knowledge of place straight into the codified knowledge of the center. Decentralized currencies should enable the return of significant components of our modern economies back into our cities and communities. And if these currencies are digitized, local initiatives and innovations can get replicated across a region or a country or a continent’s localities. The open-source approach resonates with what cities are at ground-level, as does the platform approach.
