Participatory platform inviting citizens to identify and 'hack' inaccessible urban spaces — mapping them as sites of latent potential and proposing collaborative interventions.
Concept
Space Hackers explores the politics of urban access. Participants annotate the city, marking spaces that feel closed, underused, or unjustly inaccessible — fenced-off lots, abandoned buildings, infrastructural voids. Through an app/interface these sites are collected into a "map of potentiality," and participants propose interventions: temporary events, performances, spatial hacks.
The focus is less on executing every intervention than on cultivating a mentality: the city as something that can be actively rewritten — urban fabric as a medium for collaborative authorship, where data and imagination become tools of spatial justice. The work anticipates the later interest in layered realities: here, the overlay is social and cartographic rather than digital.
Credits & context
- Project & design: Oguz Emre Bal · Team: Merve Guzel, Merve Tokgoz, Mustafa Koroglu
- Developed in parallel with early architectural R&D at UN10 / Unio Design
- Medium: participatory installation; urban mapping app/interface; graphic documentation
Acquisition
Documentation package (maps, prints, wall graphics, video of participatory events); optionally the app/interface code and a concept license for re-activation in new cities — museums may re-stage it as a locally specific, socially engaged program.