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Published in:
Transparency Imperatives: Results and Frontiers of Social Science Research Read chapter Read first chapter

2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Sunlight City: Exploring the Politics of Urban Transparency Activism

Author : Maren Heibges

Published in: Der Transparenz-Imperativ

Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

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Abstract

This chapter discusses urban transparency activism and the digital applications it produces. Based on exploratory ethnographic data, I ask how this local activism orders the social and ‘does politics’. I conclude that an aesthetic approach to local urban politics is enacted, where ‘making things visible’ becomes a political end as well as a ludic joy in itself. Secondly, I show how urban space is transformed into informational space. In doing ‘frontier-work’, activists annex urban space to a socio-technical form which is typical for so-called Cyberculture: a recursive community constantly concerned with the maintenance of its own grounds of association. Conventional notions of political protest, participation and political representation are not present in activist practices of mapping and programming. Instead, and thirdly, activism articulates a techno-centric image of social order. This imagery of the social is characterized by a paradoxical relationship to the state’s institutions and a transformation of urban participation into urban usability.

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previous chapter Grenzen der Transparenz – Geheimhaltung in demokratischen Systemen
next chapter Polizeiliche Transparenzpraktiken und die Flexibilität einer Norm im organisatorischen Alltag
Footnotes
1
I am immensely grateful to the editors of this book and the participants of the accompanying workshop, particularly Vincent August, for their constructive advice on my arguments in this chapter. I would also like to thank the transparency activists who lend me their time and let me participate in their activities.
 
2
Ironically, this volume’s editor, political theorist Vincent August, argues that Foucault’s initial account of the Panopticon’s and transparency’s inventor (well, in a sense) Jeremy Bentham was, in part, quite limited (Rzepka 2013).
 
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Metadata
Title
Sunlight City: Exploring the Politics of Urban Transparency Activism
Author
Maren Heibges
Copyright Year
2019
Book
Der Transparenz-Imperativ

Print ISBN: 978-3-658-22293-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-658-22294-9

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22294-9_5