The city is where digital infrastructures meet everyday life. As algorithms increasingly shape every facet of urban life, an old question gains new urgency: who owns the city?
From sensors to apps, urban systems record our presence, turning the city into a surveillance machine. Our shared spaces are supposedly becoming “smart” – but at what cost?
Maybe the true intelligence of cities lies in its inhabitants, in their resilience, and in the endless capacity of city dwellers to create spaces of care, encounter and wonder.
WHY THIS PROJECT
What is “digital infrastructure”?
If you are reading these lines, you are already interacting with a piece of it: smartphones and computers are terminals of a vast, planet-wide communication network that includes servers, data centers, submarine cables, power plants and much more. Here, we will analyze digital infrastructure through six “realms”, each representing a specific aspect of planetary digital networks: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User.
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THE CITY REALM
“City” is where the powerful feedback mechanisms between society and infrastructure become spectacularly visible.
In the digital age, the urban space is traversed by countless mobile devices, thus leading to the rise of the “smart city” – a marketing concept that seduced countless local administrations with the promise of efficiency and modernity.
But beneath the shiny surface, inequalities grow, tensions rise, and the fight for affordable housing, tolerance and public spaces becomes visible in the “self-made city” – where citizens reclaim their home and make it their own. Here you are invited to explore an atlas of allegorical symbols, each representing a specific aspect of this realm and its competing models.
Above - Smart City
Extraction
The Grid / The Labyrinth
The city grid appears rational, neutral, almost benevolent: a clean geometry imposed upon space. Yet beneath its orderly lines lies an older logic.
By partitioning land into neatly measurable parcels, the grid transforms territory into assets, streets into flows of capital, neighbourhoods into investment opportunities. The grid promises legibility, but what it really organises is value. Its opposite is the labyrinth – a topology that resists control, refusing straight lines and predictable outcomes.
Surveillance
CCTV / The Panopticon
Suspended on poles and facades, camera lenses gleam like beastly eyes. They watch without resting, accumulating images the way past empires collected maps.
Each camera is a fragment of the panopticon, the Enlightenment utopia/dystopia of total visibility. In Jeremy Bentham’s design, power no longer needed chains or guards; it needed only the threat of being seen. Today’s city is built as an expanded version of that architecture: the panopticon is no longer a metaphor – it is municipal infrastructure.
Hubris / Ambition
Skyscraper / Tower of Babel
Piercing the skyline, the skyscraper is the vertical emblem of financial ambition: a monument to the belief that wealth must rise above everything else.
Its shimmering glass surfaces reflect the hubris of an economy that measures success by height. Like the ancient Tower of Babel, the modern skyscraper signals humanity’s desire to climb beyond earthly limits. But towers are more fragile than they appear, requiring enormous amounts of resources, labour, and energy to build and maintain.
Gentrification
Latte Art
Foamed milk shaped into hearts, rosettas, tulips: a delicate choreography above your morning espresso. Innocent at first glance, latte art has become an urban omen.
The cup becomes a barometer of displacement: where latte art blooms, long-time residents often vanish. Ironically, its aesthetic of care – the careful pour, the perfect swirl – masks a broader indifference to the social fabric it disrupts. Gentrification rarely announces itself loudly; sometimes, it arrives in a ceramic mug.
Enclosure
Enclosed Garden
From medieval courtyards to Renaissance horti conclusi, the enclosed garden has long symbolized protection: a pocket of order carved out from the wild.
From medieval cloisters to gated communities, the enclosed garden reflects the politics of exclusion. What’s nurtured inside thrives at the cost of what’s kept out. It’s beauty bounded by borders: the illusion of harmony achieved through separation.
Delocalisation
Airport as City / City as Airport
The airport is the true threshold of the contemporary metropolis: a detached node that functions as both portal and destination.
With their shopping arcades, lounges, food courts, and signage systems, airport terminals mimic urban life. Conversely, many cities now perform like airports: zones of transit, optimized for speed and consumption, where identity dissolves into logistics. Delocalisation is not disappearance, but a new mode of urbanity.
Below - Self-Made City
Dream
Solarpunk
Imagine a world where technology and ecology intertwine, not in conflict but in collaboration: welcome to the Solarpunk future.
Solarpunk is a speculative rebellion against dystopian inevitability, proposing aesthetics of abundance, repair, and decentralisation. In an age obsessed with collapse, to insist on hope becomes radical, even confrontational. It is punk because it believes that, to live differently, we must first learn to dream differently.
Survive
Informal Settlements
Bidonvilles, shantytowns, favelas, slums – different words describing the same reality: for more than a billion people, these improvised urban spaces are simply home.
Informal settlements arise where planning collapses under inequality and laws privilege property over life. Yet they are also laboratories of resilience, dense with improvisation, mutual aid, and survival tactics unfathomable to master-planned urbanism. These communities are not “disorder”; they are the unacknowledged backbone of the global metropolis.
Evolve
Pigeon
Once messengers, companions, and domesticated workers, pigeons were abandoned when their labour was replaced by wires, machines, and networks.
Yet they adapted. They claimed the ledges, eaves, and attics of cities around the world. A species that refuses disappearance, learning to live among concrete and exhaust. Despised by some, invisible to many, pigeons remind us of the long entanglement between humans and animals – and of the futures that emerge when species evolve alongside our ruins.
Reclaim
Trifolium
Called weeds, dismissed as nuisances, yet they are the first to return to abandoned lots and neglected sidewalks.
Trifolium is among the first plants to reclaim spaces left behind by speculation, neglect, or collapse. It grows without permission, enriching soil and repairing what the city has damaged. In its stubborn persistence lies a quiet politics: reclamation not through force, but through presence. Where weeds flourish, the earth begins to breathe again.
Occupy
Squat Symbol
The radical A inside the circle, the lightning bolt, the crooked house: symbols of a practice as old as property itself.
To occupy is to resist the emptiness created by speculation, filling it instead with life. It is a tactic born from necessity and sharpened into critique: an assertion that shelter is a right, not a luxury. Squatting creates autonomous zones within the city: places where alternative cultures, mutual support, and political imagination find room to grow.
Reuse / Upcycle
Hermit Crab
Hermit crabs do not build their own homes; they borrow what others have discarded – whether animal or human, organic or plastic.
They are the unintended mascots of the Anthropocene, creatures adapting to our wasteful habits by transforming rubbish into shelter. Their behaviour is a lesson in reuse: nothing is worthless if it can be lived in again. In a world drowning in excess, the hermit crab’s resourcefulness becomes a quiet manifesto against disposability.
THE (W)HOLE REPOSITORY
Congratulations on making it this far!
In the section below, you will find a carefully curated list of online resources that aim to study, critique, and improve the vast world of digital infrastructures, with a special focus on the topics presented in this realm. If you like this section, please make sure to visit the main page of our repository, where you will find many more links from all the other realms of the (W)HOLE project.
Art
Post Growth – Art-research toolkit for degrowth futures
Sustainability
Circular Economies
Environmental Justice
Summary
Interactive tools, videos, and workshop materials to rethink growth. Explore energy, labor, and planetary limits; use cards and exercises to spark classroom and community discussions.
An evolving artistic and research platform exploring interspecies communication and shared ecologies, proposing care and empathy as foundations for multispecies coexistence.
A visual essay on the internet’s hidden geography-cables, hubs, borders, flows. Clear diagrams and short texts show how online space has politics, power, and real-world limits.
Deploys a Wi-Fi hotspot sculpture that routes all traffic through the Tor network and acts as a Tor relay, reclaiming museum internet as an anonymity tool.
Artist research exploring geology as computation: soil, minerals, and ground signals as circuits and memory. Essays, workshops, and experiments on “earth-as-medium” electronics.
Queer Futurism: Denizens of Liminality – Queer Nature
Intersectionality
Decolonialism
Sustainability
Summary
A poetic exploration of queer futurism and ecological kinship, this project reimagines survival and belonging beyond binaries, blending decolonial ecology with speculative storytelling.
Ritual Inhabitual is an art and research collective creating performances, installations, and workshops centered on embodied care and feminist resistance to productivity culture.
The Toaster Project – Making a toaster from scratch
Resources
Exploitation
Alternatives
Summary
Designer Thomas Thwaites mines, smelts, and molds parts to build a £4.99 toaster from raw materials-exposing hidden supply chains, industrial complexity, and the limits of DIY.
Essays and links on the politics of technological stacks-cables, data centers, logistics, standards-showing how power flows through infrastructure and how people can study and contest it.
How to See Infrastructure – A Guide for Seven Billion Primates (Rhizome)
Transparency
Exploitation
Knowledge
Summary
An easy field guide to spot the internet around you-cables, antennas, manholes, data centers-and how policy and power shape them. Read the city and make the invisible visible.
Subtopia’s 2009 essay on seaborne “labor camps”: offshore worker housing/prisons as mobile zones of control, tying logistics, migration, and speculative urbanism.
MOLD explores the relationship between food systems, design, and ecology. It investigates how technology and culture shape what we eat, proposing regenerative and socially just futures for nourishment and the planet.
Wild Domesticity is an Are.na editorial exploring how digital and domestic spaces overlap in contemporary life. Through reflections on design, labor, and intimacy, it reimagines home as an ecological and collaborative infrastructure rather than a private, isolated space.
Scomodo is a vibrant community born in Rome in 2016, shaping spaces for expression, participation and growth for new generations. Through print, events and local activism they cultivate independent, conscious change.
Berlin Plattform – Social-ecological urban development hub
Participation
Community
Care
Summary
A community-led cultural network in Berlin supporting artists and grassroots organisations through shared resources, collaborative programming, and accessible infrastructures for collective cultural work.
Data Workers Network is a collective that advocates for the rights of those producing, labeling, and cleaning data for AI systems. It exposes the hidden labor behind automation and builds alliances for fair conditions and collective refusal of exploitative tech economies.
Open Slum – Collaborative Platform for Urban Inclusion
Participation
Justice
Commons
Summary
Open Slum is a collaborative platform promoting visibility and agency for marginalized urban communities. It combines mapping, open data, and participatory tools to document informal settlements and advocate for social and spatial justice.
A collective that explores the politics of (collective) reading, focusing on embodied, decolonial, and situated knowledge practices that challenge institutional canons.
FCCWLA – Fairchild Cooperative Community Workshop Los Angeles
Commons
Participation
Repair
Summary
The Fairchild Cooperative Community Workshop (FCCWLA) is a member-run makerspace supporting collective fabrication, mutual aid, and open-source learning. It provides shared tools and knowledge for sustainable production, fostering community-based innovation and repair culture.
A community platform and residency network supporting creative exchange, mutual aid, and collaboration among artists, technologists, and activists in New York City.
A community-based cooperative developing open infrastructures for shared food production and digital commons. Choy Commons blends ecological farming with collective governance.
Habitat.care is a collective platform experimenting with digital and physical infrastructures of care. It connects artists, designers, and researchers to build collaborative environments that prioritize accessibility, empathy, and social interdependence.
A platform for multispecies collaboration, Interspecies.io connects artists, scientists, and activists to rethink coexistence, communication, and shared habitats between human and nonhuman life.
Tierra Común is a network of scholars, activists, and technologists working toward data justice from a Global South perspective. It challenges data colonialism and promotes community-led governance of data as a shared resource grounded in local autonomy and solidarity.
Step-by-step actions to relocalize: strengthen local food, start co-ops, change policy, and run campaigns. Toolkits, examples, and resources to organize in your community.
The Activist Checklist is an open educational tool that helps individuals and collectives organize, mobilize, and act effectively. It offers practical strategies for activism, digital security, and sustainable engagement in social movements.
An essay exploring how artistic research expands ways of knowing, connecting creative practice with critical inquiry, collaboration, and social engagement.
UCLA Center for the Study of Women – Toolkit for Feminist Research Justice
Intersectionality
Knowledge
Justice
Summary
A toolkit advancing feminist research justice, offering frameworks and resources for equitable, community-centered methodologies across academia and activism.
Created by Data for Black Lives, this educational resource unpacks the structural links between capitalism, racism, and data extraction. It exposes how algorithmic systems reproduce inequality while offering frameworks for data justice and collective liberation.
A collaborative program where designers and technologists experiment with building and repairing their own tools and networks, exploring hands-on, community-driven alternatives to centralized infrastructures.
Part of the Is Our Economy Fair? project, this resource exposes the historical ties between Wall Street, slavery, and racial capitalism. It provides educational tools to understand how economic infrastructures reproduce systemic injustice and colonial legacies.
A platform offering resources and workshops to help cultural workers navigate precarity, focusing on collective strategies for survival, solidarity, and structural change
A practical guide offering methods, exercises, and frameworks for building trust, empathy, and effective collaboration in collective and creative projects.
An educational platform offering resources on ecological design, regenerative economies, and community-based approaches to sustainability and social transformation.
La Scuola Open Source is a Bari-based cooperative fostering social and technological innovation through education, culture, and research, blending a hackerspace and FabLab for collaborative learning and creation.
An immersive art exhibition in one of the largest bunkers in the Netherlands, addressing technology, ecology and control through site-specific installations.
Baumhaus is a Bologna-based cooperative driven by social justice, accessibility and cultural quality. They place youth and marginalised voices at the centre, imagining new formats of knowledge, creativity and work.
Rete delle Case del Quartiere is a community network of neighbourhood hubs in Italy. They bring together residents, associations and public institutions to co-create inclusive spaces for social, cultural and civic life.
Nòva is an Italian social-promotion association born in 2020. They focus on transforming the former Caserma Passalacqua in Novara into a youth hub and cultural production centre, with spaces for study, creativity, music, maker labs and civic participation.
Documents a non-profit cultural association in Cantabria publishing a magazine and running itinerant workshops linking arts, agro-ecology, and community learning.
Vaacha is a laboratory for contemporary ethnic, anthropological, and artistic studies from Adivasi perspectives, serving as India’s largest resource centre for Adivasi culture.
