The Anatomy of Commoning-based Predictive Infrastructures

The one-day workshop with a concluding panel discussion on the succeeding day brings together academics, designers and artists from the field of citizen sensing, civic interaction design, feminist urban data practices, and commoning to critically engage with and speculate about predictive technologies in just and regenerative urban futures.

As a case, the workshop focuses on a speculative infrastructure for distributing rescued food and commoning as a socio-economic practice in which communities that produce and manage resources are the same communities that benefit from those resources. We invite participants to edit and annotate a map outlining the anatomy of this infrastructure. The map locates socio-technics and design principles that constitute the seemingly small but decisive differences between commoning-based and extractivist approaches to algorithmic urban futures. The aim of the workshop is to scrutinise the infrastructural proposal and subsequently contribute to more robust and persuasive imaginaries of care- and commoning-based urban futures.

The workshop is combined with a public panel discussion on Saturday at HackThePromise Festival, where some of the workshop participants will discuss the most intriguing or controversial insights and questions that emerged from the workshop.