The Spaces, Mobilities and Soundings of Coding. The Programmable City Working Paper 18

Despite its influences on urban spaces, software has largely remained a black-box for critical inspection, comprising specialist knowledge and reasoning and guarded against closer examination through compilation into executable files and by legal and intellectual property rights. However, there has been an energetic mobilisation of code writing beyond these legal, commercial, professional and knowledge confines. The mobilisation of software code for civic purposes, or civic hacking, has emerged as important everyday urban experiences. Opening up the black-box of software writing, however, leads to more issues that require further examination. This paper explores the processes of transforming everyday experiences into sequences of code by observing the social and sonic activities happening at a workshop where participants were learning a new programming language. It unpacks the complexity of code writing and indicates further complications when mobilising code for civic purposes