Project Details: Website
Date of Project Realisation: 2010 – Ongoing
Project Dimensions: Website, global network of civic innovations
Project URL: diycity.org
Project Overview: The cities we live in today are relics of the 20th century. Built with crude, industrial-era technology, they fail to rise to the challenges and potential of our times. They are closed when they should be open, centralized when they should be localized, and hard-wired when they should be dynamic and adaptive.
And while many local governments would love to remake their cities in modern form, they instead find themselves simply trying to keep their current system working under the onslaught of ever-more pressing problems and ever-rising debts, unable to innovate at the speed required by today’s world.
DIYcity exists to help solve this problem. A global network of innovators, hackers and entrepreneurs, the organization is dedicated to finding ways to make cities work better with easy-to-implement, do-it-yourself tech innovations. Their aim is to reinvent cities everywhere as efficient, effective, and sustainable places to live in the 21st century.
Started by a single person in one city, DIYcity has grown today into a network of thousands in over 100 cities around the world. Members use the site DIYcity.org and other means to spread new ideas, brainstorm solutions to problems, and issue calls to action for implementing such innovation. The ideas include such innovations as DIY bike sharing systems for cities, realtime disease detection systems built on social networks, social taxi sharing systems, and more.
For 2011, DIYcity is planning its biggest move yet: hosting an “apps contest” for every city in the world simultaneously, to be called “Apps for Everywhere”. Modeled after apps contests that have been held for specific cities — the Big Apps contest for New York City, the Apps for America contest for Washington D.C. — Apps for Everywhere will be a chance for every community-oriented developer in the world to add their voice to civic reinvention and to make an impact on their own city. And taken together, these do-it-yourself apps from everywhere may add up to a global movement, helping tip the balance to make urban life better and more livable for everyone.
Artist Biography: John Geraci, founder of DIYcity, has spent the last seven years making cities work better with web technologies. As a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program from 2003 – 2005, John created several early and influential real-world web projects such as Neighbornode and Grafedia. These experiments in applying the web to local communities, and the enthusiastic response they were met with, set Mr. Geraci on his post-school career path.
After graduation, he co-founded the hyperlocal news website Outside.in, a site that collected, organized and displayed local blog posts everywhere in the U.S. on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, effectively creating local “newspapers” for those communities. The site is now a leader in local online news aggregation, valued at $20 million and backed by CNN.
While working on Outside.in, John was struck by the disparity between how well the web worked and how poorly cities seemed to be working, and launched DIYcity as a way for tech innovators to apply their web know-how to making cities work better. The site took off and found a worldwide audience of programmers, entrepreneurs, urban planners and city workers, all collectively exploring how they can help rethink and reinvent their cities.
John writes for O’Reilly Radar and other web sites, and speaks frequently on the future of cities and the potential for transforming urban communities with innovative, open technologies.