MINIMA: Minimanuals for Urban Hacking is a small-format ethnographic zine and multimodal experiment that treats the city as something that can be read, glitched, and reprogrammed from below. It starts from a simple intuition: you don’t need a whole research project, institutional funding, or a 300-page methodology handbook to begin doing urban ethnography. You can start with a folded sheet of paper, a walk, and a carefully designed prompt.
Each issue of MINIMA is a minimanual: a pocket-sized guide to one hacking gesture—a concrete way to tune into, intervene in, or slightly misuse the city’s operating system. Rather than offering abstract theory, each issue proposes a small, situated method for inhabiting urban life otherwise.
Content
- What happens inside a MINIMA issue?
- A DIY object: print, fold, glitch, repeat
- MINIMA Hackathons: testing the minimanuals together
- Who is MINIMA for?
- Distribution and circulation
- Why MINIMA?
What happens inside a MINIMA issue?
Each issue combines three tightly linked elements:
1. A hands-on exercise
A simple, guided practice that readers can try in their own city: following cables instead of streets, mapping smells instead of landmarks, tracing infrastructural shadows, collecting tiny residues, listening for more-than-human traffic. The exercise is designed to be short, doable in an afternoon, and repeatable with different groups.
2. A short theoretical reflection
A compact text that situates the exercise within STS, experimental ethnography, and more-than-human urbanism. These reflections do not “explain” the city from above; instead, they offer a conceptual nudge—connecting your walk, your notes, your sketches to broader debates about infrastructures, multispecies life, and the politics of everyday environments.
3. A minimal visual kit
Each issue includes a small visual grammar: diagrams, maps, specimen labels, and notational devices that turn the city into a lab-book. Rather than ready-made infographics, these are prompts to draw on, annotate, photocopy, and misuse: boxes to fill, arrows to redirect, scales to recalibrate.
Together, these three elements make each MINIMA both a reading object and a field tool: something you can keep on your desk and something you can fold into your pocket and take to the street.
A DIY object: print, fold, glitch, repeat
MINIMA is deliberately modest in its material form. Each issue:
- is printed in a single ink, echoing risograph aesthetics and cheap zine cultures;
- is designed to be photocopied, refolded, and reassembled;
- fits easily into a pocket, notebook, or field diary.
This small scale is not just a design preference, but a methodological stance. The zine itself is a hack: a minimal, low-cost, reproducible format that can circulate across universities, collectives, reading groups, and informal networks. You can download the PDFs, print them at home or in a copy shop, fold them with friends, and start using them immediately.
MINIMA Hackathons: testing the minimanuals together
MINIMA is not only a printed object; it is also a workshop format.
MINIMA Hackathons are short, intensive sessions (usually 2–4 hours) where participants collectively test, adapt, and extend a given minimanual. A typical hackathon might include:
- a quick collective reading of the issue;
- a short walk or micro-fieldwork session using the proposed exercise;
- note-taking, sketching, or specimen-label writing in situ;
- a return to the workshop space to share findings, diagrams, and glitches;
- a final moment of re-writing or re-drawing the exercise based on what emerged.
Hackathons are a way of treating the zine as open hardware: something to be modified, forked, and locally reprogrammed. They are ideal for courses, reading groups, activist collectives, and design studios interested in experimenting with inventive, more-than-human, and infrastructural methods.
Who is MINIMA for?
MINIMA is designed to be porous. It is written with academic vocabulary in mind, but it does not assume readers are on a university campus. It is for:
People who want to do urban research
…without needing a full academic apparatus. If you are curious about how power, infrastructure, and multispecies life shape your city, MINIMA offers ways to start looking and recording differently.
Teachers and workshop facilitators
…who need small, concrete tools to introduce inventive methods. Each issue can become the backbone of a seminar session, a lab exercise, or a field assignment.
Artists, designers, and activists
…interested in more-than-human and infrastructural perspectives. The visual grammar and exercises are meant to be appropriated, remixed, and incorporated into existing practices.
Curious city dwellers
…who like walking, observing, and tinkering with their surroundings. You don’t have to identify as a researcher or artist to use MINIMA; you need an interest in paying attention differently.
Distribution and circulation
MINIMA will circulate through a mixed ecology of channels:
- Small, numbered print runs
Initial editions will be printed in limited, numbered series and distributed at talks, workshops, book fairs, and events.
- Open PDFs for self-printing
Every issue will also be made available as a downloadable PDF, formatted for easy printing and folding. This is crucial: the project relies on self-reproduction as part of its hacking ethos.
- Institutions and street-level spaces
MINIMA will live in universities, cultural centers, and bookshops, but also in less formal spaces: studio walls, shared tables, independent zine fairs, and urban corners where people leave and pick up printed matter.
Why MINIMA?
At its core, MINIMA is a response to a double tension:
1. Methodological inflation – contemporary urban research is full of complex, often intimidating methodological vocabularies.
2. Everyday curiosity – many people are already paying attention to the small glitches and infrastructures around them, but lack simple tools to turn that attention into a practice.
MINIMA tries to sit in between: offering small, precise tools that are conceptually grounded yet materially simple. It takes seriously the idea that minor gestures—walking differently, labeling residues, tracing shadows, listening to nonhuman traffic—can open up new ways of understanding and inhabiting the city.