Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City: An Interview with the Tapullo Collective

wireless community networks

Wireless community networks have been around for a while and are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction and community organizing. In Genoa, a group of people, some of them members of the FabLab at the Laboratorio Sociale Occupato Autogestito Buridda squat, established the Tapullo project in 2016. Their aim was to set up a DIY wireless community network. The name is reflective of their approach: in Genoese dialect, tapullo roughly refers to a quick and simple improvision (such as repairing a broken frame with Gaffa tape). Rather than providing internet access, Tapullo was designed as a purely local mesh network from the very beginning, hosting a local service in the form of a publicly accessible community forum.

Read my 2017 interview with members of the Tapullo collective plus a short essay, published in the Journal of Peer Production:
http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-11-city/experimental-format/the-tapullo-collective-genoa/
(Article is open access, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)