The Programmable City Project is hosting a two day invite-only workshop on the relations between data and the city.  The Data and the City Workshop will take place on August 31st and September 1st 2015 and will bring together 20 invited experts in the field and the ProgCity team.  A description of the workshop and the agenda are below with links to some of the papers to be presented that are already available online:

There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilising data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from, and make sense of the urban world.  Data have traditionally been time-consuming and costly to generate, analyze and interpret, and generally provided static, often coarse, snapshots of phenomena.  Recently, however, we have entered the age of big data with data related to knowing and governing cities increasingly become a deluge; a wide, deep torrent of timely, varied, resolute, and relational data.  This has been accompanied by an opening up of state data, and to a much lesser degree business data, and the production of volunteered geographic information.  As a result, evermore aspects of everyday life — work, consumption, travel, communication, leisure — and the worlds we inhabit are being captured as data and mediated through data-driven technologies.   This data revolution has produced multiple challenges that require critical and technical attention — how best to produce, manage, analyze, and make sense of big and open data, data infrastructures and their consequences with respect to urban governance and everyday life. The workshop will examine such critical and technical issues across the five thematic areas of: critically framing data, data infrastructures and platforms, data models and the city, data analytics and the city, ethical and political issues.

 Data and the City Workshop Agenda