Category Archives: publications

New paper in Geoforum – The praxis and politics of building urban dashboards

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Rob Kitchin, Sophia Maalsen and Gavin McArdle have a new paper published in Geoforum titled ‘The praxis and politics of building urban dashboards’.  It is open access with this link until early Dec.

Abstract: This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard – a website built by two of the authors that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information – from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence to unpack the building of the dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.

Big data and the city

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A special issue of ‘Built Environment’ – Big Data and the City – edited by Mike Batty has just been published and includes a paper by Gavin McArdle and Rob Kitchin on improving the veracity of open and real-time urban data.  Full details of contents below:

  • Editorial: Big Data, Cities and Herodotus by MICHAEL BATTY
  • Big Data and the City by MICHAEL BATTY
  • From Origins to Destinations: The Past, Present and Future of Visualizing Flow Maps by MATTHEW CLAUDEL, TILL NAGEL, and CARLO RATTI
  • Towards a Better Understanding of Cities Using Mobility Data by MAXIME LENORMAND and JOSÉ J. RAMASCO
  • Finding Pearls in London’s Oysters by JON READES, CHEN ZHONG, ED MANLEY, RICHARD MILTON and MICHAEL BATTY
  • A Classification of Multidimensional Open Data for Urban Morphology by ALEXANDROS ALEXIOU, ALEX SINGLETON, and PAUL A. LONGLEY
  • User-Generated Big Data and Urban Morphology by A.T. CROOKS, A. CROITORU, A. JENKINS, R. MAHABIR, P. AGOURIS and A. STEFANIDIS
  • Sensing Spatiotemporal Patterns in Urban Areas: Analytics and Visualizations Using the Integrated Multimedia City Data Platform by PIYUSHIMITA (VONU) THAKURIAH, KATARZYNA SILA-NOWICKA, and JORGE GONZALEZ PAULE
  • Playful Cities: Crowdsourcing Urban Happiness with Web Games by DANIELE QUERCIA
  • Big Data for Healthy Cities: Using Location-Aware Technologies, Open Data and 3D Urban Models to Design Healthier Built Environment by HARVEY J. MILLER and KRISTIN TOLLE
  • Improving the Veracity of Open and Real-Time Urban Data by GAVIN MCARDLE and ROB KITCHIN
  • Wise Cities: ‘Old’ Big Data and ‘Slow’ Real Time by FABIO CARRERA
  • Collecting and Visualizing Real-Time Urban Data Through City Dash-Boards by STEVEN GRAY, OLIEVER O’BRIEN and STEPHAN HÜGEL

New paper: Urban data and city dashboards: Six key issues

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Rob Kitchin and Gavin McArdle have published a new Programmable City working paper (no. 21) – Urban data and city dashboards: Six key issues – on SocArXiv today.  It is a pre-print of a chapter that will be published in Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T.P. and McArdle, G. (eds) (forthcoming) Data and the City. Routledge, London..

Abstract

This chapter considers the relationship between data and the city by critically examining six key issues with respect city dashboards: epistemology, scope and access, veracity and validity, usability and literacy, use and utility, and ethics.  While city dashboards provide useful tools for evaluating and managing urban services, understanding and formulating policy, and creating public knowledge and counter-narratives, our analysis reveals a number of conceptual and practical shortcomings.  In order for city dashboards to reach their full potential we advocate a number of related shifts in thinking and praxes and forward an agenda for addressing the issues we highlight.  Our analysis is informed by our endeavours in building the Dublin Dashboard.

Key words: dashboards, cities, access, epistemology, ethics, open data, scope, usability, utility, veracity, validity

New paper: Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities

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Rob Kitchin has published a new Programmable City working paper (no. 20) – Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities – on SocArXiv today.  It is an introductory framing/provocation essay for the ‘Creating smart cities’ workshop to be hosted at Maynooth University, 5-6 September 2016.

Abstract

Over the past decade the concept and development of smart cities has unfolded rapidly, with many city administrations implementing smart city initiatives and strategies and a diverse ecology of companies and researchers producing and deploying smart city technologies. In contrast to those that seek to realise the benefits of a smart city vision, a number of critics have highlighted a number of shortcomings, challenges and risks with such endeavours.  This short paper outlines a third path, one that aims to realise the benefits of smart city initiatives while recasting the thinking and ethos underpinning them and addressing their deficiencies and limitations.  It argues that smart city thinking and initiatives need to be reframed, reimagined and remade in six ways.  Three of these concern normative and conceptual thinking with regards to goals, cities and epistemology, and three concern more practical and political thinking and praxes with regards to management/governance, ethics and security, and stakeholders and working relationships.  The paper does not seek to be definitive or comprehensive, but rather to provide conceptual and practical suggestions and stimulate debate about how to productively recast smart urbanism and the creation of smart cities.

Key words: smart cities, framing, vision, ethos, politics, urbanism

New Paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments

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Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans have a new open access paper, Locative media and data-driven computing experiments, published in Big Data & Society today. It examines the staging of locative data and computing experiments to envision urban futures, and its consequences. More details are in the abstract below and the paper can be downloaded at http://bds.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053951716652161.

Abstract

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

Working paper – Crafting code: Gender, coding and spatial hybridity in the events of Pyladies Dublin

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A working paper by Sophia Maalsen and Sung-Yueh Perng on the subjectivity and spatiality of coding, prepared for Craft Economies: Cultural Economies of the Handmade, edited by Susan Luckman and Nicola Thomas, is available to view.

In the paper, we look at the integration of the digital and the resurgent interest in crafting artefacts. We do this by focusing on the work, relationships and spaces occupied by Pyladies Dublin – a coding group intended for women to learn and ‘craft’ code in the programming language of Python. Pyladies offers an interesting and fruitful case study as it intersects gender, relations of making and places of making, nested firmly within the digital world. The relations of making within the Pyladies group provides salient insight into the production of code, gender and space. Pyladies is predominantly attended by women with the focus to encourage women to become more active members and leaders of the Python community. By producing code in a friendly space, the group also actively works towards producing coding subjectivities and hybrid, mobile spatiality, seeking to produce coding and technology culture that is diverse and gender equitable. We base our ethnographic study to suggest ways in which Pyladies Dublin is consistently engaging in crafting code and crafting coding subjectivity and spatiality.

We thank the generosity of PyLadies Dublin for accommodating us and engaging in very productive conversation in the process.

Sophia and Sung-Yueh