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Data and the City workshop, Session 3 videos

This set of videos make up the final session from the first day of the Data and City workshop. All of the videos from the event are available through our Vimeo account .

Data Analytics and the City

Improving the Veracity of Open and Real-Time Urban Data

Gavin McArdle, Researcher, National Centre for Geocomputation, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Abstract
Within the context of the smart city, data are an integral part of the digital economy and are used as input for decision making, policy formation, and to inform citizens, city managers and commercial organisations. Reflecting on our experience of developing real-world software applications which rely heavily on urban data, this article critically examines the veracity of such data (their authenticity and the extent to which they accurately (precision) and faithfully (fidelity, reliability) represent what they are meant to) and how it can be assessed in the absence of quality reports from data providers. While data quality needs to be considered at all aspects of the data lifecycle and in the development and use of applications, open data are often provided ‘as-is’ with no guarantees about their veracity, continuity or lineage (documentation that establishes provenance and fit for use). This allows data providers to share data with undocumented errors, absences, and biases. If left unchecked these data quality issues can propagate through multiple systems and lead to poor smart city applications and unreliable ‘evidence-based’ decisions. This leads to a danger that open government data portals will come to be seen as untrusted, unverified and uncurated data-dumps by users and critics. Drawing on our own experiences we highlight the process we used to detect and handle errors. This work highlights the necessary janitorial role carried out by data scientists and developers to ensure that data are cleaned, parsed, validated and transformed for use. This important process requires effort, knowledge, skill and time and is often hidden in the resulting application and is not shared with other data users. In this paper, we propose that rather than lose this knowledge, in the absence of data providers documenting them in metadata and user guides, data portals should provide a crowdsourcing mechanism to generate and record user observations and fixes for improving the quality of urban data and open government portals.

Blockchain City: Spatial, Social and Cognitive Ledgers

Chris Speed, Chair of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract
City dashboards are typically representations of a city’s accounts, manifest according to values set by the stakeholders. The currency of the data within a dashboard is typically reduced to an assessment of the performance of services largely derived from quantitative sources. As a consequence, dashboards cannot describe many of the transactions that take place between people, nor can they make explicit the values that are brokered between the myriad of city occupants. Whilst such information displays may be useful for mayors to report on the performance of a local government, or use it to set targets that lead to penalties or bonuses, the city dwellers that are complicit in the production of data are not able to convert the information back into a currency that can inform their actions and transactions.
This paper explores the barriers that current representations of data present for building new currencies through which value may be mediated at the level of the city dweller. By reflecting on the potential of technologies such as a ‘block chain’, the paper asks: if you change the representation of value, can it change the values that you can represent?

The blockchain is a public ledger of all of the transactions that have ever taken place using the Bitcoin currency. The ledger is constantly growing in a linear manner as ‘blocks’ are completed through the recording of transactions. A copy of the blockchain exists not in one place like the transactions of a traditional bank, but across the network of nodes in the Bitcoin system. This decentralised framework offers not only a form of transparency to prevent fraud but also a potential platform through which different values can be represented.

This paper speculates on the implications for the city of the near future as services begin to adopt blockchain technology. The paper reflects on the activities of the technology startup community who have an understanding of the principles of blockchain technologies through their adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Via studies of various applications of blockchain technology across these groups, the paper will examine how emerging practices could transform our existing conceptions of value and money. The paper foresees the opportunities for the blockchain to change the way that value flows across the city, and hence lead to new economic and social models for city services.

Beyond quantification: a role for citizen science

Muki Haklay, Professor of Geographic Information Science, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London

Abstract
When approaching the issue of Smart Cities, there is a need to question the underlying assumptions at the basis of Smart Cities discourse, and especially to challenge the prevailing thought that only efficiency, costs and productivity are the most important values. We need to ensure that human and environmental values are taken into account in the design and implementation of systems that will influence the way cities operate and governed. While we can accept science as the least worst method to accumulate human knowledge about the natural world, and appreciate its power to explain and act in the world, we need to consider how it is applied within the city in a way that does leave space for cultural, environmental and religious values. The paper will argue that a specific form of collaborative science – citizen science and community science – are especially suitable for making smart cities meaningful and democratic.

Data and the City workshop, Session 2 videos

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The second set of videos from The Programmable City’s recent workshop, Data and the City focus on Data Infrastructures and Platforms.

Situating Data Infrastructures

Till Straube, Researcher, Workgroup Boeckler, Department of Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt

Abstract
In this paper I seek to critically engage with ICT – specifically digital infrastructures (like programming languages, database software, data formats, protocols, APIs, etc.) – on their own terms: by closely reading documentation materials, technical specifications, and code. I will outline a possible mode of inquiry that avoids relegating digital technologies to mere mediators of the social, or resorting to other grand abstractions. The entry point here is the problem of space: how can we account for the overflowing of spatial frames of reference by digital technologies without resorting to notions of immateriality? The approach set out insists on the metaphysical nature of the digital/physical dichotomy (among others) and proposes a radically materialist first analysis of ICT. In a next step, the problems of space and context are explored through an analytic lens building on assemblage theory, following the methodological principles of symmetry and free association. Taking further cues from science and technology studies (STS), the possibility of a topological reading of digital phenomena is explored, and in a final step extended by reading it against a diverse set of additional texts and brief examples.

Understanding the City through Urban Data

Martijn De Waal, Researcher ‘Citizen Empowerment’ Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences; Assistant professor Media Studies University of Amsterdam

Abstract
The data revolution (Kitchin, 2014) has brought us an enormous increase in the production of all sorts of data about all kinds of aspects of urban life, assembled, reworked and published (or kept secret) by various actors, from state bureaucracies and companies to citizens. One of the promises of the potential availability of these data is that they are to empower citizens in the process of ‘city making’. Data about all kinds of urban processes, so goes the rationale, will give citizens more insight into salient issues. These insights can lead to either knowledge about opportunities to act upon or they can be used in political negotiations with other actors, e.g. local governments or companies in for instance debates about air or noise pollution. As such it could lead to an increase of ‘ownership’ (De Lange & De Waal, 2013), a sense of belonging to and responsibility for one’s social and spatial structures. Alternatively, these data can be understood as a new public sphere, or at least as ‘accountability technologies’, instruments to be used in the process of urban governance by both citizens and institutions (Offenhuber & Schechtner, 2012;2013).

However, as amongst others Bates (2012) and Dawes and Helbig (2010) have pointed out, data by itself doesn’t automatically produce such a new public sphere. Accessibility of data is an issue, but also the organization and structure of the data are important aspects, as well as issues of data literacy.

In this contribution I would like to explore the relationship between urban data and the urban public sphere further. To what extent and under what circumstances can we understand urban data as a contribution to the urban public sphere? I will explore this question from a theoretical perspective, illustrated by the experiences in our own currently running research through design project The Hackable City. Collaborative Citymaking in Urban Living Lab Buiksloterham.

Ontologizing the City, From Old School National Cartographic Infrastructure toward a Rules Based Real-World Object Oriented National Database

Tracey P. Lauriault, Assistant Professor, Critical Media and Big Data, Communication Studies, Department of Journalism and Communications, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Abstract
A Programmable City case study is ongoing and being conducted with Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) as part of Work Package 2 which is about How are digital data (and software) materially and discursively supported and processed about cities and their citizens?

OSi is undergoing a revolutionary technological transformation. OSi is discontinuing its tile or layer based digital cartographic mapping infrastructure and is moving toward and is operationalizing a seamless, scale independent object oriented model. It is also moving toward developing a national real-world spatial data platform. The nation’s framework geography has been re-engineered, ‘databased’, reclassified and re-modelled. A new infrastructure is being deployed, new capture data work flows are being institutionalized, new maps will soon be generated and clients, which include utilities, private sector companies and government departments at all levels will be interoperating with this new technology as the old process is phased out.

This paper will therefore discuss the methodology by which this case study is being conducted, the two frameworks structuring the research, namely the Kitchin Assemblage Framework which guides the study of the OSi’s national mapping infrastructure, the Modified Hacking Framework of Making up Spaces which provides an approach to interrogate the material implications of the data model, and a method to assess if the change from the cartographic mapping classification system to the real-world feature objected oriented database transforms how space is conceptualized and imagined and if so what are the material outcomes, not only operationally and procedurally with the actors involved, but assessing if this changes spatial practices?

In addition, a specific set of iconic ‘things’ in the city of Dublin were selected in consultation with member of the OSi, and these ‘things’ will be examined across time and space within the Prime cartographic classification system and the new Prime2 data model, and across old and new software systems. These ‘things’ will be situated within their specific socio-technical contexts and assemblage. The re-modelling of the nation’s mapping infrastructure did not happen overnight and the data-model was not constructed in vacuum. Data modelling can be said to have started in the late 1960s, while specific discussions for the OSi began in the mid to late 1990s with Ordnance Survey UK and NI, and potentially the technological trajectory may have been set with the long term adoption Oracle databases. For the OSi and official starting point can be said to be just prior to the launch of the competitive bidding process which started somewhere in early 2001.

In order to better understand the evolution and the construction of the data modelling process, a genealogy of the constructed real-world feature database will also be carried out. It is thought, that the mixed method approach to this case study will allow for a multi-scalar and a nested analysis of the infrastructure, the knowledge and space producing aspects of the classification systems and the data modelling process itself.

Preliminary and intensive data collection began in the spring of 2015, interviews have just been transcribed, documents have been assembled and are being recorded to facilitate qualitative analysis, and the collection of digital objects for Dublin has begun. Analytical work is scheduled to begin in the fall and winter of 2015-2016. An iterative approach to this research will be ongoing in collaboration and consultation with the OSi and the Programmable City PI for the next three years. This paper will not be able to discuss results, however it is hoped that an engaged discussion about the methodology and the preliminary description of the research can be had with participants.

Data and the City workshop, Session 1 videos

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Thank you to everyone who attended our 2015 workshop Data and the City in early September. It was a fantastic event. Over the next few days we will make the video recordings of the presentations available online.

Here is the introduction to the workshop and the first session, Critically Framing Data.

Opening talk

Data-driven, networked urbanism

Rob Kitchin, NIRSA, Maynooth University

Abstract
For as long as data have been generated about cities various kinds of data-informed urbanism have been occurring. In this paper, I argue that a new era is presently unfolding wherein data-informed urbanism is increasingly being complemented and replaced by data-driven, networked urbanism. Cities are becoming ever more instrumented and networked, their systems interlinked and integrated, and vast troves of big urban data are being generated and used to manage and control urban life in real-time. Data-driven, networked urbanism, I contend, is the key mode of production for what have widely been termed smart cities. In this paper I provide a critical overview of data-driven, networked urbanism and smart cities focusing in particular on the relationship between data and the city (rather than network infrastructure or computational or urban issues), and critically examine a number of urban data issues including: the politics of urban data; data ownership, data control, data coverage and access; data security and data integrity; data protection and privacy, dataveillance, and data uses such as social sorting and anticipatory governance; and technical data issues such as data quality, veracity of data models and data analytics, and data integration and interoperability. I conclude that whilst data-driven, networked urbanism purports to produce a commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral, apolitical, evidence-based form of responsive urban governance, it is nonetheless selective, crafted, flawed, normative and politically-inflected. Consequently, whilst data-driven, networked urbanism provides a set of solutions for urban problems, it does so within limitations and in the service of particular interests.

Session 1: Critically Framing Data

Provenance and Possibility: Critically Framing Data

Jim Thatcher, ssistant Professor, Division of Urban Studies, University of Washington – Tacoma

Abstract
‘Big data’s’ boosters present a mythology wherein it is perpetually new, pushing ever-forwards towards bigger and better representations of the world. Similarly, the vision of the “smart city” is inevitably an ahistorical imaginary of data-intense urban planning and coordination. Data sources, actually existing data, appear in the literature as uncritical, pre-existing, and decontextualized representations of the world to be exploited in service to a techno-utopian urban. The sources of data, its provenance, recede into a technical issue: one in a litany of hurdles to be overcome through austere, computational methodologies. Such technical approaches to provenance efface the intentionality of data creators. They leave out the inscription of meaning that goes into data objects as socio-technical, emergent indicators at urban scales and instead seats them as objective reality. Using a critical data studies approach, this paper connects and contextualizes the conditions of data’s production with its potential uses in the world. Data provenance, the where, how, and from whom data is produced, is intrinsically linked to how it comes to (re)present the world. This exploration serves as the first steps in developing a schema that includes mobile devices, municipal services, and other categories and tie that to the historical ideologies through which these technologies emerged in urban contexts.

Where are data citizens?

Evelyn Ruppert, Professor, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Abstract
If we increasingly know, experience and enact cities through data then we need to understand who are the subjects of that data and the space of relations they occupy. The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) means phones, watches, dishwashers, fridges, cars, and many other devices are always already connected to the Internet and generating enormous volumes of data about movements, locations, activities, interests, encounters, and private and public relationships. It also means that conduct is being governed through myriad arrangements and conventions of the Internet. What does this mean for how data subjects become data citizens? If indeed through the act of making claims data subjects become citizens how do we understand the spaces of this becoming? Challenging a separation between ‘real’ space and ‘virtual’ space, I define cyberspace as a space of social struggles: a space of transactions and interactions between and among bodies acting through the Internet. How these struggles are part-and-parcel of the constitution of the programmable city is the critical framing that I take up in this paper.

Unfortunately no video recording of this paper was made. Audio should be made available shortly.

Data cultures, power and the city

Jo Bates, Lecturer in Information Politics and Policy, Information School, University of Sheffield

Abstract
How might we come to know a city through data? As citizens, policy makers, academics and businesses turn increasingly to data analytics in an effort to gain insight into and manage cities, this paper argues that rather than seeking to find the truth of cities in their data, we might better illuminate the flows of power and influence in the contemporary urban environment through close critical examination of these emerging, intersecting local data cultures and practices.

What value and relevance do local data cultures see in emergent data practices? How do they come to influence and shape them? What are their hopes, aspirations, concerns and fears? What tensions and struggles are emerging? Where and how do these local practices intersect with one another? How are they embedded within and responding to developments in national and transnational data practices, infrastructures and flows?

Through focusing on the complex and contested “assemblages” of political, economic, social and cultural processes that data production and flow are embedded in, and recognising local data practices as specific articulations of social relations situated within time and space, what can we learn about our cities and how they are situated within the global flows of capital and power in the early 21st century?

This paper will begin to address these questions using illustrative examples drawn from empirical research findings.

The remainder of the videos will be released on our website in coming weeks. If you just can’t wait, you can check them out now on our Vimeo account.

Cathal Gurrin and Rami Albatal – Lifelogging: Challenges and Opportunities in a new era of Personal Data

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On May 27th 2015, Cathal Gurrin and Rami Albatal visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on lifelogging, covering the history of creating lifelogs, technological developments in the field, the current state of the practice and future possibilities for comprehensive personal data.

The talk was extremely well received, and this video of the event should be of interest to anone interested in lifelogging, the quantified self, personal or wearable technologies or the emergence and possibilities of personal data.

Cathal Gurrin and Rami Albatal – Lifelogging – Challenges and Opportunities for a new era of personal data from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

You can also listen to the audio recording of the discussion afterwards on issues around privacy, surveillance and more here:

Mark Maguire – Counter-terrorism in Airports/Cities

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On February 25th 2015, Mark Maguire visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on counter-terrorist techniques that are increasingly becoming (or have become) techno-scientific processes.

The talk was extremely well received, and offers a detailed, critical and timely appraisal of current developments in counter-terrorism.

Video: ProgCity at Smart City Expo and Congress

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In November 2014 members of the Programmable City team visited the Smart City Expo and Congress in Barcelona. The organisers have now posted up videos of all of the sessions on their YouTube channel. Together they make interesting viewing for anyone interested in understanding what is happening with regards to creating smart cities. Rob Kitchin and Gavin McArdle presented a paper at the Congress (below) entitled, ‘Dublin Dashboard: Open and real-time data and visualizations for citizens, government and companies’.