A new issue of Tecnoscienza edited by Claudio Coletta, Liam Heaphy, Sung-Yueh Perng (all of the Progcity project) and Laurie Waller has just been published, titled: “Data-driven Cities? Digital Urbanism and its Proxies”. Contents are:
A new book – Data and the City – edited by Rob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle has been published by Routledge as part of the Regions and Cities series. The book is one of the outputs from a Progcity workshop in late 2015.
Description
There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilizing data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from and make sense of the urban world. Recently, we have entered the age of big data, and now many aspects of everyday urban life are being captured as data and city management is mediated through data-driven technologies.
Data and the City is the first edited collection to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of how this new era of urban big data is reshaping how we come to know and govern cities, and the implications of such a transformation. This book looks at the creation of real-time cities and data-driven urbanism and considers the relationships at play. By taking a philosophical, political, practical and technical approach to urban data, the authors analyse the ways in which data is produced and framed within socio-technical systems. They then examine the constellation of existing and emerging urban data technologies. The volume concludes by considering the social and political ramifications of data-driven urbanism, questioning whom it serves and for what ends. It will be crucial reading for those who wish to understand and conceptualize urban big data, data-driven urbanism and the development of smart cities.
The book includes chapters by Martijn De Waal, Mike Batty, Teresa Scassa, Jim Thatcher and Craig Dalton, Jim Merricks White, Dietmar Offenhuber, Pouria Amirian and Anahid Bassiri, Chris Speed Deborah Maxwell and Larissa Pschetz, Till Straube, Jo Bates, Evelyn Ruppert, Muki Haklay, as well as the editors.
Data and the City is available in both paperback and hardback and is a companion volume to Code and the City published last year.
[This text is the introduction to the “Reshaping Cities through Data and Experiments“ workshop held in Maynooth University, 30th of May, which was the first part of an Ulysses research exchange between researchers from the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (i3-CSI) at the École des Mines in Paris, and the researchers from MUSSI-NIRSA in Maynooth University, Ireland. UPDATE: The videos of the presentations are now available as the following separate posts:session 1, session 2, session 3]
Introduction: Why smart cities, why data and experiments
Claudio
Our aim is to advance the understanding of the contemporary cities in relation to urban data and experimentation, creating a link between “The Programmable City” (Maynooth) and “City Experiments” (“CitEx”, Paris). In particular, we want to initiate a transdisciplinary discussion on the theoretical, methodological and empirical issues related to experimental and data-driven approaches to urban development and living. This conversation is vital in a time when cities all over the world – from Singapore to San Francisco, Medellin and Dublin, as we shall see – are increasingly turning into public-private testbeds and living labs, where urban development projects merge with the design of cyber-infrastructures to test new services and new forms of engagement for urban innovation and economic development. These new forms of interaction between algorithms, planning practices and governance processes raise crucial questions for researchers on how everyday life, civic engagement and urban change are shaped in contemporary cities. Our approach is to study smart cities as the unstable and uncertain product of ongoing interactions of data and experiments.
There is a pragmatic reason, indeed. In many cases, being responsible for tax payer’s money, city administrations need to spend their budget very carefully while thinking about possible futures. It brings us to a problem of skills, knowledge and expertise: what do the public bodies know about available technologies and state of the art? How to procure them? How to test them? Once procured and tested, how to know that the adoption of a specific technology would work in the actual urban settings? Which knowledge do data allow and shadow? How to maintain the rolled out service in time?
Thus, experimentation and data become a way to engage with new actors, with new kinds of expertise and skills that enter into the public so as to test projects before committing to large scale rolling out.
But the pragmatic reason is deeply connected with a theoretical and methodological one. Sociologists of science and technology use to saying that the laboratory is now the world: it does not mean that the world should be treated as a mere copy of a laboratory. Rather, it is an invite to expand and unfold the idea of laboratory from an organizational, technical and political perspective. In terms of the smart city discourse, it involves at least three intertwined issues. There is a problem related to the organizational processes and rationalities (how data and experiments interact with organizational change), there is a problem related to technological rationalities (data and experiments are not neutral), and there is a problem related to political rationalities (which are the implication for democracy), all combined and making the smart city discourse complex and undetermined.
Experiments represents a unique place of encounter between theory and practice, which allow us to observe smart urbanism in the actual making, looking at the dynamic apparatus of practices, infrastructures, knowledge, narratives, bodies, etc. and to possibly try distinguish between good ways to combine data and experiment and bad ways to combine data and experiments.
This is where our work in Maynooth University and in the Programmable City project on big data assemblages (Kitchin 2014), algorithmic governance (Coletta and Kitchin 2017), smart city development processes (Coletta, Heaphy and Kitchin 2017), hacktivism and civic engagement (Perng and Kitchin 2016) matches the work that David and his colleagues are doing at CSI.
David
I shall start with a remark: compared to what has been done by colleagues here, at MUSSI-NIRSA in Maynooth, about cities and data, we actually did a very few. Actually, we have been involved in projects on cities and urban settings only recently. As you might know, the CSI is well known in science and technology studies (STS), especially for its contribution to the early laboratory studies. And our CitEx project clearly draws on this background, notably what we consider as two important results.
In Laboratory Life, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979) examined in minute details scientists working at the bench, performing experiments, discussing results, and writing publications. What is interesting for us here is to consider the laboratory as a peculiar place, both as a controlled environment configured to conduct experiments and to envision their replication and dissemination, and a site designed to elaborate new knowledge and to perform some demonstrations. Yet the laboratory is not the only significant site to be investigated. As Michel Callon and his colleagues (1988) clearly emphasized in La science et ses réseaux, scientific facts would be nothing without the crucial part heterogeneous networks take place in their production and dissemination. What we learned here is the various ways in which the results of experiments are not only tightly linked to economic networks, but also contribute to perform some political orderings. To put it roughly, these are the two main arguments on scientific experiments we started with to elaborate our CitEx project; these are our basics, so to speak.
This being said, some works on city and urban settings have already taken place at the CSI, and they directly inspire our ongoing CitEx project. Obviously, the book Paris, the invisible city (Latour and Hermant 1996), which is focused on the heterogeneous infrastructures that make Paris works and stands as a city on a daily basis, is particularly relevant in this regard. Contemporary experiments in urban settings are based on exiting infrastructures, dedicated to urban mobility or to data processing and storage, or to both — as it is often the case. The study of subway signs in Paris as an immobile informational infrastructure designed and maintained everyday in order to ease riders fluidity is particularly telling: by shaping both some users’ positions and some particular conditions of a public space, subway signs participate in the enactment of a specific political ordering (Denis and Pontille 2010). But some experiments may also be focused on the infrastructure itself. This is what we investigated more recently, examining the introduction a fleet of 50 electric cars as part of a car-sharing system without fixed stations (Laurent and Tironi 2015). Not only sociotechnical instruments were mobilized to explore social and technical uncertainties and to produce public demonstrations, but also what was actually tested eventually changed during the project.
The CitEx project has been elaborated at the crossroad of STS and Urban studies because, we argue, experiments are a stimulating research site. Tightly coupled with the production and use of data, experiments constitute a particular entry point to explore how part of contemporary cities are currently constituted as laboratories to test various new technologies and infrastructures, as well as forms of urban assemblages and modes of government.
This is why we believe the collaboration with Claudio and his colleagues involved in “the programmable city” project will be fruitful and stimulating.
Claudio Coletta and David Pontille
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to the IRC, Ambassade de France in Ireland and the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute for their generous support and for making possible this event.
References:
Callon M (1989) La science et ses réseaux: genèse et circulation des faits scientifiques. Éditions La Découverte.
Coletta C and Kitchin R (In press) Algorhythmic governance: Regulating the ‘heartbeat’of a city using the Internet of Things, Big Data and Society, Special Issue on “Algorithms in Culture”. Pre-print available at https://osf.io/bp7c4/
Coletta, C., Heaphy, L. and Kitchin, R. (2017) From the accidental to articulated smart city: The creation and work of ‘Smart Dublin’. Programmable City Working Paper 29https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/93ga5
Denis J and Pontille D (2010). The Graphical Performation of a Public Space. The Subway Signs and their Scripts, in G. Sonda, C. Coletta, F. Gabbi (eds.) Urban Plots, Organizing Cities. Ashgate, pp. 11-22.
Kitchin R (2014) The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. Sage.
Laurent B and Tironi M (2015) A field test and its displacements. Accounting for an experimental mode of industrial innovation. CoDesign 11(3–4): 208–221.
Latour B and Woolgar S (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.
Latour B and Hermant E (1998) Paris: Ville Invisible. Éditions La Découverte.
Perng SY and Kitchin R (2016, online first) Solutions and frictions in civic hacking: Collaboratively designing and building a queuing app for an immigration office. Social and Cultural Geography.
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.
We are organising a special issues on data-driven cities. You can find more details below and we look forward to your proposals.
Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
SPECIAL ISSUE
“DATA DRIVEN CITIES? DIGITAL URBANISM AND ITS PROXIES”
Guest editors:
Claudio Coletta (Maynooth University)
Liam Heaphy (Maynooth University)
Sung-Yueh Perng (Maynooth University)
Laurie Waller (Technische Universität München)
Call for papers:
In the last few decades, data and software have become an integral part of urban life, producing a radical transformation of social relations in cities. Contemporary urban environments are characterised by dense arrangements of data, algorithms, mobile devices, and networked infrastructures. Multiple technologies (such as smart metering, sensing networks, GPS transponders, CCTV, induction loops, and mobile apps) are connected with numerous processes (such as institutional data management, data brokering, crowdsourcing, and workflow management), in order to provide sustainable, efficient, and integrated city governance and services. Accordingly, big data and algorithms have started to play a prominent role in informing decision-making and in performing the spatial, material, and temporal dimensions of cities.
Smart city initiatives undertaken globally are characterised by highlighting the purported benefits of partly automating management of public services, new forms of civic engagement enabled by digital infrastructures, and the potentials for innovating policy and fostering economic development.
Yet, contributions within STS, Critical Data Studies, Geography, Sociology, Media Studies and Anthropology have contested the neutral and apolitical nature of (big) data and the ahistorical, aspatial, homogenizing vision of cities in favour of an understanding that recognizes the situated multiplicity of actual digital urbanism. The politics of data, data analytics and visualizations perform within specific urban and code assemblages embodying specific versions of real-time and anticipatory governance. At the same time, these studies highlight the risks of dataveillance as well as the corporatisation of governance and technocratic solutionism which, especially coupled with austerity regimes, seem to reinforce inequalities while influencing people’s lives out of the public grasp. Within this context, vested interests interact in a multi-billion global market where corporations, companies and start-ups propose data-driven urban solutions, while public administrations increasingly delegate control over citizens’ data. Also, public institutions and private companies leverage the efforts of open data movements, engaged civic communities and citizen-minded initiatives to find new ways to create public and economic value from urban data.
The aim of this special issue is therefore to encourage critical and transdisciplinary debates on the epistemological and ontological implications of actual data-driven urbanism: its uncertain, fragile, contested, conflicting nature; the different forms of performing and making sense of the urban environment through data and algorithms; the different ways to approach the relationship between data, software and cities; the urban and code assemblages that are produced.
To what extent cities are understandable through data? How do software and space work in urban everyday life and urban management? How do data and policies actually shape each other? What forms of delegation, enrolment and appropriation take place?
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions critically addressing the following (non-exhaustive-list-of) topics:
– urban big data, city dashboards;
– data analytics and data brokering;
– IoT based urban services;
– predictive analytics and anticipatory governance;
– civic hacking, open data movements;
– privacy, security and surveillance in data-driven cities;
– crowd, mobility and traffic management;
– sensors, monitoring, mapping and modelling for urban facilities;
– digitization of built environment.
Deadline for abstract submissions: June 30th, 2016
Abstracts (in English) with a maximum length of 1000 words should be sent as email attachments to redazione@tecnoscienza.net and carbon copied to the guest editor at datadrivencities@tecnoscienza.net. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by July 2016.
Deadline for full submissions: October 15th, 2016.
Submissions (in English with a maximum length of 8000 words, including notes and references) can be made via the Journal’s submission system at www.tecnoscienza.net and an electronic copy of the article should be sent to redazione@tecnoscienza.net. The papers will be subject to a blind peer refereed review process. The special issue is expected to be published in 2017.
Short description
The track explores the digital, data-driven and networked making of urban environment. We welcome contributions in various formats: presentations, audio, video and photographic accounts, as well as performances and live demonstrations of public interfaces and software tools for urban analysis.
Abstract
How do software and space work in urban everyday life and urban management? How do data and policies actually shape each other? What forms of delegation, enrollment and appropriation take place?
Contemporary urban environments are characterised by dense arrangements of data, algorithms, mobile device, networked infrastructures. Multiple technologies (such as smart metering, sensing networks, GPS, CCTV, induction loops, mobile apps) are connected with multiple processes (such as institutional data management, data brokering, crowdsourcing, workflow management), aiming to provide sustainable, efficient, integrated city governance and services.
Within this context, vested interests interact in a multi-billion global market where corporations, companies and start-ups propose data-driven urban solutions, while public administrations increasingly delegate control over citizens’ data. Also, public institutions and private companies leverage the efforts of open data movements, engaged civic communities and citizen-minded initiatives to find new ways to create public and economic value from urban data.
However, the making of digital and data-driven urbanism is uncertain, fragile, contested, conflicting. The track intends to stimulate the debate on: the different forms of performing and making sense of the urban environment through data and algorithms; the different ways to approach the relationship between data, software and cities.
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions critically addressing the following (non-exhaustive-list-of) topics:
– urban big data, dashboards, data analytics and brokering;
– IoT based urban services and governance;
– civic hacking, open data movements;
– privacy, security and surveillance in data-driven cities;
– crowd, mobility and traffic management;
– sensors, monitoring, mapping and modelling for urban facilities;
– digitization of built environment.
Paper proposals should include: a paper title (no more than 10 words); author/co-authors; a short abstract (maximum 300 characters including spaces) and a long one (up to 250 words). The long abstract will be shown on the web and the short one is what will be displayed in the conference programme.
