Sung-Yueh Perng has a new paper published in the journal Mobilites, titled: Anticipating digital futures: ruins, entanglements and the possibilities of shared technology making, doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1594867
Abstract
Contrary to the corporate production of digital cities, shared technology making explores ways of innovation that are open to all, informed by diverse knowledges, and led by citizens. However, this exploration faces corporate translation of ethical and societal values for capital accumulation and concerns around the right to participate. Building on Tsing’s concept of ‘ruins’, this paper considers the anticipation of digital futures while the neoliberal ruination of shared technology making is in full swing. The paper examines the entanglements in hackathon rationalities and practices and demonstrates that the possibilities of shared technology making emerge from disrupting technocratic visions and repurposing corporate innovation resources and techniques. Drawing on the analysis, the paper argues that these entanglements are crucial to digital futures. They disclose in concrete ways how neoliberal co-optation can be disturbed and transformed. Equally importantly, they urge continuous explorations to assemble diverse practices and values for building momentum towards sustained processes of shaping desirable 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.
Moving applications: A multilayered approach to mobile computing Jim Merricks White, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Abstract
Mobile computing plays an increasingly important role in the way that space is experienced in the city. This has political consequences, both at the micro level of everyday production and consumption, and at the macro level of institutional and political economy. While geographers have explored the ontological role which might be played by hardware, software, data and mapping within this spatial paradigm, there remains little concerted effort to explore mobile computing as a technological system which incorporates all of these socio-technical assemblages. By drawing on adjacent disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and media and communication studies, this essay proposes a multilayered model for such a holistic inquiry: hardware—software—data(base)—GUI (graphical user interface).
By applying this model to a self-reflexive exploration of the taxi service Hailo and the mobility tracking application Moves, I attempt to demonstrate how it might be put to work as a heuristic tool. Following on from my desire to expose and explore the politics of mobile computing, the model is used to draw attention to the networks of power which make up these mobile computing services.
Digital urbanism in crises: A hopeful monster? Monika Büscher, With Michael Liegl, Katrina Petersen, Mobilities.Lab, Lancaster University, UK
Abstract
Intersecting mobilities of data, people and resources are an integral part of a new digital urbanism. Thrift speaks of Lifeworld.Inc, a new entertainment-security sector driven contexture where people’s everyday activities, movements, physiological data, thoughts, desires and fears are so richly documented in real time that commercial enterprise as well as urban services (transport, energy, security) can dynamically anticipate and shape them ‘just-in-time’ (2011). While this opens up novel opportunities for more efficiency, comfort, and sustainability in networked urban mobilities, it also provides new leverage for mobilizing disaster response. In a ‘century of disasters’ (eScience 2012), where urbanization has increased vulnerability and climate change contributes to increased frequency and severity of disasters, this opens up a perspicuous site for investigations of post-human practices, phenomenologies and ethics. Big data analytics and information sharing for risk prevention and disaster response can exacerbate the unprecedented surveillance contemporary societies practice (Harding 2014), Kafka-eske transformations of privacy and civil liberties (Solove 2004) and a splintering urbanism (Graham & Marvin 2001). At the heart of these transformations is a digital phenomenology of invisibility, immateriality and ‘intelligence’ that does not lend itself to human control. ‘Smart cities’ may depend on smart citizens (Greenfield 2013), but the technologies contemporary societies produce do not support human intelligence. We report from ‘inside the belly of the beast’ of innovation in mobilizing Lifeworld.Inc data for disaster response (Balka 2006). Drawing on experience from collaborative research and design projects (e.g. http://www.bridgeproject.eu/en), we discuss the relationship between lived cyborg practice, phenomenology and ethics in networked urban mobilities. Using a disaster perspective for a disclosive ethical investigation (Introna 2007) does disclose some potentially disastrous transformations, but it also highlights avenues for alternative, radically careful as well as carefully radical design (Latour 2009).
Abstract
The urban riots of the USA in the late 1960s were some of the most powerful political events of that era. As well as drawing numerous responses from media, the civil rights movement, black nationalists, and groups such as the Situationist International, the uprising also triggered a range of research responses including some of the first computational models of cities. T.C. Schelling’s “Models of Segregation” attempted to provide a logical model for racial segregation and laid much of the groundwork for what later became agent-based modeling. Such work is expressed contemporarily for instance in the riot and insurgency modeling of J.M. Epstein and others. For the state, such events mark a schizophrenic relationship to the contingency of riot and how the algorithms play out in such a scenario. How can it govern events that both demonstrate and excite its power and also undermine it? This paper will propose a tracing of the genealogy of such models alongside a reading of other ways of using urban modeling in relation to the urban riots of that era and now. A parrallel reference point here will be the work of W. Bunge a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. Bunge consistently argued that geometrical patterns and morphological laws express disadvantage and injustice under contemporary capitalism, and that identified patterns could be remedied by rational methods.
The history of computing, from G.W. Leibniz onwards, tangles with the problematic of developing rational approaches to complex, multi-dimensional problems with a high-degree of what J. Law describes as “messiness”. This paper will examine the ways in which rationality, or ratio, is positioned in relation to urban conflict as a means of discussing the relations between the city and software. The paper will develop a discussion of ratio in relation to questions of abstraction, reduction and empiricism. We are especially concerned to find a relationship between abstraction and the empirical that, by working with the materiality of computational systems recognises, and perhaps works with, the tendency to reduction(ism) but through which modes of abstraction may also work with the highly and complexly empirical.
