A new paper by Rob Kitchin has been published in DIS Magazine as part of its fascinating ‘Data issue‘. The paper explores the extent to which geosurveillance is becoming pervasive and routinised and the consequences of such geosurveillance with respect to civil rights and governance, and is accompanied by some original art by Mark Dorf (also used in the site banner above) It starts thus:
“For the past couple of decades there has been a steady stream of analysis that has documented the ways in which the rollout of new digital and networked technologies have enabled increasingly pervasive and extensive forms of state and corporate surveillance. Such technologies have the capability to capture and communicate data about their use; simultaneously a wealth of sophisticated software has been developed that processes and acts on such data in automated, autonomous, and automatic ways. Importantly, the use of embedded GPS, sensors, and digital cameras are enabling location and movement to be tracked, facilitating extensive geosurveillance of people and places.
Continuous geosurveillance relies on the production of spatial big data, and in particular the notion of the “smart city” takes center stage, that is, urban landscapes that can be monitored, managed and regulated in real-time using ICT infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. Such instrumented cities are promoted as providing enhanced and more efficient and effective city services, ensuring safety and security, and providing resilience to economic and environmental shocks, but they also seriously infringe upon citizen’s privacy and are being used to profile and socially sort people, enact forms of anticipatory governance, and enable control creep, that is re-appropriation for uses beyond their initial design.
What follows is a consideration of the unfettered rush to create “smart cities” that is sensitive to the risks involved in extensively monitored urban landscapes. Are too much data about people and places being generated by public and private institutions and used to profile, sort, and sift in pernicious ways? In the rush to create smart cities is the privacy and freedom we expect in liberal democracies being eroded? Perhaps most alarming, are we creating cities that represent the interests of a select group of corporations and technocrats, rather than producing ones that represent the best interests of all citizens? ….”
Late last week I, and many others I would presume, were left further behind in the digital era at the stroke of a pen. What my monthly bill cheekily termed broadband was officially no longer! In fact I never really had broadband to begin with, reliant as I am on ancient lines of copper which valiantly struggled to connect me to a quaint legacy telephone exchange deep in rural Wexford. Often it has proven more useful as an indicator of wind speed than a delivery method of zeros and ones, with wind-generated friction on the line reducing those precious few minutes of 1.2 Mbps connectivity still further on stormy evenings. Well in the US the telecoms watchdog, the FCC, has just raised the bar on what can officially be labelled as broadband, state-side at least, by redefining the minimum download speed at 25 Mbps. I can but dream! Continue reading →
On January 28th 2015, Ben Williamson visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on “Programmable Schools”. Ben is a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Stirling. His current research focuses on learning analytics, policy labs, and the emergence of new forms of digital education governance and digital policy instruments. This presentation drew on the ESRC-funded Code Acts in Education project that Ben is currently leading. Continue reading →
A new open access paper – ‘Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards’ – based on research from the Programmable City project has just been published in the journal Regional Studies, Regional Science. Below is the abstract. Click here to download the full PDF. The paper forms an anchor to a small forum on the topic, with responses from Mike Batty, Matt Wilson, and Meg Holden & Sara Moreno Pires. Continue reading →
Session 5 is our last session of the Code and the City workshop. Video of the previous sessions are here: Session 1, Session 2, Session 3 and Session 4.
Session 5: Cities, code and governance
Coding alternative modes of governance: ‘Smart cities’ to ‘data cities’ Alison Powell, Media & Communications, LSE
Abstract
Within the last twenty years the concept of the “smart city” has emerged and re-emerged, focusing on various ways that technology layers new capacities over existing urban infrastructures. These “smart cities” are changing. The “smart city” of the early 2000s was a communicative city, while the smart city of the 2010s is a data city. The dynamics of these are different: a communicative city promises representation through voice – the ability to speak and listen – while a data city promises representation through information – information collected about individuals is fed back to civic decision makers who enact decisions based upon it. Data is thus a product flowing from citizen to government. In data cities governance is also different: both communicative and data cities could be the result of top-down governance decisions or subject to bottom-up reconfigurations, the ways that those decisions are enacted are quite different. A communicative city promises a democratic value to citizens of greater access to information, while a data city promises a value to governments of greater access to data about citizens. This structural inequity is particularly evident when we consider what must happen to data in a data city – it must be calculated.
Within a macro-political perspective, centralized calculation of data gathered from citizens is essential for developing visions of responsive, data-rich, centrally controlled smart cities. This seems to close off the potential for an alternative mode of governance for the contemporary data city. However, the expansion of participatory culture has created efforts to democratize collection of data about cities, through citizen science projects including air quality and noise mapping. In these projects, the legitimacy of the hierarchical city is challenged by the oppositional data collected by citizens, taken as evidence of an opposition between the “constituted knowledge” of institutions like city governance and the “adaptive knowledge” of loosely organized communities of practice (see Mansell, 2013). This contest of knowledge contrasts the two modes of combining citizenship, technology and space, the ‘hierarchical city’ and the ‘peer to peer’ city. Participatory data collection does seem to enact an alternative to centralized authority, but it is not clear whether data – without calculation – is really shifting governance.
Building upon the central contrast between hierarchical and peer to peer cities, this paper considers how the “micro politics” of cities are altered as calculation is integrated into civic participation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of peer to peer cities including community networks, citizen science, it argues that peer to peer calculation is the most significant yet most difficult activation of alternative governance of urban space.
Big data and stratification urban futures Agnieszka Leszczynski, Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
Abstract
Code has been recognized as intimately implicated in the socio-spatial stratification of cities. Big data in particular are underwriting a sweeping intensification of practices of socio-spatial sorting, which refers to the organization of city spaces into social and economic categories so as to categorize and effectively manage the individuals who inhabit them. These practices directly shape and reinforce material urban geographies of social disparity. One of the primary areas where we find evidence of this is in the increasing leveraging of big data towards the prefiguring of urban spatial pre-futures of deviance. Big data and attendant analytics are reproducing and reifying disenfranchisement alog axes of race, class, socioeconomic status, and geography at scales from the city as a whole to individual neighbourhoods so as to create material spaces for specific kinds of vertical surveillance interventions (e.g., increased police presence), and to justify the targeting of particular neighborhoods and neighbourhood populations for these practices (e.g., by prefiguring them as criminalized a priori). The ways in which this is enacted in practice is
discussed with reference to, amongst others, the EMOTIVE Twitter analytics software program designed as a riot prevention system in the UK, and the Chicago Police Department’s turn to big data analytics as a predictive policing measure.
The cryptographic city David M. Berry, Media & Communication, University of Sussex
Abstract
Questions about opacity and transparency have been turned upside down in the post-Snowden era. With the certainty of tracking technologies, surveillance and monitoring, a new turn towards anonymity, opaque presence and crypto-identity has emerged in digital networks. This paper looks to examine questions of cryptography and encryption in relation to the city, particularly in relation to the increasing mediation of life through algorithms, software and code. Key questions are the relationship between opacity and opaque presence and notions of publicness and city space, but also the way in which the city as a programmable city will increasingly rely upon the cryptographic layers. Through an engagement with the notion of ‘capture’ the paper seeks to think through the limits of what we might call plaintext code/space and reflect on the crypto code/spaces and their materialities.
Additional Videos from previous sessions
Session 4 – Cultural curation and urban Interfaces: Locative media as experimental platforms for cultural data Nanna Verhoeff, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Abstract
My contribution is concerned with the way in which urban interfaces are used for access to cultural collections – whether institutionally embedded, or bottom-up, participatory collections. Designed in code and exploring affordances of new location-based and/or mobile technologies for urban space-making, these interfaces are thought to be powerful tools for ideals of participatory urban culture. I propose to approach these “projects” as curatorial machines, as urban experimental laboratories for cultural data. This entails a threefold perspective, on curation, on code, and on principles of creative (sometimes artistic or playful) experimentation.
For this, we may remind ourselves of the curatorial project of museal and archival institutions, of preserving, and “caring” for the object, as well as creating new contexts for the object and providing access for an urban public – a field which is very much in transition as a result of current ambitions for new public engagement and ideals of participation, pervasive in all socio-economic and political regions of contemporary culture. Simultaneously we witness the current interest in the principles of data curation as the care for, interaction with, interpretation and visualisation of digital data, as the datafication and codification of culture invades all corners of urban life. Design of interfaces is central in how we can access, work with, and make meaning with digital culture. Departing from the concept of dispositif in the analysis of interfaces, I propose to bring together the fact that the interfaces are coded and designed, to (playfully) experiment with their affordances.
In my approach to this intersection of datafication of, and the proliferation of interfaces for “culture”, I aim to develop heuristic tools for critical evaluation of this phenomenon, broadly bracketed as [urban interfaces] as interfaces of cultural curation.
If you missed any of the videos from the first three sessions, they are here: Session 1, Session 2 and Session 3.
Session 4: Cities, knowledge classification and ontology
Cities and context: The codification of small areas through geodemographic classification Alex Singleton, Geography, University of Liverpool
Abstract
Geodemographic classifications group small area geography into categories based on shared population and built environment characteristics. This process of “codification” aims to create a common language for the description of salient internal structure of places, and by extension, enable their comparison across geographic contexts. The typological study of areas is not a new phenomenon, and contemporary geodemographics emerged from research conducted in the 1970s that aimed at providing a new method of targeting deprivation relief funding within the city of Liverpool. This city level model was later extended for the national context, and became the antecedent of contemporary geodemographic classification. This paper explores the origins of geodemographics, to first illustrate that the coding of areas is not just a contemporary practice; and then extends this discussion to consider how methodological choices influence classification structure. Being open with such methods is argued as being essential for classifications to engender greater social responsibility.
The city and the Feudal Internet: Examining institutional materialities Paul Dourish, Informatics, UC Irvine
Abstract
In “Seeing like a City,” Marianne Valverde turns to urban regulation to counter some of James Scott’s arguments about the homogenizing gaze of high modern statehood. Cities, she notes, are highly regulated, but without the panoptic order that Scott suggests. They operate instead as a splintered patchwork of regulatory boundaries – postal codes, tax assessment districts, business improvement zones, school catchment areas, zoning blocks, sanitation districts, and similar divisions that don’t quite line up. Arguments about online experience and the consequences of the Internet have a similar air to Scott’s analysis of statehood – they posit a world of consistent, compliant, and compatible information systems, in which the free flow of information and the homogenizing gaze of the digital erases boundaries (both for good and ill).
In fact, the organization of the Internet — that is, of our technologically- and historically-specific internet –is one of boundaries, barriers, and fiefdoms. We have erected all sorts of internal barriers to the free flow of information for a range of reasons, including the desire for autonomy and the extraction of tolls and rents. In this talk I want to explore some aspects of the historical specificity of our Internet and consider what this has to tell us about the ways that we talk about code and the city.
Semantic cities: Coded geopolitics and rise of the semantic web Heather Ford and Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Abstract
In 2012, Google rolled out a service called Knowledge Graph which would enable users to have their search query resolved without having to navigate to other websites. So, instead of just presenting users with a diverse list of possible answers to any query, Google selects and frames data about cities, countries and millions of other objects sourced from sites including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook and Freebase under its own banner.
For many, this heralded Google’s eventual recognition of the benefits of the Semantic Web: an idea and ideal that the Web could be made more efficient and interconnected when websites share a common framework that would allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, community, and geographic boundaries. This move towards the Semantic Web can be starkly seen in the ways that Wikipedia, as one of the foundations for Google’s Knowledge Graph, has begun to make significant epistemic changes. With a Google funded project called WikiData, Wikipedia has begun to use Semantic Web principles to centralise ‘factual’ data across all language versions of the encyclopaedia. For instance, this would mean that the population of a city need only be altered once in WikiData rather in all places where it occurs in Wikipedia’s 285 language versions.
For Google, these efficiencies provide a faster experience for users who will stay on their website rather than navigating away. For Wikipedia, such efficiencies promise to centralise the updating process so that data are consistent and so that smaller language Wikipedias can obtain automated assistance in translating essential data for articles more rapidly.
This paper seeks to critically interrogate these changes in the digital architectures and infrastructures of our increasingly augmented cities. What shifts in power result from these changes in digital infrastructures? How are semantic standardisations increasingly encoded into our urban environments and experiences? And what space remains for digital counter-narratives, conflict, and contention?
To tackle those questions, we trace data about two cities as they travel through Google’s algorithms and the Semantic Web platforms of Wikidata and Wikipedia. In each case, we seek to understand how particular reflections of the city are made visible or invisible and how particular publics are given voice or silenced. Doing so leads us to ultimately reflect on how these new alignments of code and content shape how cities are presented, experienced, and brought into being.
