Data-Driven Urban Representations: Systems thinking as an operational challenge for a deep reading of contemporary cities (original) (raw)

The urban geographical imagination in the age of big data

Big Data & Society, 2017

This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the 'new urban science' and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of big data in the urban context doesn't necessarily produce a single, greater understanding of the city as it actually is, but rather a highly variegated series of essentialized understandings of the city that render it knowable, governable and intervene-able. Through the construction of new, data-driven urban geographical imaginaries, these projects have opened up the space for urban interventions that work to depoliticize urban injustices and valorize new kinds of technical expertise as the means of going about solving these problems, opening up new possibilities for a remaking of urban space in the image of these sociotechnical paradigms. Ultimately, this paper argues that despite the importance of big data, as both a discourse and practice, to emerging forms of urban research and management, there is no singular or universal understanding of the urban that is promoted or developed through the application of these new sources of data, which in turn opens up meaningful possibilities for developing alternative uses of big data for understanding and intervening in the city in more emancipatory ways.

Urban Synthesis: A Case Of Data Driven Practices In Urban Design

Elementary Education Online, 2020

Urban areas or Cities are home to world’s majority of population. There are no cross roads to the intense use of technology by humans for the smallest or the tiniest job in the everyday life. While unknowingly creating tons of data which could reasonably benefit themselves while negotiating with the space in the long run. Considering the recent trends and its human benevolence, use of technologies to demonstrate case specific urban issues and their investigation persist to be the newer avenue of research. The aim of this research paper addresses the deep understanding of the nexus between negotiation of humans in the urban realm and the digital technology. The idea here is to elaborate with the trending digital technology of data creation, data synthesis and data analysis. Keywords: Urban Analytics, Urban Synthesis, Technology, Big Data, Urban Realm

Urbane-ing The City: Examining and Refining The Assumptions Behind Urban Informatics

Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, 2009

This chapter critically examines the notion of “the city” within urban informatics. Arguing that there is an overarching tendency to construe the city as an economically and spatially distinct social form, we review a series of system designs manifesting this assumption. Systematically characterizing the city as a dense ecology of impersonal social interactions occurring within recognizably public places, this construction can be traced to turn-of-thecentury scholarship about the metropolis. The idealized dweller of these spaces ...

Creative Urban Methods for the Datafied City

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2023

Datafied and smart cities produce some challenges for inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban futures. How can creative methods contribute to thinking and designing ways to imagine and co-create datafied cities with and for participatory citizenship and values for inclusion and sustainability? This question is central to the agenda of the research group [urban interfaces] and their collaboration in interdicisplinary and transdisciplinary partnerships. Working with and around the concepts of participation, criticality and imagination, the group brings cultural inquiry into datafied cities together with a methodological inquiry into creative urban methods. In the following, we sketch this agenda and approach and some recent examples of what such creative methods may yield.

Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big Data

The two authors of the MIT based Senseable City Lab show how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. The publication also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control.

FCJ-214 Visions of Urban Informatics: From Proximate Futures to Data-Driven Urbanism

The Fibreculture Journal

Urban informatics is positioned to offer unique insights into complex urban processes through use of big data and pervasive computing. This paper examines the rise of urban informatics as a field of expert urban knowledge, with a focus on the particular visions and epistemologies of the city embedded within the field. By exploring its emergence over the past decade, and reflecting on connections with previous eras of urban computing, the article explores questions about the kind of city that is occupied, resolved and reformed by urban informatics and associated lab-style data sciences.

Digital Urban Narratives: The Images of the City in the Age of Big Data

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2020

The massive presence and use of digital technologies in urban areas generate a growing amount of data. This new knowledge, from one side, assigns to the city the new posthuman image of a smart system; from the other side, the polyphony of data-sources interferes with the narrative structure of the city, increasing its complexity and multiplying both the possibilities of its explorations as the management and design of its futures. In fact, the integration of digital tools for the collection, analysis and visualization of data enables the simulation of possible transformation scenarios. But how this system of fluctuating parameters relates to the physical space of the city? How these multiple virtual possibilities change the urban narrative? The intersection between digital mediation and physical urban space is the object of this paper, that moves from an interdisciplinary perspective, between narratology and urban design. We analyzed three case studies (Saint Petersburg, Bologna, Barcelona), representative of how the use of digital technologies transforms the representation of the city. In Saint Petersburg we have reshaped the (semantic) landscape of the city through Instagram data; in Bologna we have followed the (digital) traces of the temporary community of students, investigating the interaction and interference between the 'univercity' and the physical urban environment; in Barcelona we have analyzed an urban fragment (the street of La Rambla), considering it as a microcosmos of data.

Data driven, networked urbanism

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.

Data-Driven Processes in Participatory Urbanism: The “Smartness” of Historical Cities

Architecture and Culture, 2019

Cities have always been arenas wherein social, ethnic and cultural differences lead to social friction. People from various cultures meet in spatial interfaces and this interaction, besides intensifying their awareness of diversity, imposes the integration of existing and newly brought cultural expressions with distinct socio-spatial and historical references. This article reflects on the resilience of smart systems promoted today for user-personalization when interacting with, and in the efficient operation of, city infrastructures. Specifically, the article addresses the capacity of smart digital tools and participatory processes to stimulate city data interpretation, interoperability and sharing processes as another commons of the city. The article foregrounds user-driven co-creation methodologies and information and communications technologies tools that enable adaptive and flexible, cross-cultural, data interpretation by communities that appropriate public spaces. Digital technologies can act as a catalyst for engaging people with their urban environment and cultures, and therefore with urban commons.

City Science: A Chaotic Concept – And an Enduring Imperative

Planning Theory & Practice

Amid widespread enthusiasm for 'scientific' approaches to reading and understanding the city, driven by the increasing availability of 'big data' and sophisticated tech-driven analytics, we call for greater clarity in the terms and genealogies of the 'new' sciences of the urban. We appeal to those observing and participating in the latest manifestations of 'city science' to recognize the intellectual and practical inheritance of their urban craft. At the same time, we call for planners and social scientists, who would be critical of the emergence of city sciences, to move beyond longstanding debates of previous decades, and to engage more meaningfully and productively with new analytical approaches to understanding and intervening in urban processes. It is only through sustained intellectual engagements that we can hope to develop the new sciences of the city as an art, and to respond effectively to the global nature of the urban challenges that confront us. The imperative of providing a summative account of the global changes generated by and impacting on cities has catalysed debate on how best to understand urban systems. Multiple articulations and interpretations of the 'global urban' and calls for a 'new science of cities' echo the passage of transnational policy prescriptions that include but are not limited to an urban Sustainable Development Goal. The race to reconfigure planning heuristics to prioritize urban transformation in order to address multiple global crises is already understandably, if possibly counterproductively, contested. Debates surrounding the 'new' city sciences are polarized. On the one hand, a new generation of tech-savvy data scientists, spatial modellers, and analysts confidently express their ability to predict and explain city processes at unprecedented scales of complexity. On the other hand, those trained to see the world as fundamentally shaped by contingent meanings and subjectivities may see in such approaches little more than old positivism in new bottles, or perhaps a hubristic overstep of urban non-specialists onto their turf (Derudder & Van Meeteren, 2019). In some ways, then, the discourses of 'city science' invert Ian Hacking's (1999) reflection on the celebrity of the term 'social construction': The phrase has become code. If you use it favourably, you deem yourself rather radical. If you trash the phrase, you declare that you are rational, reasonable, and respectable. (p. vii) Might not a dismissal of 'city science' have something of a radical feel to it; a statement of commitment to a certain kind of criticality and (certainly anti-neoliberal!) politics? Or, when used favourably, does one not mark oneself as grounded with a bloodhound fidelity to data, or even as (that rare breed) a believer in human progress through technological mastery? However, perhaps CONTACT