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Urban Big Data and City Dashboards: Praxis and Politics Rob Kitchin NIRSA, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Urban Big Data and City Dashboards: Praxis and Politics
Rob Kitchin
NIRSA, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Data and the city
• Rich history of data being generated about cities
• Long had data-informed urbanism
• Urban data are a key input for: • understanding city life
• solving urban problems
• formulating policy and plans
• guiding operational governance
• modelling possible futures
• tackling a diverse set of other issues
• Being complemented and replaced by data-driven urbanism
Urban big data
• Directed
o Surveillance: CCTV, drones/satellite
o Scaled public admin records
• Automated
o Automated surveillance
o Digital devices
o Sensors, actuators, transponders, meters (IoT)
o Interactions and transactions
• Volunteered
o Social media
o Sousveillance/wearables
o Crowdsourcing/neogeography
o Citizen science
Urban big data
• Diverse range of public and private generation of fine-scale (uniquely indexical) data about citizens and places in real-time: • utilities
• transport providers
• environmental agencies
• mobile phone operators
• social media sites
• travel and accommodation websites
• home appliances and entertainment systems
• financial institutions and retail chains
• private surveillance and security firms
• remote sensing, aerial surveying
• emergency services
• Producing a data deluge that can be combined, analyzed, acted upon
Data-driven urbanism
www.dublindashboard.ie
Urban Dashboards
• Dashboards provide a visual means to organize and interact with data
• Act as cognitive tools that improve a user’s ‘span of control’ over
voluminous, varied and quickly transitioning data
• Enable a user to explore the characteristics and structure of datasets
and interpret trends
• Power and utility of urban dashboards are their claims:
• to show in detail and often in real-time the state of play of cities
• to translate the messiness and complexities of cities into rational, detailed,
systematic, ordered forms of knowledge
• to enable us to know the city as it actually is through objective,
trustworthy, factual data
• Dashboards are underpinned by a powerful realist epistemology for
monitoring and understanding cities, underpinned by an instrumental
rationality in which ‘hard facts’ trumps other kinds of knowledge and
provide the basis for formulating solutions to urban issues
Urban Dashboards
• Realist epistemology and instrumental rationality of urban
dashboards has been critiqued from a number of
perspectives. Dashboards:
• are not neutral, technical, commonsensical tools; constitute a data
assemblage
• act as translators and engines rather than mirrors
• are reductive, atomizing complex, contingent relationships and
decontextualizes a city from context
• Going to examine these three critiques by examining the
development of the Dublin Dashboard, launched in
September 2014
Building the dashboard
• ERC grant (Nov 2012) SFI grant; Leverage off of AIRO
• Produce a dashboard that would allow these questions to be answered:
• how well is Dublin performing?
• what’s happening in the city right now?
• how does Dublin compare to other places?
• None of the four Dublin local authorities were approached whilst formulating the project proposal
• Funded Sept 2013; postdoc started Nov 2013
• Started data audit, background research, system design
• Set out some principles:
• no closed elements with all of the visualizations on the site are accessible to everyone;
• all of the data used on the site would be open in nature
• the site would be very easy to use, with users requiring no mapping or graphing skills;
• the site would be interactive allowing users to explore the data
• Approached DCC Dec 2013 as they were about to tender for indicators project
• Met DCC 18th Dec 2013
Building the dashboard
• Reconvened with DCC in February; discussion concerning data, desired indicators, scope, etc
• Shortly afterwards reconfigured scope of dashboard to be able to answer these questions: • where are the nearest facilities/services to me? what are the spatial patterns of
different phenomena? what are the future development plans for the city? how do I report issues about the city? how can I freely access data about the city?
• Two new principles: • as much data as possible, regardless of source or type, would be made available
through the site;
• existing resources and apps would be used if they did a good job to remove duplication of effort
• Over next few months spent iteratively planning and building the dashboard. Included: • on-going negotiation and decision making with respect to data set inclusion
• reworking of site organization and playing with the look and feel of the interface
• email, phone exchanges and meetings with data holders
• liaising with DCC offices to try and source data sets or hunting through websites to discover data or interesting existing data visualisation projects for the city
• Meeting with other stakeholder and interested companies
• Launched Sept 2014
Building the dashboard
Unpacking the Dublin Dashboard
• The dashboard is not simply a technical assemblage of networked infrastructure, hardware, operating systems, assorted software, data and an interface achieved through neutral, objective processes of scientific conception, engineering and coding
• Rather, the dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing systems, and power geometries
Unpacking the Dublin Dashboard
• The production, maintenance and on-going research and development of dashboards unfold contingently and relationally • They are ontogenetic in nature, constantly in a state of becoming, evolving
through a series of individuations and transductions
• The praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects • Just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional
landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape, sometimes in profound ways
• The discussions concerning the dashboard produced reflexivity within DCC about its data production and management and its wider smart cities strategy
• At the same time, our engagement with DCC and other state agencies altered our thinking with respect to the parameters, design and approach being taken and our perception of the issues and tasks at hand
• It also inflected our wider thinking on smart city technologies and most specifically their messy and contested visioning and deployment by and within local authorities
The politics of data
• The data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city
• Whilst the dashboard might seek to show the city as it actually is, it is inevitably partial and limited
• Dashboards only visualize a sample of the data that exists with respect to the city
• These data have a politics
• Data and urban analytics are not neutral, objective, value-free, commonsensical, pragmatic, and ‘free from the regulatory force of philosophy’
• Data do not exist independently of the ideas, instruments, practices, contexts, knowledges and systems used to generate, process, analyze and interpret them
• Analytics are dependent on veracity and provenance of data
• Urban data often published with metadata concerning measurement, sampling frame, handling, veracity (accuracy, fidelity), uncertainty, error, bias, reliability, calibration, lineage
• Rarely are the algorithmic black-boxes exposed so that calculations are open to scrutiny
• There are issues such as MAUP and other ecological fallacies that shape interpretation
Data quality and
provenance
The politics of dashboards
• How the data can be presented is mutable
• Dashboards provide oligoptic views of the world: views from certain vantage points, using particular tools, rather than an all-seeing view
• Dashboards do not simply present data; they actively produce meaning
• They set the forms and parameters for how data are communicated and what the user can see and engage with
• They shape what questions can be asked of the underlying data and what answers can be obtained
• They do not act as mirrors, but as engines
• They actively frame and do work in the world
The politics of dashboards
• Urban analytics and systems express a normative notion
about what should be measured, for what reasons, and
what they should tell us
• And they have normative effect - being used to influence
decision-making, modify institutional behaviour, condition
workers, nudge consumers, socially sort individuals, etc
• As such these data & tools are never objective or neutral
Conclusion
• Urban data is proliferating, as are ways to make sense and act on those data
• Urban dashboards are one way to collate, process, visualize, analyze and share urban data, and are becoming more common
• Their power is their assumed realist epistemology and instrumental rationality, and their supposed ability to translate the messiness and complexities of cities into rational, detailed, systematic, ordered forms of knowledge; to enable us to know the city as it actually is
• This paper has provided a critique of such a view by unpacking the building of the Dublin dashboard to reveal the praxis and politics of urban data and dashboards
• Dashboards, it has been argued, are complex socio-technical assemblages that are contingently, relationally and contextually emergent
• However, rather than opposing dashboards, alternatively we advocate re-imagining, explicitly recognizing their inherent politics, praxes and contingencies
Background
http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/progcity
@progcity
@robkitchin
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/rob-kitchin
