Alison Powell London School of Economics March 31 2015 abpowell apowelllseacuk Citizenship in Data cities What is a data city What is citizenship Who are the intermediaries Why does it matter ID: 565446
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Slide1
Data Intermediaries and Citizenship: Who benefits?
Alison Powell, London School of Economics
March 31, 2015
@
a_b_powell
a.powell@lse.ac.ukSlide2
Citizenship in Data citiesWhat is a data city?
What is citizenship?
Who are the intermediaries?
Why does it matter?Slide3
What is a data city?Computational paradigms
Data based intermediaries
Public private partnershipsSlide4Slide5
Computational paradigmsSlide6
Typical framingsSlide7
Top down ‘Smart Cities’Slide8
CCTV is now the single most heavily-funded crime prevention measure operating outside the criminal justice system, accounting for more than three quarters of spending on crime prevention by the Home Office. (
Cambell
Collaboration, 2009)Slide9
Bottom up smart cities?Slide10
Smart City Definitions
“Smart Governance, Smart People, Smart Living, Smart Mobility, Smart Economy and Smart Environment”
(EU Smart Cities Report, 2014)
“
In a Smart City, networks are linked together, supporting and positively feeding off each other, so that the technology and data gathering should: be able to constantly gather,
analyse
and distribute data about the city to
optimise
efficiency and effectiveness in the pursuit of competitiveness and sustainability; be able to communicate and share such data and information around the city using common definitions and standards so it can be easily re-used; be able to act multi-functionally, which means they should provide solutions to multiple problems from a holistic city perspective.
“ (Copenhagen
Cleantech
Cluster, 2012)Slide11
Siemens on “smart cites” “Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service…The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems
.”
What we encounter in this statement is an unreconstructed logical positivism, which, among other things, implicitly holds that the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable, and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in the state of a technical system, without bias or distortion. As applied to the affairs of cities, it is effectively an argument there
is one and only one universal and transcendently correct solution
to each identified individual or collective human need; that this solution can
be arrived at algorithmically, via the operations of a technical system furnished with the proper inputs
; and that this solution is something which can be
encoded in public policy, again without distortion
. ( Greenfield, 2013)Slide12
Who mediates?“Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are highly important, especially where the private partners bring in developer expertise, finance and technology capabilities, as is the involvement of citizens and other end-users.
” (EU Smart cities report) Slide13Slide14
What is Citizenship in a data city?Representation
Data +
Datafication
Alternative mediationsSlide15
THE DATA-CITIZEN DRIVEN
CITY in “City
Sense - Shaping our environment with real-time data
”, 2011Slide16
What is citizenship?Citizens
Consumers
Producer-consumersSlide17
‘the city is not only an experimental space, but also a political space where struggles for power, control and ownership are reflected and shaped through the intense (mediated) meetings of people, technologies and places’ (
Myria
Georgiou, 2008,
p.224). Slide18
With pressure to save money and ‘roll back’ the state, governments may shift
from seeing citizens as those with civic responsibilities and engagements, to classifying them as consumers who purchase services from providers. Slide19
“Ofcom [the UK communications regulator]
has preferred to align the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ so that the interests of both may be met, as far as possible, through an economic agenda of market regulation. Among civil society groups, there is growing concern that the citizen interest is becoming marginalized as the consumer discourse becomes more widespread
. (Livingstone, Lunt and Miller 2013) Slide20Slide21
Voice: “the effective opportunity for people to speak and be heard on what affects their lives” (Nick
Couldry
)Slide22
“we have seen arrogant paternalism, crass boasts about commercial profits, a lack of clear governance, and a failure to communicate basic science properly.” (Ben
Goldacre
on
care.data)Slide23
Who are the brokers?Information intermediaries
PPPs
Corporate actors
Civic actorsSlide24Slide25Slide26Slide27
At the moment, Uber is so effective because it controls all the key data points: our phones tell it all it needs to know about planning a trip. If, however, control over data were to pass to cities,
Uber
– a company with few assets – would hardly be worth the $40bn that it’s valued at today. Surely, an algorithm to match supply and demand cannot be that expensive? Cities such as
New York and Chicago
, undoubtedly under pressure from taxi companies, seem to have grasped the importance of mounting a unified tech-savvy response to
Uber’s
assault. Both are trying to launch a centralised single city-wide taxi app, which could dispatch conventional taxis in a Uber-like efficient manner
. (
Morzov
, Feb 1 2014; Guardian Comment is Free)Slide28
Citizen data cities: 596 Acres, NYCSlide29
Our work is unique because
we actually
create
maps and data
to understand issues facing city residents. We believe that a lack of data has sometimes allowed for government to evade its responsibilities to provide basic entitlements to all city
residents….
We work closely with individuals and citizens’ groups to create data
that can help them counter inaccurate or incomplete government data, and make better claims on the government for their rights and entitlements
. (Transparent Chennai)
Civic Brokers: Transparent ChennaiSlide30
http://youtu.be/7hAniWYUBt8Slide31Slide32
What gets calculated?Quantifiable information
Financially valuable information
Sensitive information?Slide33
I-see, 2003
Infrastructural inversion(s)Slide34
http://www.mulksuzlestirme.org/Slide35
Why does it matter?Citizenship
Public and social responsibility
Power, politics and sustainabilitySlide36Slide37Slide38Slide39
“… it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now.” (Howard
Zinn
)Slide40
Thank you@
a_b_powell
http://
alisonpowell.ca