Data and the City

There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilizing data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from and make sense of the urban world. Recently, we have entered the age of big data, and now many aspects of everyday urban life are being captured as data and city management is mediated through data-driven technologies.

Data and the City

is the first edited collection to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of how this new era of urban big data is reshaping how we come to know and govern cities, and the implications of such a transformation. This book looks at the creation of real-time cities and data-driven urbanism and considers the relationships at play. By taking a philosophical, political, practical and technical approach to urban data, the authors analyse the ways in which data is produced and framed within socio-technical systems. They then examine the constellation of existing and emerging urban data technologies. The volume concludes by considering the social and political ramifications of data-driven urbanism, questioning whom it serves and for what ends.

This book, the companion volume to 2016’s Code and the City, offers the first critical reflection on the relationship between data, data practices and the city, and how we come to know and understand cities through data. It will be crucial reading for those who wish to understand and conceptualize urban big data, data-driven urbanism and the development of smart cities.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Data and the city
Part I: Data-driven cities
Chapter 2: A city is not a galaxy: understanding the city through urban data
Chapter 3: Data about cities: redefining big, recasting small
Chapter 4: Data-driven urbanism

Part II: Urban data
Chapter 5: Crime data and analytics: accounting for crime in the city
Chapter 6: Data provenance and possibility: thoughts towards a provenance schema for urban data
Chapter 7: Following data threads
Chapter 8: Sticky data: context and friction in the use of urban data proxies

Part III: Urban data technologies
Chapter 9: Urban data and city dashboards: six key issues
Chapter 10: Sharing and analysing data in smart cities
Chapter 11: Blockchain city: economic, social and cognitive ledgers
Chapter 12: Situating data infrastructures
Chapter 13: Ontologizing the city

Part IV: Urban data cultures and power
Chapter 14: Data cultures, power and the city
Chapter 15: Where are data citizens?
Chapter 16: Beyond quantification: a role for citizen science and community science in a smart city