25-26 November 2021
Urban data politics
in times of crisis
Institute of Geography,
University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Online Conference with an in-person core
This November, the University of Neuchâtel welcomes you to attend the conference, ‘Urban Data Politics: In Times of Crisis’.
A select panel of speakers will provide a mix of virtual and in-person presentations – all streamed to the Cisco Webex link emailed to registered attendees. The programme below details the presentations and topics covered across the course of two days, November 25th and 26th.
Please note – registration for the conference has now closed.
We look forward to (virtually) welcoming you to Neuchâtel.
CONFERENCE CALL
It is well established that data is inherently political (Kitchin, 2014). Data have come to play a more important role in the evolving power-geometries (Massey 1993) that characterise contemporary social and political assemblages. At a time where nation states have lost their long-standing (quasi)-monopoly over data (Bigo et al. 2019), there has been a resurgence of interest among civil society organisations and citizens to extract, produce, circulate and politicise the data revolution.
This conference will focus on the relations between urban life and everyday data crises. Indeed, the Covid-19 crisis highlights the impact of data on cities and how entangled urban lives are with data revolution. In this conference we take an expanded understanding of data crises in terms of its everyday manifestations, not just in terms of instances of breakdown such as the pandemic. We take data crises as forms of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) that accumulates over time through various forms of everyday and mundane data violence that deny access to urban infrastructure, welfare and services from the state (Guma, 2013). The pandemic crisis, as other critical junctures past and present, works in this context as a heuristic tool. It makes strategies, interests, ‘governance games’ (Meijer, 2018) and functional relations more visible. Crises also tend to accelerate and legitimate the use of data, algorithms and technologies for nefarious means.
The aim of this conference then is to engage with data politics and crises in all its urban expressions – big data, deep data, small data, no data, data scarcity and dataveillance alongside its political and social implications in a context where our ‘data bodies’ (Critical Art Ensemble, 1998) are increasingly the markers of our identities and experiences. In this context, urban life is the terrain where data index phenomena that are close to people’s everyday lives (from emotions to access to basic infrastructures), are contested, can support rights claims, veil or unveil social and political issues. They are criticised for being selective, biased, inexistent or, in contrast, support hopes of empowerment and ‘evidence-based’ policies.
This conference invites contributions on how data politics shape urban life in times of crisis. The intention is to initiate debates that uncover the use of data not limited to ‘born digital’ (Crang, 2015) objects and measures of management. The aim of the conference is to investigate ways of contextualising, archiving and historicising data, provincialising it through its long experiences of colonialism, racism, capitalism, and globalisation in situ. The conference will draw upon its multiple forms to articulate ways through which data can work for those historically excluded from its conceptualisation, collection, manipulation and representation. We will examine the politics of data through its visibility and invisibility, through forms of resistance that emerge from survival, refusal and civil disobedience.
- Bigo, D., Isin, E., Ruppert, E. (2019) Data politics: worlds, subjects, rights. London: Routledge.
- Crang M (2015) The promises and perils of a digital geohumanities. cultural geographies 22(2). SAGE Publications Ltd: 351–360. DOI: 10.1177/1474474015572303.
- Critical Art Ensemble (1998) Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, & New Eugenic Consciousness. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Available at: http://critical-art.net/books/flesh/flesh7.pdf
- Guma PK (2013) Public-sector reform, E-Government and the search for excellence in Africa: Experiences from Uganda. Electronic Journal of e-Government 11(2): 241.
- Kitchin R (2014) The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. SAGE.
- Meijer A (2018) Datapolis: A Public Governance Perspective on “Smart Cities”. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance: 195–206. DOI: 10.1093/ppmgov/gvx017.
- Nixon R (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Conference Programme
25-26
November
25 November
Ayona Datta & Ola Söderström
Introduction to the workshop
Rob Kitchin
Urban data politics: data power, capitalism, ethics and justice
AbdouMaliq Simone
Urban landscapes of feral measures: Making everything and nothing count at the peripheries
Lunch
Radical cities: The city as interface for alternate data futures
Gillian Rose
Glow and flow: aesthetics as power in urban digital imagery
Break
Ayona Datta & Ola Söderström
Webinars and War-rooms: Techno-politics of data in shaping COVID19 narratives
26 November
Digital peripheries and techno-driven subaltern urbanisms: An emerging idiom for infrastructural politics and digital activism in the global South
Coffee break
An urban data politics of scale: Lessons from South Africa
Lunch
Reconfigurations of the city and the digital under Covid-19 restrictions: Through the lens of delivery platforms in Nairobi
Citizenship, gamification and crisis: seeing through (smart)glass, darkly
Break
Ayona Datta & Ola Söderström
Conclusions and discussion on publication
This conference serves as a capstone event for the Swiss National Science Foundation project,
'Smart Cities: Provincialising the global urban age in India and South Africa’.
The project is a four year international research collaboration between University of Neuchâtel and University College London on Indian and South African smart cities. Through a comparative study of cities in these two Global South countries, this project researches globally circulating urban development narratives around ICT and data-driven urbanism, its ‘mutations’ in different urban contexts and ‘urban hacking’ at the scale of everyday life.
For more information and links to research outputs, please visit the project website.
Register
Location
University of Neuchâtel
Institute of Geography (IGG)
Espace Tilo-Frey 1,
CH-2000 Neuchâtel