Urban data politics

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.