Controversing the datafied smart city: Conceptualising a ‘making-controversial’ approach to civic engagement

Baibarac-Duignan, Corelia; Lange, Michiel de

doi:10.1177/20539517211025557

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The fact that the smart city is mainly considered as a privacy issue, and that privacy is almost structurally considered to be a personal concern, could be considered as a clash between private and public values (cf. Baibarac-Duignan and De Lange, 2021): our respondents appear to be prepared to deny themselves as well as other members of society (potential criminals) their rights on privacy for the sake of promises of security (cf. Datta, 2018), which indicates that there is hardly any collective awareness of the fact that the way in which we deal with the smart city determines the functioning and quality of our public sphere and space and, with that, how our democratic rights are safeguarded and our collective futures formed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Datta, 2018), which indicates that there is hardly any collective awareness of the fact that the way in which we deal with the smart city determines the functioning and quality of our public sphere and space and, with that, how our democratic rights are safeguarded and our collective futures formed. Strikingly, the respondents themselves treat the smart city as a politically neutral technological construct, which minimizes the opportunities for frictions, controversies and contestations within the public debate, whereas precisely conflict and struggle are considered the essential ingredients of democratic city-making (Baibarac-Duignan and De Lange, 2021; Fraser, 1990; Lefebvre, 1996 [1968], 1991).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem

2022

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Digitization and datafication of public space have a significant impact on how cities are developed, governed, perceived and used. As technological developments are based upon political decisions, which impact people’s everyday lives, and from which not everyone benefits or suffers equally, we argue that ‘the smart city’ should be part of continuous public debate; that it should be considered and treated as a social problem. Through nine focus groups, we invited respondents to explore and discuss instances and dilemmas of the smart city. We investigated which interpretative repertoires they used to frame the smart city as a social and actionable problem. Following Blumer's and Gamson's theories on the social construction of problems and on collective action frames, we assessed respondents’ discursive interpretations and their subjective construction of their senses of injustice, agency and identity regarding this subject. We find that – in the context of the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands – citizens do not experience and consider the smart city as a social and actionable problem. Although they do associate the technological development of smart cities with potential threats, this does not change or constrain their sense of ‘actionability’, nor their behaviour, as they consider themselves to be powerless individuals regarding what, in their eyes, is a complex, elusive and inevitable situation they are confronted with. Strikingly, rather than specifically and contextually reflecting on smart city issues, respondents tended to express their concerns in the more general context of digital and data technologies invading everyday life.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem

2022

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“…The topics that the groups decided to focus on included litter, wastelands, and paint waste. To collect and map data, we developed the workshop as a "walk-shop, " a method combining the experiential qualities of walking with a workshop setting (e.g., Powell, 2018;Baibarac-Duignan and de Lange, 2021). The participants collected data on the amount and kind of litter they found in the area, the amount of wasteland that would allow for biodiversity, and the willingness and resources of people working in the area to share and sell their paint on a second-hand market.…”

Section: Step : Making Acquaintancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materials and modes of translation: Re-imagining inclusive “zero”-waste futures

Eijnden

Baibarac-Duignan²,

Lange³

et al. 2022

Front. Sustain. Cities

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In this paper, we present and reflect upon a creative and participatory approach for engaging citizens in imagining desirable “zero”-waste futures that include different values and perspectives. The approach emerged through a 4-month collaboration involving academic researchers and creative professionals and was prototyped in a formerly industrial neighborhood of Utrecht (het Werkspoorkwartier), currently being developed as a creative circular manufacturing area. With our approach, we inquire into and provide an alternative to predominant technology-centered policy visions, which portray the issues of waste as objective challenges that can be addressed through data-driven technological solutions. Such visions neglect many other perspectives and values, particularly those of citizens that face the issue of waste in everyday life, thus providing only a narrow vision of how the future might look like. To gather and articulate different perspectives on alternative “zero”-waste futures, we focus on citizen-science-inspired and speculative design methods to engage people and stimulate imagining futures that bring to light diverse values and perspectives. In the development of the methods, we work in close collaboration with creative practitioners, both in terms of anchoring the research in a real-world context and in terms of combining our different types of expertise. Reflecting on the project, we discuss the potential of our transdisciplinary approach and the co-produced methods to intervene in how we see and imagine alternative futures. We do so by taking “translation” as an analytical lens to understand how different meanings and visions are created through experiential, material, and affective modes of expression. Specifically, we will analyze the translations that occur in the processes of moving from abstract data to matters of concern, and from desirable futures to actionable presents. Looking at these multiple processes through the lens of translation will serve to investigate how different future imaginaries are generated through different materials and modalities of translation, offering different forms of engagement in shaping inclusive urban futures. Translation here will be conceptualized less as a perfect transference of information and more as an open-ended process of paying attention to different values, and identifying those matters for which to care for in our urban futures.

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“…It also allows us to ask what kinds of practices public institutions could experiment with and how this changes the relations between the public sector and various publics. To give one example, we may think of participatory design practices that actively create controversies around smart cities as a way of making space for public engagement (Baibarac-Duignan and de Lange, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the practices of “data-driven innovation” in the European public sector

Lämmerhirt,

Micheli,

Schade

2024

Data & Policy

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The European public sector has for a long time tried to change its activities and its relation to the public through the production and provision of data and data-based technologies. Recent debates raised attention to data uses, through which societal value may be realized. However, often absent from these discussions is a conceptual and methodological debate on how to grasp and study such uses. This collection proposes a turn toward data practices—intended here as the analysis of data uses and policies, as they are articulated, understood, or turned into situated activities by different actors in specific contexts, involving organizational rules, socioeconomic factors, discourses, and artifacts. Through a mix of conceptual and methodological studies, the contributions explore how data-driven innovation within public institutions is understood, imagined, planned for, conducted, or assessed. The situations examined in this special issue show, for instance, that data initiatives carried out by different actors lack institutional rules to align data use to the actual needs of citizens; that data scientists are important moral actors whose ethical reasoning should be fostered; and that the materiality of data practices, such as databases, enables and constrains opportunities for public engagement. Collectively, the contributions offer new insights into what constitutes “data-driven innovation practices,” how different practices are assembled, and what their different political, moral, economic, and organizational implications are. The contributions focus on three particular topics of concern: the making of ethical and normative values in practice; organizational collaborations with and around data; and methodological innovations of studying data practices.

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Controversing the datafied smart city: Conceptualising a ‘making-controversial’ approach to civic engagement

Cited by 17 publications

References 51 publications

Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem

Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem

Materials and modes of translation: Re-imagining inclusive “zero”-waste futures

Exploring the practices of “data-driven innovation” in the European public sector

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