Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the convergence of big data and urban governance beyond the discursive and material contexts of the smart city. I argue that in addition to understanding the intensifying relationship between data, cities, and governance in terms of regimes of automated management and coordination in ‘actually existing’ smart cities, we should further engage with urban algorithmic governance and governmentality as material-discursive projects of future-ing, i.e., of anticipating particular kinds of cities-to-come. As urban big data looks to the future, it does so through the lens of an anticipatory security calculus fixated on identifying and diverting risks of urban anarchy and personal harm against which life in cities must be securitized. I suggest that such modes of algorithmic speculation are discernible at two scales of urban big data praxis: the scale of the body, and that of the city itself. At the level of the urbanite body, I use the selective example of mobile neighborhood safety apps to demonstrate how algorithmic governmentality enacts digital mediations of individual mobilities by routing individuals around ‘unsafe’ parts of the city in the interests of technologically ameliorating the risks of urban encounter. At the scale of the city, amongst other empirical examples, sentiment analytics approaches prefigure ephemeral spatialities of civic strife by aggregating and mapping individual emotions distilled from unstructured real-time content flows (such as Tweets). In both of these instances, the urban futures anticipated by the urban ‘big data security assemblage’ are highly uneven, as data and algorithms cannot divest themselves of urban inequalities and the persistence of their geographies.

Cybernetics and the 4D Smart City: Smartness as Awareness

“…Continuous monitoring, tracking, and identification of individual bodies coupled to automated facial recognition technology are seamlessly embedded across numerous cityscapes of the world today. However, we must recognize the danger of creating inequalities [22]. One rather evident example is the exclusion of elderly citizens in algorithmic aggregations, who 'do not [necessarily] register as digital signals', as [22] puts it.…”

“…Digital technology is transforming conventional three-dimensional space into cyber-physical-social meshworks. As stated by [22], augmented, virtual reality has constituted new temporality of cities, in which the future and the past can be present in a digitized "now". Further, this has denoted human existential change, as our embodied existence blends with virtual existence.…”

“…Further, this has denoted human existential change, as our embodied existence blends with virtual existence. Two scales of digital urban praxis thus become central: "the urbanite body and the city itself" [22].…”

“…Integrating data of individualized urban experiences from flows of real-time geocoded social media content to sensor data from the physical environment adds temporal dimension to urban management and planning. Public streaming APIs capture semantic content as it is being generated by individuals in real-time, and facilitate an understanding of human behavior [22,23]. In the context of urban planning practices, semantic analysis helps us to gain knowledge about what kind of affordances and possibilities urban spaces offer, and what kind of rhythms and temporal layers urban spaces reflect and what kind of rhythms they force urban life to take.…”

Digital turn, digital geographies?

“…As Datta (2015), Greenfield (2013), Kitchin (2014c) and Leszczynski (2016) note, there is a strong neoliberal ethos underpinning such appropriations of data, with the technological solutionism deployed and the corporatisation of city services designed to buttress inequalities and enforce securitised regimes of law and order. Geographers are ideally placed to map the socio-spatial materialities of these various data regimes and to chart the promises and perils, socio-spatial processes, and political economies of data-driven urbanism.…”