Cities are becoming ever more instrumented and networked, their systems interlinked and integrated, with vast troves of big data increasingly being used to manage and control urban life. This paper critically reflects on this emerging data-driven urbanism. First, it will examine the production of urban big data about people and places and their use in governing city life. Second, it will deconstruct the building of the Dublin Dashboard — a website that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information. The analysis critically considers the the politics and praxes of creating city dashboards and considers how best to make sense of their production and use.
Rob Kitchin is professor and ERC Advanced Investigator at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He is principal investigator of the Programmable City project, the Dublin Dashboard, the All-Island Research Observatory, and the Digital Repository of Ireland. He has published widely across the social sciences, including 23 authored/edited books and over 150 articles and book chapters. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences
Slides from the talk:
Praxis and politics of dashboards Northeastern
Referenced papers:
Praxis_and_Politics_of_Urban_Data_SSRN
RSRS 2015