data intermediaries and citizenship: who benefits? alison powell, london school of economics march...
TRANSCRIPT
Data Intermediaries and Citizenship: Who benefits?
Alison Powell, London School of EconomicsMarch 31, 2015
Citizenship in Data cities
• What is a data city?• What is citizenship?• Who are the intermediaries?• Why does it matter?
WHAT IS A DATA CITY?
Computational paradigmsData based intermediariesPublic private partnerships
Computational paradigms
Typical framings
Top down ‘Smart Cities’
Smart City Definitions“Smart Governance, Smart People, Smart Living, Smart Mobility, Smart Economy and Smart Environment” (EU Smart Cities Report, 2014)
“In a Smart City, networks are linked together, supporting and positively feeding off each other, so that the technology and data gathering should: be able to constantly gather, analyse and distribute data about the city to optimise efficiency and effectiveness in the pursuit of competitiveness and sustainability; be able to communicate and share such data and information around the city using common definitions and standards so it can be easily re-used; be able to act multi-functionally, which means they should provide solutions to multiple problems from a holistic city perspective. “ (Copenhagen Cleantech Cluster, 2012)
Siemens on “smart cites” “Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service…The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems.”
What we encounter in this statement is an unreconstructed logical positivism, which, among other things, implicitly holds that the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable, and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in the state of a technical system, without bias or distortion. As applied to the affairs of cities, it is effectively an argument there is one and only one universal and transcendently correct solution to each identified individual or collective human need; that this solution can be arrived at algorithmically, via the operations of a technical system furnished with the proper inputs; and that this solution is something which can be encoded in public policy, again without distortion. ( Greenfield, 2013)
Who mediates?
• “Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are highly important, especially where the private partners bring in developer expertise, finance and technology capabilities, as is the involvement of citizens and other end-users.” (EU Smart cities report)
WHAT IS CITIZENSHIP?
CitizensConsumersProducer-consumers
‘the city is not only an experimental space, but also a political space where struggles for power, control and ownership are reflected and shaped through the intense (mediated) meetings of people, technologies and places’ (Myria Georgiou, 2008, p.224).
With pressure to save money and ‘roll back’ the state, governments may shift from seeing citizens as those with civic responsibilities and engagements, to classifying them as consumers who purchase services from providers.
“Ofcom [the UK communications regulator] has preferred to align the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ so that the interests of both may be met, as far as possible, through an economic agenda of market regulation. Among civil society groups, there is growing concern that the citizen interest is becoming marginalized as the consumer discourse becomes more widespread. (Livingstone, Lunt and Miller 2013)
Voice: “the effective opportunity for people to speak and be heard on what affects their lives” (Nick Couldry)
WHO ARE THE BROKERS?
Information intermediariesPPPsCorporate actorsCivic actors
At the moment, Uber is so effective because it controls all the key data points: our phones tell it all it needs to know about planning a trip. If, however, control over data were to pass to cities, Uber – a company with few assets – would hardly be worth the $40bn that it’s valued at today. Surely, an algorithm to match supply and demand cannot be that expensive? Cities such as New York and Chicago, undoubtedly under pressure from taxi companies, seem to have grasped the importance of mounting a unified tech-savvy response to Uber’s assault. Both are trying to launch a centralised single city-wide taxi app, which could dispatch conventional taxis in a Uber-like efficient manner. (Morzov, Feb 1 2014; Guardian Comment is Free)
Citizen data cities: 596 Acres, NYC
Our work is unique because we actually create maps and data to understand issues facing city residents. We believe that a lack of data has sometimes allowed for government to evade its responsibilities to provide basic entitlements to all city residents…. We work closely with individuals and citizens’ groups to create data that can help them counter inaccurate or incomplete government data, and make better claims on the government for their rights and entitlements. (Transparent Chennai)
Civic Brokers: Transparent Chennai
http://youtu.be/7hAniWYUBt8
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
CitizenshipPublic and social responsibility Power, politics and sustainability
“… it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now.” (Howard Zinn)
THANK YOU
@a_b_powellhttp://alisonpowell.ca