10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17369
If "big data", "smart cities" and "data-driven cities" are merely useful buzzwords, they nevertheless evidence an expanding chatter of heterogeneous voices who are merging with and reshaping the urban environment. This introduction addresses the data-driven city by focusing on the concept of proxy to articulate its multiplicity. We then provide an overview of the contributions included in this special issue, highlighting how they account for the particular sites where relations are made between knowledge practices, infrastructural developments and administration and management. Rather than take a stance with respect to particular definitions of the data-driven city – or its more commercial inflections as "digital urbanism" or the "smart city" – in this special issue we suggest there is value for urban research to draw on STS approaches in attending to the sociotechnical fuzziness of data as it falls between epistemological problems, material infrastructures and organizational concerns. We conclude by suggesting possible directions for further research.
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Laurie Waller
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
technical democracy
Data-driven Cities? Digital Urbanism and its Proxies: Introduction
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2018-01-29
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Laurie Waller
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17369
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2038-3460
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technical democracy
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Data-driven Cities? Digital Urbanism and its Proxies: Introduction
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                                                                                 Introduction
                                                                                                      5




Data-driven Cities? Digital Urbanism
and its Proxies: Introduction
      Claudio                         Liam              Sung-Yueh                 Laurie
      Coletta                        Heaphy               Perng                   Waller
      University of                  Maynooth                 Maynooth         Technical University
      Antwerp (BE)                  University (IE)          University (IE)     of Munich (DE)



     Abstract: If ‘big data’, ‘smart cities’ and ‘data-driven cities’ are merely use-
     ful buzzwords, they nevertheless evidence an expanding chatter of hetero-
     geneous voices who are merging with and reshaping the urban environ-
     ment. This introduction addresses the data-driven city by focusing on the
     concept of proxy to articulate its multiplicity. We then provide an over-
     view of the contributions included in this special issue, highlighting how
     they account for the particular sites where relations are made between
     knowledge practices, infrastructural developments and administration and
     management. Rather than take a stance with respect to particular defini-
     tions of the data-driven city – or its more commercial inflections as ‘digital
     urbanism’ or the ‘smart city – in this special issue we suggest there is value
     for urban research to draw on STS approaches in attending to the soci-
     otechnical fuzziness of data as it falls between epistemological problems,
     material infrastructures and organizational concerns. We conclude by sug-
     gesting possible directions for further research.

    Submitted: November 15, 2017 - Accepted: December 10, 2017

     Keywords: data-driven cities; proxies; open data platforms; citizenship;
     technical democracy.

     Corresponding author: Claudio Coletta, University of Antwerp - City
     Campus, M.386. Sint-Jacob straat 2-4, 2000 Antwerp – Belgium.
     Email: claudio.coletta@uantwerpen.be




1. Cities by Proxy

    The ‘data-driven city’ is a multivalent concept. To some, the data-driven
city draws attention to the recent expansion of urban disciplines and their
public influence in the business of cities. To others, the data-driven city re-

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
8 (2) pp. 5-18 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                  2017
6                                                              Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

fers to the proliferation of computing infrastructure in urban environments
and the possibilities for novel forms of interaction between communities.
Other versions of the data-driven city can be found in developments in city
administration that build on longstanding data collection practices and
problems of city management. Still more versions of the concept abound in
the technology and energy industries. This special issue presents a collec-
tion of empirical papers, interdisciplinary dialogues and book reviews that
grapple with particular conceptions of the data-driven city, as well as prac-
tical attempts to realise its value, govern its uncertainties and resist its ex-
cesses.
    Rather than take a stance with respect to particular definitions of the
data-driven city – or its more commercial inflections as ‘digital urbanism’ or
the ‘smart city’ – in this special issue we suggest there is value for urban re-
search in attending to the sociotechnical fuzziness of data as it falls between
epistemological problems, material infrastructure and organizational con-
cerns. Spotlighting ‘the data’ has widely (although not exclusively) been a
strategy of urban research driven by instrumental aims in social policy,
planning and economic development and rarely exhibiting much concern
for the contingencies involved around data collection, processing and ap-
plication. Indeed, the ease with which we can detect traces of positivism in
the work of the very researchers heralding a paradigm shift to a new com-
putational urban science (e.g. explicit in Pentland 2014) might help explain
why some versions of the data-driven city feel distinctly familiar and at
times surprisingly unsophisticated (see Farias and Widmer this issue). As
contributors to this special issue widely highlight, the data of the data-
driven city rarely appear “raw” (Gitelman 2013); and where they do, this is
often a highly fabricated, materialized and contingent accomplishment
(Denis and Goëta 2017; Courmont, Marquet and Reed this issue). In other
words, (big) data need to be considered as part of an assemblage (Kitchin
2014).
    The erasure of the artifices of the data-driven city may be a common
characteristic of positivist urbanisms (new and old) but it has also long
been a key tenet of commercial and political strategies that seek to promote
and exploit cities as information economies (Castells 1996). One of the cen-
tral arguments of this special issue is that attending to the social and tech-
nical contingencies of the data-driven city would be of little critical conse-
quence if its artifices are simply bracketed as ‘local context’ (e.g. “let 100
data-driven cities bloom!”). Rather, we propose that examining the con-
struction of the data-driven city (in all its variations) also requires account-
ing for the ways in which this concept has circulated across the globe, not
only making relations between diverse governmental authorities but also
between the practices of urban disciplines, the engineering of digital infra-
structure, and city management and administration. We ask in what ways
can mass-market measurement devices reconfigure issues like air pollution
in cities as diverse as New York, Rio de Janeiro and Dublin? Can data in-
frastructure, like sensor-networks, provide an apparatus for the circulation
Coletta et al.                                                                7
and exchange of technical expertise? How do city managers address uncer-
tainties introduced into urban environments by ‘off-the-shelf’ smart city
technologies such as government data platforms and energy monitoring sys-
tems?
    In this special issue, we propose the concept of ‘proxies’ as a tool for in-
terrogating the data-driven city as it is assembled as a sociotechnical arte-
fact. Search the web for the word ‘proxy’ and you will likely return a list of
companies offering ways to either browse the internet anonymously or ac-
cess blocked content using intermediary servers. Today, the proxy is a core
concept in the technical design of computer networks and the transfer of
data between distributed locales. However, like so many things digital, in-
ternet proxies are infrastructure technologies that often come with particu-
lar forms of sociality hardcoded. Conventionally, the concept of the proxy
described a particular form of social relation: a delegation of agency from
one party to another and an indirect, or mediated, exercise of power. Like
many technical components of digital infrastructures, proxy servers are
widely invested (more or less explicitly) with particular social and cultural
ideas about networked order (Bowker and Star 2000; Kelty 2008; Turner
2010). Users of internet proxies, for example, are often encouraged to un-
derstand them not only as mere intermediaries that facilitate flows of in-
formation but also as points of “data friction” (Edwards 2010) where, for
instance, entities like IP addresses can be manipulated (anonymised or dis-
torted). In addition to reasons of personal privacy, users may seek to pre-
serve their anonymity to disrupt surveillance regimes or route around legal
regulations and state censorship (cf. Van de Velden 2016). Indeed, it is not
surprising that surveillance should be one of the key themes emerging in
this special issue (see Evangelista et al.).
    Our proposition is that to begin to understand the political and com-
mercial affordances of the smart city we need to examine the particular sites
(see White this issue) where relations between knowledge practices, infra-
structural developments and administration and management are made, en-
tangled or disentangled and sometimes obfuscated. Proxies are points of
connection that facilitate flows of data but, as many contributors to this
special issue point out, they are just as often points of bifurcation between
heterogeneous networks and boundary markers between collectives.
    One of the gambles of this special issue is the proposition that
knowledge practices, infrastructure and management programmes devel-
oped in the name of ‘digital urbanism’ or the ‘smart city’ are as riddled with
glitches, distortions and data-loss as they are competing social and political
conceptions what the data-driven city is for and who it serves. While col-
laborations between the technology industry and city administrations often
promote data-driven solutions and the renewal of technocratic governance
and political managerialism (Morozov 2013), contributors to this special is-
sue highlight that deployments of data for addressing urban issues often
draw attention to those settings, practices and technical arrangements
through which governmental and managerial power is derived and their
8                                                            Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

messy contingencies negotiated. Whether investigating the heterogeneity of
urban data infrastructures (Shapiro this issue), comparing “off-the-shelf”
pollution sensors (Reed this issue), engaging with design to develop a
methodology for high quality urban environments (Hick et al. this issue), or
creating smartphone games for CCTV sousveillance (Evangelista et al. in
this issue), contributors to this special issue highlight the diverse ways in
which proxies of the data-driven city both mediate the construction of ur-
ban issues and delegate the ability to act on them.
    The second proposition that we wish to make is that a focus on proxies
allows us to enrich our understanding of the indeterminacy and precari-
ousness of contemporary smart city endeavours and achievements. A pleth-
ora of digital data-driven or data-aided sociotechnical systems are now in
place, and further systems are continually being tested and trialled at vary-
ing scales in real-life urban settings, informing decision-making and in-
volved in the performance of the spatial, material, and temporal dimensions
of the urban. We especially refer to the formation and proliferation of
“code/spacetimes” (Kitchin this issue) where software is a constitutive
component of urban life, highly visible in control rooms, city dashboards,
mobile apps and sensing networks, which in turn enact new forms of citi-
zenship and governmentality (Gabrys 2016). The interplay of big data in-
frastructures and organizational processes contributes to increase the het-
erogeneity of “urban assemblages” (Farias and Bender 2010). The uncer-
tain and mutable existence of such assemblages makes urban spaces typi-
cally “experimental” (Evans et al. 2016): cities become expanded laborato-
ries where different sustainable, prosperous and liveable urban futures can
be tested in the real world. Singapore, Barcelona, Dublin, and San Francis-
co are but few examples of cities undertaking experimental modes of de-
velopment.
    In these cities, experimental urbanism is often developed through com-
binations of networked infrastructures with economic development strate-
gies seeking to foster entrepreneurship, and in some cases national identity.
This combination has led to the adoption of pre-commercial procurement,
hackathons and testbedding to prototype the urban at different scales, from
‘smart districts’, living labs, open innovation initiatives, developed in and
for global cities such as Dublin, Boston, New York, and Paris to nation
states such as India or Singapore as a city-state. While such rhetoric of ex-
perimentation often make gestures towards the openness of smart city pro-
grammes to public participation, various contributors to this issue note that
the experimental processes developed through these programmes are often
driven by deeply instrumental aims that both circumscribe the ‘public inte-
rest’ and limit the articulation of public concerns. While procurement is in-
creasingly said to be becoming problem-oriented, the definition of what
counts as a valuable problem is often left to the market, blurring distinc-
tions between public and private interests. It is therefore perhaps not sur-
prising that various contributions could be read as indicating the emer-
gence of new forms of ‘public agnosticism’ as a response to the atmos-
Coletta et al.                                                                  9
pheres of uncertainty and anomie promoted in smart city experiments. The
appearance of the Public as a weak actor with scarce resources to critically
test urban solutions coming from industry, research or ‘the market’ argua-
bly echoes debates about the capacity of democratic societies to deal with
technological change reaching back to the early 20th century (Lippmann
1927). It would of course be a mistake to imagine that urban experimenta-
tion somehow plays out as a zero-sum game between public and private in-
terests. As many contributions to this issue highlight, commercial actors are
far from being a homogeneous group. For instance, broad shifts in local
government from service provision to procurement have widely contribut-
ed to redefining what counts as commercial activity, and corporate aims of-
ten come into conflict in experimental processes. The creation of interme-
diaries able to orient and prioritize urban innovation strategies; the contra-
dictions of “transparency by datafication” with the reuse of open data by
the private sector; and finally, the role played by STS in engaging with and
articulating these contingencies, as discussed in the Crossing Boundaries
section by Young, Hoyng, Blok and Minor, offer tools and materials for re-
flecting upon these issues.
    Under the rubric of urban experimentation, hackathons and other
‘open innovation’ events also make promises to solve urban problems by
adopting a citizen-centric and co-production approach that celebrates a
new horizon of citizen engagement. In practice, however, municipality-led
participation initiatives rarely aim at problematizing competing political
understandings of citizenship, and are instead more economically focused
on the exploitation of highly skilled labour. In such initiatives, as described
by Farias and Widmer (this issue), citizens are often invited to propose
technical prototypes and are valued principally as providers of data or ideas
(Perng forthcoming). It is understandable why a certain cynicism about
participation might result from initiatives where the engagement of citizens
is driven by municipal aims to marketize city infrastructure. A vision of citi-
zenship based on ‘productive’ forms of collaboration with central and local
governments has provided an important focus of smart city developments.
Such a vision (and the participation practices it initiates) requires critical at-
tention. As several contributors to this issue argue, aims to make citizen
participation productive in smart city programmes – whether citizen sci-
ence, civic hacking or ‘making’ initiatives – may not always be compatible
with other governance aims of extending transparency and enhancing the
accountability of administration actions. The question of how urban issues
are defined and who owns the tools to act on them is unlikely to be an-
swered by participation programmes that simply attempt to convert private
individuals into ‘active’ citizens.
    Initiatives to improve the openness, transparency and effectiveness of
urban knowledge, governance and service delivery have typically expanded
the open data franchise, produced new tools and technologies, and availed
of citizen sensing, hacking or crafting communities.
10                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)




2. The Contributions in this Issue
    The development of these sociotechnical proxies and practices there-
fore leads to many of the questions this special issue seeks to address. To
what extent cities are understandable through data? How do software
and space interact in everyday urban life and urban management? How
do data and policies actually shape each other? With many rich contribu-
tions, the special issue seeks to shed light on the multiple enactments and
proxies of such experimental urban and data assemblages which affect
the way time, politics, economy, design, engagement, control and know-
ledge are performed in diverse empirical settings.
    As we see in Rob Kitchin’s opening lecture, smart city technologies
produce new timescapes. Kitchin unfolds the notion of ¨real-time city¨ as
a constructed temporal condition “transforming management and gov-
ernance of city systems and the pace, tempo and scheduling of everyday
life”: acceleration, simultaneity, colonization of dead time and decoupling
from clock time are typical of the condition enacted through ICT in cit-
ies. The cases of the traffic control room and intelligent transport systems
are emblematic for understanding how the temporal pulses of the city are
maintained and adapted, as well as for observing the multiple latencies
that take place. Through generating, recording, measuring, and sharing
real-time data from cameras and sensors to regulate traffic flows and min-
imize congestion, they produce an accumulation of microseconds that in
turn creates asynchronous code/spacetimes that need to be continuously
readjusted. In practice, they are never quite in real-time and these tem-
poral missing masses compose varying forms of “realtimeness”, namely
distinct “real-time cultures” within platforms and systems.
    A second, though not secondary, aspect involves the kind of politics
attached to and detached from smart city discourse, this being the focus
of Ignacio Farías and Sarah Widmer’s lecture. They unfold the question
mark of “Data-driven cities?” by a combination of decoupling smart and
data-driven cities and moving beyond governmentality as a lens to ob-
serve contemporary urban development. Drawing on Latour’s cosmo-
political framework, their proposal addresses the city as a “multiple ob-
ject, where different forms of governing, knowing, valuing and practicing
the city interact and enter in conflict with each other”. Accordingly, big
data initiatives, smart urbanism and the non-digital logic of many civic
engagement processes are often disentangled in shaping the urban. Ex-
ploring the trajectories of two actually existing instances of smart urban-
ism – the first on Foursquare, and the second, on Smarter Together –
they account for the unconventional character of “ordinary smart cities”.
    In the Essays section, the contributors continue to unpack the multi-
ple and problematic unfolding of data-driven technologies. We have gen-
erally assembled papers with a theoretical and critical analysis of data-
Coletta et al.                                                             11
driven cities yet also include more practice-based and playful pieces as a
means of teasing out and emphasising how cities reconfigure these tech-
nologies and also become reconfigured in the process.
    In the literature on smart cities it is not uncommon to find computa-
tional metaphors applied to urban processes (for instance, the idea that
cities could have unified “operating systems” – Townsend 2013). Shapiro
interrogates the extension of the computing term “stack” to analyse the
structure of the data-driven city. Through the “urban stack” Shapiro aims
to explore what is beneath and behind the interface so as to identify the
“digital-material assemblages” that produce data-driven cities. Shapiro
reconfigures the concept of the “stack” in a broader and more heteroge-
neous way to capture the different ways in which both digital and non-
digital objects, practices, technologies, institutions and infrastructures are
assembled to enable data flows. His proposition is empirically grounded
in two case studies: LinkNYC, a Wi-Fi infrastructure in New York gen-
erating real-time locational data to be used for advertising purposes, and
fleet management algorithms acting as invisible layers of control in the
on-demand economy of taxi hailing. While distinctively different, the two
case studies together provide a critical understanding of how the soft, dis-
tributed infrastructures, including consumers, workers, laws, regulations
and public institutions are enrolled into and also exploited in the enacting
of calculated, passively experienced, controlled, surveilled and instrumen-
tally rationalized cities.
    Sensor networks are often characterized as a distinctive infrastructure
of the smart city, and have been foregrounded in attempts to link techno-
logical innovation with environmental sustainability. Reed’s contribution
explores how environmental sensing infrastructure can ‘script’ the com-
petences of its users. Taking a moment of infrastructural breakdown in
the installation of an urban pollution sensor network, Reed describes how
concerns about a lack of public data literacy led engineers to manipulate
the patchy data produced to appear more complete than it was. High-
lighting the multiple ways in which sensor-produced data are routinely
manipulated, Reed proposes the promotion of data literacies that do not
fetishize ‘raw’ data. Rather, Reed argues, data literacies should instead
encourage sensitivities to the ways in which such data ‘glitches’ provide
moments for creative interaction between technology, the built environ-
ment and urban publics.
    The design-based piece from Adam Urban, David Hick, and Jörg
Rainer Noennig is partly a counterpoint to the more critically focussed
papers. Like Mueller von der Haegen and Peter Sloterdijk’s (2005)
pneumatic parliament that could be deployed within 45 minutes to con-
flict zones, it technicises problems that are cultural and organisational as
much as they are technical. Although a serious piece with intent of devel-
oping further, its utopian thinking brings up the challenges we see every-
where with smart technologies; the replacement of human mediators (in
this case, planners) with digital platforms, data analytics, and claims to
12                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

equitable participation. Where Uber sidelines regulators and trade unions
and empowers those outside, so might data-driven design reduce the
planner to that of “data concierge”. Nevertheless, it addresses key con-
cepts concerning the computational drive into architecture that recalls
debate on computational design and algorithmic architecture, only in this
instance applied at the neighbourhood scale. We trust that it will be read
in a context of experimentalism, counterbalancing our smart city critiques
with smart city creativity from professional architects.
     The contribution by Evangelista, Soares, Costa Schmidt and Lavignat-
ti continues the examination of data-driven cities by engaging with design
practices. They combine game studies and surveillance studies to propose
a smartphone app called DIO to enable ‘sousveillance’ practices and civic
hacktivism. The game starts with a dystopian scenario where all the data
converge in a system called Digital Information Operative (DIO) that in-
tegrates public surveillance devices around the planet. Clearly inspired by
Edward Snowden’s revelations, DIO is also a reflexive tool for under-
standing locative media and privacy issues related to contemporary urban
life. Reflexivity also engages with what it means for an academic commu-
nity to engage with the design of Massively Multiplayer Online Games
and location-based games as a sociological experiment to ‘game’ the sur-
veillance culture.
     The Crossing Boundaries section provides a space for exchanges be-
tween researchers studying public and open data platforms and the im-
plications for urban governance. Contributors to this section offer a series
of joint reflections on public and open data platforms across a variety of
cases: from cycling, traffic and digital mapping to activism, environment
and data brokering. Often linked to open government initiatives, data
platforms are frequently proposed both as mechanisms for enhancing the
accountability of administrations and as sites for bottom-up digital inven-
tion. However, such promises of smooth flows of information, enhancing
transparency, collaboration and interactivity rarely materialise unprob-
lematically. The development of data platforms is always situated in par-
ticular administrative cultures, access always involves processes of social
negotiation, and interfaces (such as sensors) may become objects of con-
testation. In this section, contributors draw attention to some of the sub-
stantive issues driving the development of public and open data platforms
and shaping their deployment, as well as highlighting the limitations of
urban governance programmes.
     The opening contribution from Anders Blok and Kelton Minor rec-
ognises the changing framework around big data, expanding from dis-
courses of technological development and deployment to that of reconsti-
tuting social relations through technology. They discuss efforts by the city
of Copenhagen to harness new data infrastructures to advance their al-
ready advanced modal shift to cycling in the interests of climate change
mitigation and to secure their reputation of environmental leadership.
Blok and Minor discuss how their previous work within a large project on
Coletta et al.                                                            13
social networks, based on volunteered smart phone data, can feed into
further projects and the ethical implications involved with data re-use. In
particular, their piece draws attention to how these encounters of STS re-
search with the urban lead to further reflexivities on the agency of STS in
an age of data ubiquity and cross-disciplinary meetings.
     The “awkwardly engaged encounters” and the socio-technical rela-
tions of big data described by Blok and Minor are observed by Antoine
Courmont as modalities of circulation, production and re-use. Describing
a case of traffic open data, Courmont explores the interplay of attach-
ment and detachment that allows the actionability and accountability of
data across different publics with different representations of urban
space. This perspective offers an opportunity to rethink information lib-
eralism, emphasizing the dependent, non-neutral and materially inscribed
character of data.
     Ideologies of information liberalism are also the object of critique in
Rolien Hoyng’s contribution, which explores the links between open data
and the politics of transparency. Hoyng highlights how smart city open
data initiatives widely instrumentalize transparency discourses in ways
that often empower further, rather than hold accountable, governing
powers. Affirming the disruptive and “messy” qualities of digital urban-
ism, Hoyng advocates for data-activism premised on seizing and freeing
data in ways that allow open data to perform as a site and medium for po-
litical contestation and struggle.
     As the contributors to this section highlight in different ways, produc-
ing data requires work. The focus on “data labour” in Clément Marquet’s
contribution makes this aspect explicit. Marquet examines the forms of
labour that are invented in the collaboration between Transilien, a public
transportation operator in France and OpenStreetMap France. In a trial
and error process of data production, various forms of labour are created
and enrolled – from informal ones such as leisure and volunteering activi-
ties to formalised contracts and the use of professionals with specialist
expertise. As Marquet further demonstrates, these actors and their labour
are also crucial in “an ecology of data maintenance”, trigger “tag wars”
(who owns which tags on the map), and also demand the intermediaries
of Transilien agents to maintain the correspondence between new data
inputs and reality.
     Like Hoyng and Marquet, Christian Nold’s contribution highlights
the limitations of governance approaches to account for the multiple, and
often conflicting, practices of deploying data platforms to address urban
issues. Nold examines the proliferation of what he terms “neo-environ-
mental” sensing in which cheap and often low quality sensors are used for
public data gathering on environmental problems outside of government
mandated monitoring programmes. In a case study on airport noise cam-
paigners, Nold highlights that the power of these sensing devices lies not
in so much in precise measurements of particular material pollutants but
in their networking capacities and in the production of affective visualiza-
14                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

tions. Despite the limited value of such devices for governmental moni-
toring programmes, Nold proposes that neo-environmental devices none-
theless provide platforms through which the ‘sensation’ of airport noise
can be publicly articulated and evidenced.
     Continuing to observe the mutations of public-private relationship,
Meg Young addresses the open data initiatives promoted by government
agencies. While, as Young makes clear, it is undeniable that open data
programmes widely promote economized understandings of the ‘public
interest’ and privilege corporate actors as drivers of social change, the au-
thor’s empirical study of an open data network in Seattle also highlights
that the commercial value of such platforms does derive solely or princi-
pally from data made accessible for public use. Rather, Young describes
how private interests are mediated through attempts to set standards for
local government data platforms, thereby producing a number of data-
brokers that set standards and profit from the preparation and release of
open datasets. While increasing usability and interoperability across
agencies, such standards afford an exclusive set of corporate actors the
power to both unlock the commercial value of municipal data and act in
the public interest.
     Standards are the theoretical concern of the Scenarios section, where
we invite the reader to make a move from issues related to the urban to
issues related to spatiality itself and its making. James Merricks White
proposes a site-based methodology to study standards and standardiza-
tion. He draws on Karen Barad’s agential realism, with standards consid-
ered here as a material-discursive apparatus of bodily production, involv-
ing both human and non-human bodies. Thus conceived, the approach
looks at human and voluntary standards as a narrow subset of what a
standard actually does and is, with network addressing standards such as
IPv4 and ISO 9001 seen as entangled sites which come into existence
through iterations. White’s contribution is especially relevant considering
the entangled sites where multiple (organizational) bodies, (public and
private) agencies and infrastructures collide and intra-act to set the stand-
ards for what an allegedly desirable, innovative and smart city should look
like.
     Finally, the Book Review section includes the contributions by Caspar
Menkman on Jennifer Gabrys’ Program Earth, that of Claudia Mendes
and Pim Peters on Evans and colleagues’ The Experimental City, and the
combined review by Susann Wagenknecht on Krajewski and colleagues’
Dienstbarkeitsarchitekturen. Zwischen Service-Korridor und Ambient In-
telligence, and Meier and Portman’s Smart City. Strategie, Governance
und Projekte.
Coletta et al.                                                             15
3. Conclusion

     The present ubiquity of sensors and computing devices moves in tan-
dem with an increasingly powerful and extended multiform network of
organizations, technology creators, epistemic communities, advocacy coa-
litions and users (Kitchin et al. 2017). If ‘big data’ and ‘smart cities’ are
merely useful buzzwords, they nevertheless evidence an expanding chat-
ter of the multiple voices who are merging with and reshaping the urban
environment. The contributions included in this special issue offer a
grounded account of various partnerships between city administrations,
technology companies, civic activists and academics, among others. They
unpack the different proxies and practices of data-driven cities and
demonstrate how data-driven systems and schemes are deeply contested
and have never been neutral and apolitical: (big) data and the ahistorical,
aspatial, homogenizing vision of cities are problematized for recognizing
how they are situated in the multiplicity of actual digital urbanism.
     The politics of data, data analytics and visualization performs within
specific urban and code assemblages embodying specific versions of real-
time and anticipatory governance. The proxies and practices that are in
play and examined here range from the sophisticated multi-purpose digi-
tal monoliths featured in Shapiro’s contribution to the rudimentary noise
sensors described in the paper by Nold. Where the former are becoming
the first visible and interactive manifestations of a new urban technology
wave led by natively digital corporations, the latter reflect the increasing
means at the disposal of concerned citizens who wish to articulate new is-
sue-publics (Marres 2012) and new ontologies. Echoing the concerns
raised by these citizens and amplified by the contributions, we look for-
ward beyond this special issue to new critical perspectives on a number of
issues.
     The first one involves the disparities of scale, such as that between
large urban systems and piecemeal civic projects. Where the former may
subtly manipulate millions of human bodies in the synchronised perfor-
mance of urban life, the latter may be far less powerful one-off projects
associated with civic hacktivists, political actors, and other concerned in-
dividuals or collectives. The disparity might also be between widespread
(and often taken-for-granted), and alternative sociotechnical imaginaries,
upheld across different public/private actors and organisations, have the
potential to strengthen or potentially challenge existing proxies for the
production and circulation of data. The quality of democracy enacted by
the heterogeneous urban proxies is then a matter of redistributing and ar-
ticulating the calculative as well as the political agency of data-driven ini-
tiatives.
     The articulation and redistribution moves are connected with the
management and governance of uncertainty in urban development and
the delivery of services. What is uncertain and contested is not necessarily
unmanageable, and the second issue considers the capacity to include dif-
16                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

ferent publics into a common space as well as other initiatives not includ-
ed in smart city discourse but critically relevant to it. To date, we note the
expansion of IoT networks, control rooms, hackathons, city dashboards,
and the development of smart districts which herald future change, yet al-
so a rather subdued critical response from wider civic society. The chal-
lenges and the testbedding initiatives undertaken by city administrations
are somewhat localized and disconnected from planning policies, and ul-
timately not ambitious enough with respect to actual needs in terms of
work, mobility, environmental quality, and housing.
    The third issue addresses the neoliberal elephant in the room. The
specific ways in which data-driven innovations have been, and can con-
tinue to be, leveraged to legitimize the ongoing neoliberalizaton of urban
governance requires further empirical and theoretical examination with-
out using neoliberalism as an analytical shortcut. Looking closely, it may
turn out that neoliberalism is not so much an elephant as it is an issue
with how the room is arranged, and one of the aims of this special issue is
to detach the big neoliberal assemblage starting from its specific, multiple
and mutable proxies. This means, while unpicking similar rhetoric on ef-
ficiency or cost-effectiveness, it is also important to pay attention to any
emerging means by which new markets are being created, often in unpre-
dictable places. Similar to the re-constitution of the public, government
and social relations, markets and market practices can be re-constituted
through data-driven technologies. The proxies and practices that are then
invented to exploit new forms of measuring, valuing and performing la-
bour require new analytical lens grounded in empirical investigation to
tease out the inventiveness of neoliberal proxies and their extension of
market logic to urban governance.
    Fourth, it is also important to consider emergent sociotechnical prac-
tices within, around or peripheral to the large networks and platforms as
proxies that might challenge our assumptions, imaginaries and discourses
about what it means to be ethical. The focus on practices, however, does
not imply a dissolution of responsibility. Rather, it suggests one of the
possible means to help ensure that the design, engineering, planning, reg-
ulation, and governance of these networks, platforms and cities are in-
formed and inspired by socially-driven values and principles.
    Academic perspectives thus can look not only towards how and where
neoliberal inventions are made and where contestations against them
arise, but also towards the underlying ethical frameworks which underpin
large technical systems such as social networks and open data platforms.
In a new age where large-scale political manipulation and distortion can
be conducted with relative ease through the exploitation of the creations
of naive digital evangelists, it may be that the future urban systems be-
coming commonplace in our cities will not expose false hopes of ethical
neutrality and instead be purposely driven by specific shared values and
principles.
Coletta et al.                                                               17



Acknowledgements
    The research funding for Claudio Coletta, Sung-Yueh Perng, and Liam
Heaphy for this article was provided by a European Research Council Advanced
Investigator Award, “The Programmable City” (ERC-2012-AdG-323636) and by
the Ulysses Exchange Programme grant 2017 “Reshaping cities through data and
experiments” funded by Irish Research Council and the Ambassade de France in
Ireland.


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