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Scientific Article details

Title The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons
ID_Doc 40890
Authors de Lange, M
Title The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons
Year 2019
Published
DOI 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191005
Abstract The current datafication of cities raises questions about what Lefebvre and many after him have called "the right to the city." In this contribution, I investigate how the use of data for civic purposes may strengthen the "right to the datafied city," that is, the degree to which different people engage and participate in shaping urban life and culture, and experience a sense of ownership. The notion of the commons acts as the prism to see how data may serve to foster this participatory "smart citizenship" around collective issues. This contribution critically engages with recent attempts to theorize the city as a commons. Instead of seeing the city as a whole as a commons, it proposes a more fine-grained perspective of the "commons-asinterface." The "commons-as-interface," it is argued, productively connects urban data to the human-level political agency implied by "the right to the city" through processes of translation and collectivization. The term is applied to three short case studies, to analyze how these processes engender a "right to the datafied city." The contribution ends by considering the connections between two seemingly opposed discourses about the role of data in the smart city - the cybernetic view versus a humanist view. It is suggested that the commons-as-interface allows for more detailed investigations of mediation processes between data, human actors, and urban issues.
Author Keywords Smart city; datafied city; urban commons; interfacing; ownership; the right to the city; commons-as-interface; translation; collectivization
Index Keywords Index Keywords
Document Type Other
Open Access Open Access
Source Book Citation Index – Social Sciences & Humanities (BKCI-SSH)
EID WOS:000837173300005
WoS Category Regional & Urban Planning; Urban Studies
Research Area Public Administration; Urban Studies
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