Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-1603-1357

Document Type

Book Chapter

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Urban studies (Planning and development), Literary theory, History and philosophy of science and technology, Arts

Publication Details

Chapter originally presented at ENMI 2018 : L'intelligence des villes et la nouvelle révolution urbaine, Centre Pompidou Paris. Le Nouveau Génie Urbain edited by Bernard Stiegler.

Abstract

This chapter sets out to define the Data City by counteracting the Smart City as ahistorical, uprooted and dislocated, the Data city approach will highlight the rootedness, the historical and locate context of data colonalisation both historical and within contemporary Smart City Discourse. The Data City is, hence, taken within the paradigm of discourses in relation to the smart city, the smart city is here understood as the spectrum of discourses about the contemporary city. This spectrum encapsulates city authorities laudable aspirations for more social inclusion and better distribution of services to the Smart City as a form of technological imaginary where the city becomes hub for data generation. This paper will situate the Data City approach within one particular urban agglomeration which is the city of Dublin, Ireland. There are two distinct aspects to the Data City in Dublin, firstly there is a fully developed fictional account of the city and secondly, the three of biggest companies in the world, the GAFA, in the world have large headquarter offices in Dublin (Google, Amazon, Facebook in Dublin and Apple is based in Cork). This paper explores the history of the relationship between the city and data, where the colonisation of space takes place through the physical mapping of the built environment and then more recently through processes of computational data extraction. The paper will argue that the process of data colonialisation, is therefore, not something new and that the historical colonialisation and new forms of data colonialisation are part of a similar process. The Data City is both an artistic activity and an historical mode of posting the problems of governance and colonialisaiton. This article will demonstrate that the promise of the Smart City to deliver better services through the capturing of more data is aligned with the promises of big data and deep learning technologies. This growing disillusion with some discourses in relation to the smart city is founded on the broken promises of the ability to capture everything.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/g4wm-5k88

Funder

European Commission

Download


Share

COinS