The City: The Data Factory
In the paper ‘Data and the City’[3] McMillan, Engström, Lampinen and Brown discuss the production and use of data across four cities through conducting 20 interviews. Their aim is to examine the effects of data on cities, through collaborations, and politicisation of the data to see how this has changed the realisation of smart cities. This paper is posed as a response to the growing interest in HCI towards civic engagements for big data.
The authors found resistance to the notion of open data from not only cities but also contractors of whom maintenance of public services is regularly delegated to. This was said to be for fear of damaging the cities reputation, and also the loss of a competitive edge for the contractors who could be undersold if the data was to go public. Difficulties in opening data were further exacerbated by contractors managing databases themselves, and cities only having fragmented representations of these databases. And lastly one of their findings was the difficulty in sharing citizen generated data, where the authors talk of data gathered from Le Dantec et al.’s ‘Cycle Atlanta’[2] research.
I think many of these are real concerns, although McMillan et al. try to approach the topic of smart cities without money in mind this it is undoubtedly a major factor in what makes a city smart. Having the resources to manage and maintain a high level of data collection is unlikely, therefore this will often rely on outsourcing this to either contractors, who would as the paper mentions want to keep their data private for fear of being undersold. An alternative would be citizen led data collection but as the difficulties shown with ‘Cycle Atlanta’ and sharing successful driving tests there are concerns around anonymity. Although steps can be taken to make data anonymous many share the feeling a smart city could be “buggy, brittle, and hackable’[1], potentially damaging the cities representation.
Overall I agree with [3]’s conclusion that data in cities can be both an inhibitor and an enabler, but in order to improve I think there needs to be a push towards ownership of the data and resulting technologies. As noted in the paper ownership is often fragmented between third parties and cities are unlikely to maintain these themselves, furthermore projects are often started but only funded for development process leading to collected data being lost with the funding. Like McMillan et al. I think research into how data can be used in cities should be practice led, but with the view of understanding how these practices can pushed data into open and centralised stores. I think an ideal smart city would take all of these differing forms of data into account, whether from the city itself, contractors, or citizens, and incorporate these into anonymous open sourced platforms communities can build their own applications on for their own means.
References
[1] Kitchin, R. [2014], ‘The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism’, GeoJournal 79(1), 1–14.
[2] Le Dantec, C. A., Asad, M., Misra, A. and Watkins, K. E. [2015], ‘Planning with Crowdsourced Data’, Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing – CSCW ’15 pp. 1717–1727. URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2675133.2675212
[3] McMillan, D., Engström, A., Lampinen, A. and Brown, B. [2016], ‘Data and the City’, Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’16 pp. 2933–2944. URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2858036.2858434
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