GED Seminar
Series
Thursday 8
September 2016, 4-5pm
VUW Kelburn,
Cotton 304
All welcome
New Data, cities, & futures in the making
Speaker: Agnieszka Leszczynski, School of Environment, University of
Auckland
Abstract: In this talk, I take up ‘big data’ as a
material-discursive project of future-ing (Anderson 2010) - of anticipating,
shaping and circumscribing the horizon of possibiltites. Specifically, I focus
on the ways in which urban big data – digital content about city spaces from
city spaces – needs to be understood not only in terms of practices of
automated management in ‘actually-existing’ smart cities (Shelton, Zook and
Wiig 2015), but also as implicated in regimes of speculating about
cities-to-come. As (big) data enrolled within modes of urban governance
actualize particular visions of urban futures, I address the question of what
kind of city is actually being enviosioned and affected.
As the city is subsumed as an object/subject of
the data-security assemblage, rather than anticipating a radically different
urban as would be consistent with an understanding of the future as something
that is organically open, urban big data cannot divest itself of urban
inequalities and the persistence of their geographies, projecting these forward
in time and space. Extant inequalities are abstracted into data flows,
informing and propagating through the calculation of algorithmically
anticipated urban futures. Using empirical examples of the management of
individual urban mobilities via neighbourhood safety apps and the
securitization of city spaces through sentiment analytics, I demonstrate that
the anticipation of unequal urban futures can be discerned at two scales of
digital praxis: that of the body, and that of the city itself.
Biography:
Agnieszka Leszczynski is a Lecturer in GIScience
at the University of Auckland. Her longstanding research interests are in
GIScience & Society, with current attention towards how geolocation is
valued in emergent market sectors such as the variously designated sharing,
last-mile, platform and gig economies.
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