Abstract
Abstract A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings.
Highlights
A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.”[1]. Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of twenty-first-century cities, in everyday life as in professional study or administration
Making good on the civic potential of Big Data requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city to allow for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings
Behind and beyond the technical diagrams of urban functions produced by urban models and the data trails of “smart” infrastructure, a political community relies on cultural models, images, and narratives to justify collective actions and lend individual actions meaning in the city’s life.[2]
Summary
A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.”[1]. Behind and beyond the technical diagrams of urban functions produced by urban models and the data trails of “smart” infrastructure, a political community relies on cultural models, images, and narratives to justify collective actions and lend individual actions meaning in the city’s life.[2] In the example introduced above, the narrative that public-sector decision makers employ to make practical use of this gentrification model – a narrative of what is just or good for the city as a whole – is not limited in its implications to justifying public-sector actions It implies an interpretation of the meaning of the actions of individuals and private actors within the systems in question. Understood as exercises in rhetoric, I argue, data-powered depictions of the city can work alongside technical models to furnish factually grounded, culturally resonant, politically powerful images of the city as an arena for creative proposals for common life, and so animate twenty-first-century civic discourse
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