Controversing the datafied smart city: Conceptualising a ‘making-controversial’ approach to civic engagement

Corelia Baibarac-Duignan,Michiel de Lange

doi:10.1177/20539517211025557

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the concept of controversing as an approach for engaging citizens in debates around the datafied city and in shaping responsible smart cities that incorporate diverse public values. Controversing addresses the engagement of citizens in discussions about the datafication of urban life by productively deploying controversies around data. Attempts to engage citizens in the smart city frequently involve ‘neutral’ data visualisations aimed at making abstract sociotechnical issues more tangible. In addition, citizens are meant to gather around issues already defined externally by others. Instead, we focus on how people might become engaged and develop the capacity to shape alternative urban futures. We suggest that making controversial apparently less contentious issues in the smart city allows people to identify their own issues, come together temporarily as a public, imagine alternative possibilities and thus develop capacities for action. In this context, controversies can act as agents of change and open up new spaces for participation and action. We develop the notion of controversing as a deliberate strategy of making datafication controversial, and operationalise the term along the dimensions of recontextualisation, meaning-making and agency. We then look at two cases from the mid-sized city of Amersfoort in the Netherlands, first to test the conceptual potential of controversing to expose how frictions shape citizen engagement, and second to analyse how controversing may frame design-oriented methods aimed at involving diverse participants in discussing datafication and defining public values in the datafied smart city.

Highlights

A making controversial approach to citizen engagement in the datafied cityThe datafication of urban life plays out largely beneath the surface of everyday experience, and behind the screens of institutional and corporate interests and decision-making
We propose a controversing approach – that is, a deliberate strategy of making datafication controversial – to address the question of how people can become engaged in issues and debates around public values in the datafied smart city
How for instance are data shaping urban mobility, living environments or urban governance? What for example are the assumptions and biases in producing datafied insights, and how do data interfaces shape our knowledge of and outlook onto the world? What are the ethical implications of collecting these data, and who benefit from the insights and any resulting policies, that is: who has the right to the smart city (Cardullo et al, 2019)? These and other controversies surrounding datafied smart cities, we argue, are not merely undesirable bumps or glitches that need to be ironed out on the path to citizen engagement with the smart city

Summary

Introduction

The datafication of urban life plays out largely beneath the surface of everyday experience, and behind the screens of institutional and corporate interests and decision-making. We propose a controversing approach – that is, a deliberate strategy of making datafication controversial – to address the question of how people can become engaged in issues and debates around public values in the datafied smart city. Institutional takes on engaging with the datafied smart city in publicprivate partnerships typically position themselves in what is termed a minimalist and consensus-oriented mode of democratic participation (Carpentier, 2011; see Figure 1) They seek very little active involvement of people with processes of datafication, except perhaps as data producers, and when this leads to friction, the aim is to quickly resolve any ensuing issues. Conceptualising a controversy-mediated approach to value-focused civic engagement Against this background we propose the notion of controversing as a situated and iterative process to engage citizens in the making of smart cities that address (multiple and diverse) public values. Spanning domains like Critical Data Studies, STS and Urban Studies we further operationalise controversing as comprising three interlinked dimensions

Recontextualisation

Agency