Data/infrastructure in the smart city

Understanding the infrastructural power of Citymapper app through technicity of data

Bibliographic Data

ID5261080
AuthorsGüneş Tavmen (0000-0001-6532-5285, King's College London, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume7
Issue2
Publication date2020-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBig Data & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/2053951720965618
OpenAlexW3094450852
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited47

Over the last few years, smart cities have been a focus of scholarly attention. Most of these critical studies concentrated on the multinational corporations' discourses and their implications on urban policies. Besides these factors, however, the data-driven city develops within a complex web of entanglements whereby data-driven technologies modulate the urban infrastructure in a multitude of ways contingent upon the social, political, material and technical aspects. As such, this article attends to the infrastructural implications of a smart city product, Citymapper, which is a transport app built on open data available as part of London's smart city planning. In order to establish the relationship between data and infrastructure, I use Gilbert Simondon's notions of 'transduction', 'individuation' and 'technicity' to explore this relationship in a processual and relational way. In constructing this relationship as co-generative, whereby infrastructure and data transindividuate, I subsequently posit the term data/infrastructure. Against this theoretical background, I study the ways in which Citymapper individuates and thereby gains infrastructural power through technicity of data by studying the ways in which the users' contribute to data generation that feed back into the app. Specifically, by following the transformation of the app from initially mediating the bus timetable to transducing users into environmental sensing nodes through which the app collects behavioural data, I foreground the epistemological, infrastructural and social consequences of Citymapper's infrastructural power for the data-driven city

Big data · Computer security · Data science · Individuation · Internet of Things · Knowledge management · Multinational corporation · Multitude · Political science · Politics · Smart city · Sociology · Sociotechnical system · Computer Science · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Law · Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing · Smart Cities and Technologies

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Open DOIOpen Access