Interface, Infrastructure, and Urban Data Imaginaries

• In Event: Smart yet (in)Sensible? Feminist Critical Perspectives on “Smart Cities” I

Abstract

As Mattern (2014) has argued, although smart city interfaces (kiosks, APIs, urban “dashboards,” data visualizations, etc.) tend to be a central figure in smart city promotional materials, in practice they cover over as much as they reveal. Behind the digital urban interfaces of the smart city imaginary lay complex infrastructural realities from which citizens are excluded. At least according to corporate smart city visions. Looking to “actually existing smart city” initiatives (Shelton, Zook and Wiig, 2015), it becomes clear that publics can and do imagine infrastructure. In this paper, I elaborate on what I call “urban data imaginaries,” a mode of design that animates both the smart city’s digital interfaces as well as as its material, social, legal, and technical infrastructures that generate urban data. Specifically, I examine a New York City government-sponsored design challenge held in 2012 and 2013 in which members of the public competed to “Reinvent the Payphone,” to re-envision what a “public communications structure” might look like in the 21st century. I contrast entries to the competition with LinkNYC, the Google-backed, gigabit wi-fi system that eventually won the City’s franchise bid to replace the aging network of public payphones. Entries tended to promote a coherent relationship between interface and infrastructure; infrastructural affordances worked in service to the interface concepts. Conversely, LinkNYC”s interface concept is divorced from its infrastructural affordances. Data collection to maximize advertising revenue comes at the expense of public or community benefit, despite official claims to the contrary.

Author

• Aaron Shapiro, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication