Smart City Data as an Epistemic Object

• In Event: Who Knows? Smart Cities as Epistemology

Abstract

Smart city solutions rely on the availability of data and involve many stakeholders, creating tensions between viewing data as 1) a public resource that can be used for public good, 2) an external resource that endangers community structures and increases stereotyping and discrimination, and 3) a private asset that can be used for gaining competitive advantage. Those tensions highlight competing epistemologies of data, i.e., understandings of what constitutes data and its knowing and acting subjects and methodologies. To complicate this even further, smart city data is embedded in the big data and data science semantics that increasingly determine what knowledge about the cities and their inhabitants is valuable.

In this presentation we examine the tensions around smart city data and its fixity/fluidity within the framework of epistemic objects - open-ended inquiry projections that become the locus of knowing (Knorr-Cetina, 2001). We analyze public discursive representations of data in the smart city initiatives in eleven largest cities in the US and ask two questions: 1) How does data make city knowable? and 2) How are stakeholders (knowing subjects) and decision-making knowledge/power are constructed? Our preliminary findings suggest that smart city data epistemologies transform and legitimize the logics of postindustrial society. Through the rhetoric of design, experimentation, and testing, and through the shift of epistemological agency to algorithms and digital platforms, smart city data renders citizens into prosumers of data and services. Those who live outside of downtown areas become even less visible and civically engaged. We conclude with the discussion of knowledge commons as a framework that can help to change the politics of visibility within smart cities.

Authors

• Inna Kouper, Indiana University

• Angie Raymond, Indiana University