An inter­view on urban data, cit­izen engage­ment strategies and smart city with Michiel de Lange from Utrecht Uni­versity, Neth­er­lands, who gave a lec­ture at the Data (for) Cul­ture con­fer­ence in Katowice in Decem­ber 2017.

• Łukasz Mir­ocha: What is the role of data in the city of 2018?

Michiel de Lange: The role of data in today’s cit­ies is already pretty huge and will only become more import­ant. Data are being used extens­ively by many cit­ies throughout the world for a vari­ety of pur­poses, like mon­it­or­ing infra­struc­tures and ser­vices, crime fight­ing, man­aging traffic, ped­es­trian flows, social media mon­it­or­ing, risk ana­lysis, and much much more.

• What aspects of data gen­er­a­tion and man­age­ment in the urban con­text are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing to you?

Issues that con­cern me are, among oth­ers, that, first, the deploy­ment of data tends to be primar­ily about man­age­ment and con­trol, and second, it tends to obscure from sight and scru­tiny the myriad of implic­a­tions for pub­lic urban life. My col­league Karin van Es already poin­ted out in another inter­view for Medi­alab Katowice, that data never speak for them­selves.

• What value does data hold for dif­fer­ent act­ors: muni­cip­al­it­ies, cit­izens, local and non-local busi­nesses?

As we know, data are not given but taken. This pro­cess of tak­ing data, and con­struct­ing a cer­tain image of real­ity through data, I find very intriguing on an epi­stem­o­lo­gical level. What kinds of know­ledge does this foster, what can­not be known, what remains hid­den from sight? Recently, I have explored this theme in a Crit­ical Mak­ing work­shop about urban data, which involved inter­dis­cip­lin­ary teams of Human­it­ies and Arts stu­dents and cre­at­ive coders, work­ing together on ima­gin­ing the pos­sible nar­rat­ives behind data cre­ation. Also, a yet untapped poten­tial of using data for enga­ging cit­izens with their envir­on­ment, and allow­ing them to have a say in the future of their cit­ies. That is a longer-run­ning pro­gram­matic theme I am inter­ested in.

• What is left of the early-2000s Smart City idea? Has the cor­por­ate vis­ion of the smart city, based on closed, pro­pri­et­ary data man­age­ment ser­vices and solu­tions, pre­vailed?

Busi­nesses seem to move away from the ini­tial over­blown prom­ises of the smart city as tech­no­logy-driven urban man­age­ment, and instead appear to turn to prac­tical applic­a­tions built on the Inter­net of Things. However, I believe that civic dis­courses around the smart city have gained a solid foothold.

• There is still hope for the par­ti­cip­at­ory, open-data smart city, then? What does it look like in the Neth­er­lands and at the EU level?

Abso­lutely. This people-cent­ric per­spect­ive is sup­por­ted both in and out­side of aca­demia, by fund­ing schemes, pro­grams, organ­iz­a­tions, research­ers, artists, design­ers. For example, I am part of a recently awar­ded Cre­at­ive Indus­tries pro­ject called Design­ing for con­tro­ver­sies in respons­ible smart cit­ies, which is a col­lab­or­a­tion between two Dutch uni­versit­ies, the muni­cip­al­ity of Amers­foort (a mid-sized, cent­rally loc­ated city in the Neth­er­lands), and vari­ous private part­ners.

• Can you pre­dict any research out­comes of this pro­ject at this point?

In the next few years, we’ll invest­ig­ate ways of enga­ging people with smart tech­no­lo­gies by focus­sing on the fric­tions they engender. By involving a law office as a part­ner, legal ques­tions about data own­er­ship and pro­pri­et­ary vs. open data shall be addressed as part of our pro­ject. These are con­tro­ver­sial issues that have not yet been adequately pub­licly dis­cussed.

Pre­cisely because they high­light fric­tions and struggles, they will actu­ally be more believ­able and relat­able.

• The ques­tion of respons­ib­il­ity in data man­age­ment leads us to eth­ical but also polit­ical ques­tions: What is at stake here – are there any altern­at­ives to data com­mons/data shar­ing? What would be the con­sequences of out­sourcing city-related data man­age­ment ser­vices to act­ors using pro­pri­et­ary stand­ards and ser­vices?

In the Neth­er­lands and in the EU, there is a strong push for safety, as we see in efforts to expand the rights of gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence to col­lect and store data. Together with pro­pri­et­ary com­mer­cial interests in data, I think this is often at odds with the demand for more open­ness and the pub­lic poten­tials of data. We need to ser­i­ously con­sider whether key pub­lic ser­vices can be out­sourced to com­mer­cial parties. Indeed, this is a polit­ical ques­tion of how to best organ­ize and safe­guard pub­lic ser­vices. Bot­tom line ques­tions at stake in any muni­cipal data pro­ject are: who actu­ally bene­fits and how the pro­ject can best help to strengthen pub­lic val­ues.

• What are, then, the best strategies to strengthen pub­lic val­ues and to enrich cit­izens’ life in the city through apply­ing open data and urban data com­mons strategies?

Data can help foster a civic com­mons in mul­tiple ways. For example, data can help to cre­ate new pub­lics around shared issues of con­cern, to visu­al­ize, and hence make action­able, oth­er­wise abstract prob­lems like air pol­lu­tion, to cre­ate strong nar­rat­ives about pub­lic con­cerns and ideals (what kind of city do we want?), and to pool resources to sus­tain col­lect­ive efforts and con­trib­ute to the com­mons. I have writ­ten a draft paper about this.

• What can muni­cip­al­it­ies do to encour­age cit­izens to engage in the par­ti­cip­at­ory model of the smart city, to basic­ally co-cre­ate the smart city in col­lab­or­a­tion with muni­cip­al­it­ies and other act­ors?

When we focus on the data part of par­ti­cip­at­ory smart cit­ies, in my view, cit­ies have to work hard on cre­at­ing access­ible, mean­ing­ful and empower­ing data inter­faces. I am not a policy expert but I do have some rudi­ment­ary sug­ges­tions. On the pro­ced­ural level of policy, this means involving a vari­ety of groups and people, mak­ing sure their voices are heard and actu­ally taken into account, allow­ing data plat­forms to be writ­able (cit­izens can con­trib­ute data them­selves), and exper­i­ment­ing with pro­duct­ive formats for data-driven dia­logues that are situ­ated in mean­ing­ful places and events, rather than online only. On the con­di­tional level of policy, it means safe­guard­ing the pub­lic nature of par­ti­cip­at­ory smart cit­ies. We can think for instance about com­mons-based licens­ing sys­tems (e.g. Cre­at­ive Com­mons), determ­in­ing clear indic­at­ors to assess pub­lic bene­fits of data, policy meas­ures that stim­u­late the shar­ing of data, the form­a­tion of self-organ­ized civic insti­tu­tions and the inclu­sion of broad seg­ments of soci­ety, and meas­ures that pro­tect pub­lic data resources from mis­use and freeriders.

• To what extent can city-scale data com­mons solu­tions be use­ful in imple­ment­ing grass-roots/cit­izen-ini­ti­ated ser­vices and pro­jects that are based i.a. on shar­ing eco­nomy or par­ti­cip­at­ory budget?

In my view, such solu­tions can only be use­ful when they do not merely sup­port exper­i­ment but also pre­scribe or codify what hap­pens with the res­ults and who bene­fits, and makes sure that this passes the key­stone of the pub­lic interest. Hence, in order to strengthen the pub­lic qual­it­ies of civic ini­ti­at­ives, the con­di­tional, insti­tu­tional level of (data) policies are just as import­ant as the ‘urban labs’, the exper­i­ments, the pro­to­types, if not more in the long run. Oth­er­wise, the shar­ing eco­nomy is just another word for neo­lib­eral lais­sez-faire cap­it­al­ism in which the social domain, too, becomes mon­et­ized. Moreover, not all cit­izen-led action is inher­ently good or desir­able, so there needs to be a way to debate and nego­ti­ate desirab­il­ity.