Sarah Barns

Mine your data: open data, digital strategies and entrepreneurial governance by code

Investment in the release of open data has become increasingly central to the implementation of smart city programs by governments around the world. Though originally arising out of a push towards “open government” and the pursuit of more transparent decision-making by public authorities at multiple scales, open data programs have more recently been adopted by municipal governments to support entrepreneurial goals of enhanced competitive positioning and attracting investment. As urban scholars now subject the smart city project to critical scrutiny for its role in advancing urban entrepreneurialism, this article considers the relevance of the open data agenda as it shapes wider understandings of the smart city. In particular, I address the collection of policy practices, aspirations, stakeholders and entrepreneurs active in framing the opportunities and values of open data for urban governments. Both the momentum of support for open data, along with a recent shift in the rhetorical aspirations of the open data movement away from the values of openness and transparency and towards a more confined focus on value generation, raise important critical questions for urban geographers concerned with the nature of urban governance in an age of big data.

Sounds Different Listening to the Proliferating Spaces of Technological Modernity in the City

This article is interested in how a tuning of the ear toward the auditory qualities of urban life presents new encounters with the historical geographies of the city and its spaces of technological modernity. It identifies the way a heightened appreciation of the auditory domain has helped disclose different ways of conceptually approaching the experience of urbanization and technological modernity during the 20th century. The article then moves on to address contemporary practice-based responses to the auditory historical terrain, particularly where they experiment with contemporary mobile technology. It considers the way these mobile practices help to open up fruitful new methods of geographical enquiry, while at the same time calls into question why existing analyses of mobile culture necessarily denigrating the urban public realm.

When One Idea Led to Another: Re-inscribing and Recombining Thinking Spaces Using Night-time Projections at the Australian National University

ABSTRACT Large-scale projections onto urban architecture are an increasingly established form of public art, dazzling audiences and re-narrating the places and structures they are projected onto. This article examines one such projection work, Thinking Spaces, a two-week installation on the campus of the Australian National University in 2013. The artists sought to use the indistinct, fleeting, and ghostly aspects of illumination to practice a non-representational poetics of affect, re-inscribing a documented archive of relationships and “thinking spaces” onto present-day facades of selected university buildings. The article explores the creation of this artwork through three distinct layers: its historical site-specificity, as it related to the documentary archive from which it drew; its focus on rendering temporal geographies as non-representational, affective spatial practices; and the atmospheres that the artworks co-constituted with visitors. In doing so, this article adopts a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to describing the practices through which place, time, and spatial experience might be investigated through projection and illumination.

Digital Infrastructures and Urban Governance

Abstract The urban built environment is underpinned by an increasingly complex digital infrastructure, which is posing a variety of unpredictable and unprecedented challenges for urban governance. The paper discusses how the new “hard” digital infrastructures such as broadband are accompanied by the need to understand the governance of public sector information; and in turn how this relates to the emergence of smart city strategies. The paper is illustrated using empirical examples drawn from Australian digital infrastructure development, with reference to the international landscape of “smart city” developments. It argues that there is a significant mismatch between the often small scale, bounded capabilities of municipal government, and the operational expertise and scope of technology firms.

Plus ça change? Remaking the city, ‘one site, one app, one click at a time’

T he digital city has arrived. The technological revolution that is transforming the way we read, write, jot down notes and talk to each other, the way we pay our bills, make our way to meetings, catch trains and book our holidays is also radically reshaping the way cities are built, managed and governed. From power grids to security, from water to sanitation, from traffic management to construction and project management: each of the fundamental infrastructures and industries of the city are becoming ‘informationalised’. Indeed, some might even say ‘smart’. An urban planner can use an agent-based model to simulate the impacts of an urban development or transit system on population demographics over a 20-year period. An architect can collaborate with a structural engineer real time, across different continents, to design solutions not only for the construction phase of a building but, ostensibly, for its entire life cycle. A traffic engineer can use GPS (Global Positioning System) data harvested from smartphones to analyse traffic patterns, and in turn design better systems for cars to move around a city. Those cars can drive themselves. And you, dear reader, will never get lost again. It might be easy to think of the digital city’s arrival as merely symptomatic of the technological revolution that is everywhere obliterating existing business models and birthing fresh-faced billionaires. However, to Anthony Townsend (2013), author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia, the changes we are witnessing are very much more than simply maps becoming apps: they represent the transformation of the very art of city building. He writes: ‘Not since the planting of cobblestones, the laying of water mains, or the roll out of sewage pipes have we installed such a vast and versatile new infrastructure for controlling and organising our physical world’ (iv). Therefore, this is not just a technological revolution, nor simply a deepening of the symbiotic relationship between cities and information technology that extends back in time to the ancients. ‘That machines now run the world’, he writes, is nothing short of ‘a historic shift in the way we manage cities’ (xiii). Sounding at times every bit the prophetic champion of bits and bytes as his MIT mentor William J. Mitchell (1996), Townsend’s rhetorical strategy is crafted to excite his readers into action, inspiring a ‘new civics’ capable of designing ‘the future we want’ (6). Playing the role of ‘myth buster, whistle-blower, and skeptic in one’, Townsend takes his readers on a fast-paced ride

Climate Adapted People Shelters: A Transdisciplinary Reimagining of Public Infrastructure Through Open, Design-Led Innovation

Successful adaptation to climate change requires collective action by multiple actors operating at multiple scales. The Climate Adapted People Shelters (CAPS) project addressed the complex challenges of public exposure to urban heat, its impacts on the community, and the need for smarter public transport infrastructure to improve the liveability of cities in a warming world. It found that solutions to this problem require the integration of knowledge that includes, but is not limited to, the disciplines of environmental physics, innovation and design, business management, smart technology design, transport user behaviour and local governance. The project sought to foster innovation in climate adaptation through an open and human-centred design competition involving multiple stakeholders. The process was important because it revealed that community expectations about bus shelter design and performance were multi-faceted, and that the needs of infrastructure users could inform the practices of designing future public infrastructure. We discuss how to achieve more effective and broadly accepted urban design by utilizing open innovation, addressing urban resilience and climate adaptation, and leveraging the opportunities that lie within the use of data analytics and sensor technologies to address, in particular, transport user needs.