The problematisation of big data circulation in Santiago de Chile’s Public Transport
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Urban Geography
, Transportation Geography
Keywords: Big Data, Public Transport, Problematisation, Governance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 19
Authors:
Ignacio J Perez, University of Oxford
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Abstract
Over the last decade, a lot has been said about smart cities, and more lately platform urbanism, as projects and ideas that loosely connect the confluences between digital data, urban management, labour, governance, and politics. Part of this agenda has been related to critical analysis around the "smart" in "actually existing" projects: ideas on the expansion of platform capitalism; novel governmentalities structured in pervasive forms of quantification, the erosion of privacy rights; and interdependent infrastructural forms of urban exclusion and colonialism.
Despite these efforts, not much has focused on what data does in cities as a "problematisation" (Foucault, 1984). This is, first, to explore how data becomes a problem through the observation of the tensions between continuity and change (ie. ruptures, disruptions) in the process of data circulation. And second, to identify how problems are generative of specific forms of solution-oriented experimentations which pragmatically reveal what data does in the city.
In this paper, I analyse how big data circulation becomes a problem in Santiago de Chile's public transport. In doing so, I examine three problems: control rooms and urban fragmentation, expertise, and translation. Using an ethnographic approach, I reconstruct the contingent trajectories of real-time passenger data, GPS and data platforms in public transport. Focusing on the generative capacity of problems to inflict active responses through an experimental "ontology of ourselves" (Stengers, 2021). I argue that these responses have the strategic capacity to coordinate actions and knowledge enacting experimental configurations revealing what big data does in public transport.
The problematisation of big data circulation in Santiago de Chile’s Public Transport
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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