A Study of Transformations in City Governance Due to the Use of Big Data Analytics

This award supports a dissertation research project, a case study of a smart city in development. The researcher will conduct a year-long, multi-sited ethnographic study of a Kansas City, where public officials, ordinary residents, and local entrepreneurs have joined with tech giants such as Cisco, Google, and Sprint to build citywide fiber-optic broadband and a pilot smart city system. She will examine how the adoption of big data analytics is transforming local government practices and civic engagement, and what the implications of such changes are for social inequality, local governance, and urban policy. It particularly focuses on what happens when smartness as technical innovation drives not only the solutions for local problems, but also the methodology of discovering and defining them. In addition to disseminating the results of this project in scholarly literature, she will share findings with local stakeholder groups and in other non-academic venues including opinion columns and guest posts for popular science and technology blogs such as those hosted by Scientific American and the Atlantic. In doing so, the results will serve to inform ongoing public debates around the cultural role of data analytics in the city. The findings will help technologists and local government officials be cognizant of the cultural paradigms and political decisions they build into technical infrastructure and enable discussion about potential alternatives to these paradigms, informing the future design of actual systems.

The project will serve to provide a better understanding of how cities use smart technologies. It will allow for a more nuanced critique of urban big data, one that understands how such data is produced, shared, and analyzed across various communities; conversely, it will show how cities shape smartness as a socio-technical construct. It will challenge the view that organizing data-driven urban systems is a top-down process by showing how civic entrepreneurs are being encouraged to collaborate with city officials and voluntary organizations through smart city experiments. It will also examine a new mechanism that drives the production of social problems in local governance, one in which the adoption of big data analytics leads to identifying new problems in the city through both the incentives of the innovation economy, and the epistemologies of data science. Rather than immediate efficiency gains or systemic advances, city officials and civic entrepreneurs intend less to solve long-standing problems than to discover new ones. Their constant hunt for new problems or novel ways of measuring stands in contrast to expectation that the smart city solves, or aims to solve, extant urban problems. By demonstrating an on-the-ground account of new forms of algorithmic city management, this study will reveal how a city enabled by smart technologies and urban data can engage more effectively with exclusion and disparities across different population groups.