IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/urbpla/v1y2016i2p101-113.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Data-Driven Participation: Algorithms, Cities, Citizens, and Corporate Control

Author

Listed:
  • Matthew Tenney

    (Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Canada)

  • Renee Sieber

    (Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Canada)

Abstract

In this paper, we critically explore the interplay of algorithms and civic participation in visions of a city governed by equation, sensor and tweet. We begin by discussing the rhetoric surrounding techno-enabled paths to participatory democracy. This leads to us interrogating how the city is impacted by a discourse that promises to harness social/human capital through data science. We move to a praxis level and examine the motivations of local planners to adopt and increasingly automate forms of VGI as a form of citizen engagement. We ground theory and praxis with a report on the uneven impacts of algorithmic civic participation underway in the Canadian city of Toronto.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthew Tenney & Renee Sieber, 2016. "Data-Driven Participation: Algorithms, Cities, Citizens, and Corporate Control," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 1(2), pages 101-113.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v:1:y:2016:i:2:p:101-113
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/645
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lucy Budd & Peter Adey, 2009. "The Software-Simulated Airworld: Anticipatory Code and Affective Aeromobilities," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 41(6), pages 1366-1385, June.
    2. Gregory Brown & Maggi Kelly & Debra Whitall, 2014. "Which 'public'? Sampling effects in public participation GIS (PPGIS) and volunteered geographic information (VGI) systems for public lands management," Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(2), pages 190-214, February.
    3. Robert G. Hollands, 2008. "Will the real smart city please stand up?," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(3), pages 303-320, December.
    4. Mei-Po Kwan, 2016. "Algorithmic Geographies: Big Data, Algorithmic Uncertainty, and the Production of Geographic Knowledge," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 106(2), pages 274-282, March.
    5. Vito Albino & Umberto Berardi & Rosa Maria Dangelico, 2015. "Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives," Journal of Urban Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(1), pages 3-21, January.
    6. Jenifer Winter, 2015. "Algorithmic Discrimination: Big Data Analytics and the Future of the Internet," Public Administration and Information Technology, in: Jenifer Winter & Ryota Ono (ed.), The Future Internet, edition 1, chapter 0, pages 125-140, Springer.
    7. Robert Goodspeed, 2015. "Smart cities: moving beyond urban cybernetics to tackle wicked problems," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 8(1), pages 79-92.
    8. Ola Söderström & Till Paasche & Francisco Klauser, 2014. "Smart cities as corporate storytelling," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3), pages 307-320, June.
    9. Mark Graham & Bernie Hogan & Ralph K. Straumann & Ahmed Medhat, 2014. "Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 104(4), pages 746-764, July.
    10. Nicky J. Welton & Howard H. Z. Thom, 2015. "Value of Information," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 35(5), pages 564-566, July.
    11. Napoli, Philip M., 2015. "Social media and the public interest: Governance of news platforms in the realm of individual and algorithmic gatekeepers," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(9), pages 751-760.
    12. Nader Afzalan & Jennifer Evans-Cowley, 2015. "Planning and Social Media: Facebook for Planning at the Neighbourhood Scale," Planning Practice & Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(3), pages 270-285, June.
    13. Andrew Williams & Mark Goodwin & Paul Cloke, 2014. "Neoliberalism, Big Society, and Progressive Localism," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 46(12), pages 2798-2815, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Secinaro, Silvana & Brescia, Valerio & Lanzalonga, Federico & Santoro, Gabriele, 2022. "Smart city reporting: A bibliometric and structured literature review analysis to identify technological opportunities and challenges for sustainable development," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 296-313.
    2. Fenna Imara Hoefsloot & Javier Martínez & Christine Richter & Karin Pfeffer, 2020. "Expert-Amateurs and Smart Citizens: How Digitalization Reconfigures Lima’s Water Infrastructure," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 5(4), pages 312-323.
    3. Sara Safransky, 2020. "Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(2), pages 200-218, March.
    4. Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko, 2021. "Digital Urban Planning Platforms: The Interplay of Digital and Local Embeddedness in Urban Planning," International Journal of E-Planning Research (IJEPR), IGI Global, vol. 10(3), pages 35-49, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Johannes Stübinger & Lucas Schneider, 2020. "Understanding Smart City—A Data-Driven Literature Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(20), pages 1-23, October.
    2. Lill Sarv & Ralf-Martin Soe, 2021. "Transition towards Smart City: The Case of Tallinn," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-18, April.
    3. Seema Mundoli & Hita Unnikrishnan & Harini Nagendra, 2017. "The “Sustainable” in smart cities: ignoring the importance of urban ecosystems," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 44(2), pages 103-120, June.
    4. van den Buuse, Daniel & Kolk, Ans, 2019. "An exploration of smart city approaches by international ICT firms," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 220-234.
    5. Trencher, Gregory, 2019. "Towards the smart city 2.0: Empirical evidence of using smartness as a tool for tackling social challenges," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 117-128.
    6. Kummitha, Rama Krishna Reddy, 2018. "Entrepreneurial urbanism and technological panacea: Why Smart City planning needs to go beyond corporate visioning?," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 137(C), pages 330-339.
    7. Parul Gupta & Sumedha Chauhan & M. P. Jaiswal, 2019. "Classification of Smart City Research - a Descriptive Literature Review and Future Research Agenda," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 21(3), pages 661-685, June.
    8. Huaxiong Jiang & Stan Geertman & Patrick Witte, 2020. "Avoiding the planning support system pitfalls? What smart governance can learn from the planning support system implementation gap," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 47(8), pages 1343-1360, October.
    9. Schiavone, Francesco & Paolone, Francesco & Mancini, Daniela, 2019. "Business model innovation for urban smartization," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 210-219.
    10. Marchesani, Filippo & Masciarelli, Francesca & Bikfalvi, Andrea, 2023. "Smart city as a hub for talent and innovative companies: Exploring the (dis) advantages of digital technology implementation in cities," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 193(C).
    11. Alan-Miguel Valdez & Matthew Cook & Stephen Potter, 2018. "Roadmaps to utopia: Tales of the smart city," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(15), pages 3385-3403, November.
    12. Ezra Ho, 2017. "Smart subjects for a Smart Nation? Governing (smart)mentalities in Singapore," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(13), pages 3101-3118, October.
    13. Lyons, Glenn, 2018. "Getting smart about urban mobility – Aligning the paradigms of smart and sustainable," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 4-14.
    14. Mohamed Hanine & Omar Boutkhoum & Fatima El Barakaz & Mohamed Lachgar & Noureddine Assad & Furqan Rustam & Imran Ashraf, 2021. "An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Approach for Smart City Development Evaluation for Developing Countries: Moroccan Context," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(21), pages 1-22, October.
    15. Mora, Luca & Deakin, Mark & Reid, Alasdair, 2019. "Combining co-citation clustering and text-based analysis to reveal the main development paths of smart cities," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 56-69.
    16. Karimikia, Hadi & Bradshaw, Robert & Singh, Harminder & Ojo, Adegboyega & Donnellan, Brian & Guerin, Michael, 2022. "An emergent taxonomy of boundary spanning in the smart city context – The case of smart Dublin," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 185(C).
    17. Mora, Luca & Deakin, Mark & Reid, Alasdair, 2019. "Strategic principles for smart city development: A multiple case study analysis of European best practices," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 70-97.
    18. Li Zhao & Zhi-ying Tang & Xin Zou, 2019. "Mapping the Knowledge Domain of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric and Scientometric Analysis," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(23), pages 1-28, November.
    19. Munan Li, 2019. "Visualizing the studies on smart cities in the past two decades: a two-dimensional perspective," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(2), pages 683-705, August.
    20. Anke Strüver & Rivka Saltiel & Nicolas Schlitz & Bernhard Hohmann & Thomas Höflehner & Barbara Grabher, 2021. "A Smart Right to the City—Grounding Corporate Storytelling and Questioning Smart Urbanism," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(17), pages 1-17, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v:1:y:2016:i:2:p:101-113. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.