Implications of “Data as Infrastructure” in the Smart City – Güneş Tavmen

In this presentation, I will raise critical questions regarding the future of public services and spatial organisation against the backdrop of ever-expanding data-driven urban management systems. Since data has become an infrastructure in the smart cities (as opposed to the metaphor of “oil”), multinational data analytics companies have now become important actors in urban governance. Focusing on London, I will discuss data technologies from a perspective of infrastructural disposition by comparing various public and private data analytics initiatives.

Güneş Tavmen is ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the transformation of urban infrastructure together with the implementation of data technologies. She earned her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London with her thesis on (open) data discourses and applications in the context of smart city making in London.

From Cities to Forests: Digital Governance for a Smart(er) Planet - Jennifer Gabrys

Smart cities have been extensively analysed as a technological development that creates problematic as well as undemocratic modes of urban governance. However, even more sites are now transforming into “smart” environments. This presentation will consider how forests are increasingly observed, occupied and remade through digital infrastructures that are meant to manage and mitigate environmental change. The proliferation of smart environment and smart forest technologies raises the question of how digital technologies are altering approaches to forests, environmental change, and planetary governance.

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics; Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet; and How to Do Things with Sensors. Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.