Environment and Planning A 2014, volume 46, pages 1263 – 1266

doi:10.1068/a472c

Commentary

The promise of urban informatics: some speculations

Introduction
You don’t have to be a technological determinist—like so many of our Silicon Valley brethren
who in the 1990s started a narrative of progress, even revelation, through information
technology that they now seem unable to put down—in order to be able to argue that cities
are being changed by information technology. They have been and they are being.
All that said, some of the claims about big data are being made as if it were still the 1990s,
just as they are with allied phenomena like MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses). The
future becomes the fulfilment of fulfilment.
But if we tried to get past the information technology as book of technological revelation
narrative into all of the thinking that’s been done about technology over the last fifteen years,
what might we be able to see instead?
Let me do a bit of throat clearing first. We don’t have to start by talking in the corporate
language of smart cities and the like in order to declare that urban informatics, understood as
the capture of the soundings produced by all of a city’s connected devices and the application
of data from those devices analysed in various ways, will have some far-reaching effects
(Batty, 2013; Weinstock, 2013). We can say immediately that the new tools available to us
thanks to big data can help the inhabitants of cities by enhancing and redefining infrastructure.
There are issues about the simple mechanics of the city that big data will enhance: all the way
from the availability of cabs to medical and other emergencies. There are issues about being
able to watch over people’s welfare which follow on, all the way from monitoring vital signs
to more clearly targeting public services. There are issues about being able to know how
neighbourhoods work and play which we will be able to monitor in a democratic fashion and
use as material for deliberative choices. And so on.
Of course, these effects will never be seamless in practice. Like all technological utilities,
there will be breakdowns, there will be endless repair and maintenance, there will be missing
data, and so on. Equally, there are bound to be downsides to the technology too—as there
always are to any new technology. All kinds of diminishments could arise. The issue of
privacy looms large, as does the issue of becoming trapped in a bubble of our own self-
declared preferences, unwilling or unable to let anything serendipitous in to contention,
chiming with the idea that people could miss a declaration of war nowadays because it would
not be on their preferences or those of their friends. Again, there is the issue of believing
that the local can be effortlessly recovered from a body of generic anyspace synthetic data:
both data and algorithms need to be open source and so open to outside influences (Amoore,
2013; Greenfield, 2013). There is an issue about statistical relevance and reference (Harford,
2014; Lazer et al, 2014; Marcus and Davis, 2014). And there is an issue about rampant
overspecification: that is, the idea that everything can be settled and anticipated if only we
can find the right system or set of algorithms (O’Neil and Schutt, 2014).
Another route
But let’s travel a slightly different route—away from the idea of a city that can somehow be
tuned to perfection and planned to the last microsecond: a vision that, as Greenfield (2013)
and Halpern et al (2013) have pointed out, Le Corbusier would have been happy with. To do
that we need to keep a few principles in mind.
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First off, technology is more mundane than it is usually portrayed. It is a part of people’s
practices and rapidly adapts to them (Glennie and Thrift, 2009). Most information technology
practices are only interesting because of what people do with them and most of the time that
means fitting them into buying and selling, communication, mainly with friends and family,
and simply passing the time with centuries old modes of pleasure (sex, gambling, gaming,
etc). Most of these practices would have been understood by the ancient Babylonians once
they got over the shock of the new, up to and including modern state practices like counting
and spying.
Second, because it is bound up with these practices, technology is more likely to proceed
through slow upheaval than some kind of ecstatic change. For example, over time, instant
search seems to be producing lower rates of recall of information in its users but higher
rates of recall of where to access information—but this is a slow process (Sparrow et al,
2011). In other words, instead of calling up narratives of progress, we might think instead of
‘improvement’, in a conscious nod to processes like the agricultural revolution.
Third, the most effective technology is what becomes adopted as infrastructure: pipes,
roads, cables, wireless, and so on: all the stuff you notice only when it goes wrong. Big data is
likely to fall into this category over time: it will become a standard ‘utility’: indeed it already
is to a degree. Big data will simply become an accepted background which allows the world
to continue on.
Fourth, technology is never adopted in a rational manner. It becomes mixed up with
people’s beliefs and expectations and rapidly moves from the object to the spiritual world.
When we don’t understand something we get a fix on it by anthromorphising it. So big data is
likely to become understood as a force or forces in the world, helped by its decidedly unholy
intersection with the security and entertainment industries.
Fifth, all that said, what is also interesting is that technology, in the form of objects, has
a life of its own. We shouldn’t become involved in easy correlationism of either the human
or technological determinist kind. Gradually we are adding a new skin of data to the world, a
skin which can also have its own life, at least in part arising from the way it can be so easily
integrated with so many activities.
So what’s next? Speculations
So how might big data reconfigure cities? Well, in all kinds of ways, of course, from
continually locating us to allowing us to be automatically mobile, from representing all of
our activities to allowing many people to follow them, from becoming a normal part of
buildings just like water or electricity or gas to becoming a part of normal practices of vision,
of how we see what we see (of which Google Glass may be a precursor). Systems of flow
will become flow systems.
Big data will also spawn a new kind of urban science, interdisciplinary, working with
new techniques born in mathematics and statistics departments certainly but also taking in
the insights and imaginings of the arts and social sciences as a matter of course, not just as a
convenient archive of design and representation that can be drawn down but also as a means
of providing a genuinely social and political drive without which urban science will be left
simply with efficiency and profit maximisation as goals.
But I think what is most interesting is that big data will become a part of the surfaces we
routinely encounter (Thrift, 2014). What we are seeing is data gradually becoming a part of
how we see the world as it becomes embedded in all of the surfaces we come across, and the
moving actors that span them, whether birds and trees or cars or us. Screens are becoming
surfaces are becoming materials, in other words. Other technologies like 3D printing, robotics,
intelligent fabrics, drones, and floppy surfaces only underline how surfaces will be lit up and
morph if our attention wanders in their direction.
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I can foresee a world in which every surface is overlaid with data, in which every surface
can speak: the world as a continuous canvas, if you like. Each and every situation will
be haunted by its data analogues. These new alloys of materials and information will call
to us in more or less powerful ways, fitting into our lives like slightly out-of-kilter duals to
existing surfaces because they can react so quickly. Trees and animals, walls and windows,
all of them will be sending and receiving—and representing—data, just like screens do now
but generalised to the nth degree. And, at the same time, they will produce new means of
representation which we are only just beginning to glimpse as art and information technology
merge, based upon the currency of partial composition and the attendant risk—the unfinished
and the awkward, the everyday missteps and erratics, the tiny tragedies and the small pleasures
all bundled together and taken apart again.
The interesting thing becomes what this wrapped world of ‘metamaterials’ will feel like in
the next thirty years or so when so much of big data will have become a part of technological
second nature.
In particular, I suspect it will change our notion of causality. You will be able to see
process unfolding in a way which is currently impossible. At the moment we can track our
Amazon packages but what happens when everything becomes susceptible to logistical
seeing and thinking?
It will change our notion of our place in the world too. We will really be able to see things
going on both near and far at once as the faraway nearby (Solnit, 2013) becomes an even
more common experience. Cities will be able to be seen through. Being present in a specific
time and place and being real will no longer be one and the same since we will be able to see
many points of view instantaneously.
And it will change our notion of circumstance. Things won’t have to have a true now.
The immediate will be able to be multiple. Round the corner will no longer mean as much.
The result is also that cities will no longer be an aftereffect of human presence. They have
always had an independent aspect but now cities will take on a sense of themselves—like
an indelible atmosphere. ’Twas always thus, you might say: the ring of bells, the hum of
traffic, the susurrus of conversation. But now you will be able to see more of it, hear more
of it, touch more of it. Its life will not just be our life. The city will become a moving part
in a web of human and nonhuman relationships which can begin to independently represent
itself. Perhaps we will start to form a culture which has elements of animism to it. In animist
cultures, animals and plants and even things are ‘humans in disguise’. They are persons—
subjects—sometimes thought of as having their own cultures. Humans and nonhumans differ
by virtue of the form of their bodies but the substance of their souls is counted as similar.
So, for example, animals might be thought of as essentially human but they have been
transformed into animal forms by means of the outward clothing of their skin. Or all beings
are thought to be made from the same substances. The result is that human beings are joined
by all manner of other humans—but humans who do not present with a human appearance.
At the same time, phenomena like poverty can become real to more people: they will
not be able to be hidden away as they have been in many Western cities (although not in
cities of the South). Does that mean that things will get better? Will there be an outburst of
compassion once you can see people struggling and dying close to? Not necessarily. After
all, many cities have existed and do exist in which rich and poor live adjacent to one another
and nothing happens. Being able to see and analyse things doesn’t necessarily lead to action.
But, that said, think of a city in which the apartments of the rich can be surveilled by the poor
as well as vice versa.
Adam Smith once talked in the The Theory of Moral Sentiments about not being able to
appreciate suffering at a distance in the same way as close to. The media have already put
1266 Commentary

that to the test in that people have probably become more caring of distant causes than before.
Big data could be the next step forward since it will become possible to know people and
other actors from afar as never possible before—city twinning may take on a real purchase as
cities and their inhabitants intertwine all over the world: you could know other cities as well
as your own, fix on a city block in a city far away as your second locality just as people now
have second homes.
Then, finally, sense of place will change in other ways. Perhaps the kind of outlook found
in classical Chinese gardens, driven by the facility of comparison provided by all kinds of
cultural apparatuses from writing to landscape, will prevail in the sense that the Chinese
understanding of these spatial sites is always heavy with explicit analogy and metaphor,
weighed down by the notion that certain spatial forms bring good—or bad—fortune. Things
are like other things: rocks are like animals or people, many trees and flowers have explicit
meanings which come from both their nature and where they are planted, animals turn up
in designs as portents and guides. Everything looks like/sounds like something else too and
this landscape of homonyms and homophones and of borrowed scenery made integral to a
vista is a continuous proof of that point. Symbolic meaning will be heightened—and it will
speak back.
So I am not arguing that big data will produce an all-seeing governmentality, though
the danger is certainly there. Nor am I arguing that big data will necessarily add to the sum
of human welfare in some glorious techie lovebomb, though it will produce many small
but important improvements in human life. Rather, what I am interested in is how big data
will begin to change our perceptions of what the world is in ways which will certainly be
interesting, might be for good or for ill, but will certainly intensify the space in space.
Nigel Thrift
University of Warwick
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