Monat: August 2024

Auf der EASST/4S-Konferenz in Amsterdam sprach Martina Klausner im Panel „Voicing Places“ über die Verflochtenheit von Daten und Politik. Ihre Erzählung spannte sich von der akustischen Vielfalt von Signalen und Geräuschen im urbanen Straßenraum bis zu den unsichtbaren und unhörbaren Signalen, die von Induktionsschleifen, Sensoren und Scannern geschrieben und gesendet werden. Sie erklärte, weshalb in der Datenlandschaft Frankfurts Autodaten omnipräsent sind, während Daten zu anderen Mobilitätsformen nur in sehr begrenztem Maße vorhanden sind und annlassbezogenen in Handarbeit zu Datenflicken zusammengenäht werden. Der Vortrag ging der Frage nach, wie sich Politik in Daten-Assemblagen einschreibt und wie diese Daten letztlich selbst Politisches ausdrücken.

Street noise: tracing data politics in urban traffic infrastructures

Pannel

Voicing Places

Autorin

Martina Klausner

Abstract

In my contribution I seek to listen to the different signals that are generated as part of urban traffic and administrative information infrastructures and how the resulting data assemble voice politics in different forms.

Urban streets are filled with noise: roaring engines, chatting neighbours, bicycle bells, all voicing demands for their space in public place. Unheard and mostly unnoticed by road users, other signals fill the urban public space: inductors embedded in the asphalt of the road generate and transmit signals, indicating the numbers and movement of (some) road users and ultimately form the basis for the planning and monitoring of the city’s traffic. My contribution to the panel seeks to listen to these signals and asks how they participate in the politics of redistributing space for urban traffic. As part of the historically grown traffic and administrative information infrastructures, traffic data are assembled in particular ways.

Weiterlesen

To no surprise, signals counting cars and controlling their flows and stops have been central for the development of traffic data infrastructures. Just as cars dominate the roads, traffic data infrastructures are also primarily populated by car data. However, my interest is less on the quantity of certain data but on the trails and forms that data take and how they assemble and voice political claims in different ways. While car data are meant to flow continuously, data on bicycle traffic are knit together in what I call data patches: context-specific and issue-related data collections that span various sources, times and places, enabling different data stories and politics.

Während der EASST/4S Konferenz in Amsterdam 2024 sprachen wir über Daten-Lieferketten im öffentlichen Sektor. In unserem Vortrag haben wir gezeigt, dass Verkehrsdaten nicht einfach fließen, sondern sich auf teils holprigen Wegen durch ein Geflecht aus Akteuren und Austauschbeziehungen bewegen. Während die Stadtverwaltung, Unternehmen und Bürger*innen Daten erzeugen, nutzen und weitergeben, verlaufen diese Prozesse nicht immer reibungslos. Anhand zweier Fallbeispiele haben wir diskutiert, wie sich klassische Marktmechanismen mit informellen Tauschpraktiken vermischen und welche Spannungen daraus für die städtische Verkehrspolitik entstehen.

Lighting Bumpy Data Roads: Investigating Heterogeneous Data Supply Chains in Urban Traffic Transformation

Panel

Demystifying Data Supply Chains: Perspectives from Markets of Data Sourcing, Production, and Brokerage

Autorinnen

Catharina Dietrich und Janine Hagemeister

Abstract

Urban traffic infrastructure matters for a variety of actors: the municipal administration, private enterprises, and most numerously, citizens. Just as manifold as the relations between these actors are the traffic data they generate for different purposes at different locations, and the evolving supply chains.

This presentation is based on an ongoing research project on data politics in the proclaimed “sustainable traffic transformation” (Verkehrswende) of Frankfurt, Germany. We use the concept of data journeys (Bates et al. 2016) to trace how data is produced, processed, and shared within the complex networks at play.

Many actors obtain ambivalent roles in this entanglement: Citizens are simultaneously customers, objects of datafication, data consumers, or sometimes even data manufacturers, while the municipality acts as both a key data provider and a customer. In addition, relevant legal regulations and political interests contribute to a mixture of commodification logics and practices. As a public actor within private markets, the municipality finds itself in various double binds. 

Weiterlesen

We will illustrate the diversity of data trading practices on two examples. While the data purchases involved in the development of a new municipal traffic model follow traditional logics of marketization, other constellations elude those. In the case of pedestrian counters that were installed in Frankfurt, the agreements are based on an exchange of various services and mutual data provision instead of monetary payments. Attending to those diverse forms of bargain allows us to investigate the multifaceted practices of data valorization involved along different stages of the supply chains.