Data labor and power in the context of Verkehrswende politics in Frankfurt, Germany
Panel
(Inv)isibilities in environmental and spatial data
Abstract
Municipal planning and monitoring practices increasingly deal with data-saturated urban environments, especially in the traffic sector: Here, data become a prevalent tool for contriving more climate-friendly ways of moving people and goods in the context of striving for quantified sustainability goals. Car-centered infrastructure is still dominant in most cities and inferring from STS scholarship, we assume that it has politics. Comprising not only what is visible on the roads — traffic lights, lanes, and intersections — traffic infrastructure also includes a growing invisible twin of counting points, induction loops and data-handling systems.
Weiterlesen
Our research on the Verkehrswende (“mobility turn”) politics in Frankfurt, Germany, observes that the municipality automatedly collects extensive data on motorized individual traffic, while for other forms of mobility, it relies on modest data patches of singular locuses. Within our two case studies on A) civic and B) administrative data politics we find, however, that for all types of traffic, fields of action exist in which the administration only acknowledges communicated concerns when they are quantified. In this context data gain substantial power, as the recognition or disregard of various realities hinges significantly upon the availability or absence of numerical data. To increase the discursive and political power of cyclists and pedestrians, and their space in the city, civil society organizations frequently collect data themselves, exerting significant unpaid labor. By creating new data stories, they render visible what was not on the screens before.
We argue that the unequal datafication of different mobilities in combination with uniform expectations for data-informed arguments fosters power imbalances. It seems as if the horsepower of a road user corresponds with their overall power position — not only on the streets, but also in the digital data sheets.
Autorinnen:
Catharina Dietrich
Janine Hagemeister