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Beim STS Hub 2025 in Berlin, der unter der Überschrift „Diffracting the Critical“ stand, war unser Projekt mit einem Beitrag zu den verschiedenen Formen von Grenzarbeit (Boundary Work) die zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure im Zusammenhang mit ihren Datenpraktiken leisten, vertreten. Der Vortrag behandelte die Rolle von freiwilliger Datenarbeit in den Aushandlungen um eine Verkehrswende. Aktivist*innen in Frankfurt erfassen Rad- und Fußverkehrsdaten, um ihre Anliegen mit numerischer Evidenz zu untermauern und sehen sich wiederholt mit mit Diskussionen über Datenvalidität konfrontiert. Daten werden dabei selbst zu einem Gegenstand von Grenzarbeit und sind zugleich Werkzeug für Kollaboration und die Neuverhandlung von Grenzen und Zuständigkeiten.

The Politics of Voluntary Data Labor: Activist Boundary Work in Urban Mobility Transformation

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Demarcating boundaries of and with data: Boundary work in the age of datafication

Autorin

Catharina Dietrich

Abstract

The demand for numerical evidence is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and administrative decision making and audible in public debates (Rieder and Simon, 2016). The field of urban mobility is no exception. In the heated debates over a sustainable traffic transition, experiential knowledge is often dismissed as unreliable.

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In my research on activist data practices in Frankfurt, Germany, I observed that civic actors engage in voluntary data labor to meet these demands. Activists collect and generate digital data on cycling and pedestrian traffic to underpin their claims. By employing measuring devices and counting practices, they reconfigure their sensory perceptions into numerical evidence. Their effort to produce knowledge that is seen as neutral and credible, and to frame it as “citizen science”, involves considerable boundary work. As the data they produce is often contested, they find themselves in ongoing negotiations about what counts as valid knowledge and what characterizes trustworthy data.

My paper explores these dynamics and examines how voluntary data labor in combination with careful boundary work can allow activists to increase their discursive and political power and claim space for non-motorized transportation in the city.

Im Rahmen der Data Power Conference 2024 sprachen wir über Datenarbeit und Machtverhältnisse in einer datenbasierten Transformation von städtischer Mobilität. Unser Vortrag thematisierte die politische Bedeutung ungleicher Datenverfügbarkeit im für verschiedene Mobilitätsformen. Während der motorisierte Individualverkehr umfassend erfasst wird, bleibt der Fuß- und Radverkehr oft unsichtbar. Oft sind es zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure, die hier Initiative ergreifen und selbst Daten erheben, um ihre Anliegen in politische Entscheidungsprozesse einzubringen.

Data labor and power in the context of Verkehrswende politics in Frankfurt, Germany

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(Inv)isibilities in environmental and spatial data

Autorinnen

Catharina Dietrich und Janine Hagemeister

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.  

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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.

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

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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. 

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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.