Month: August 2024

At the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam, Martina Klausner spoke on the panel ‘Voicing Places’ about the intertwining of data and politics. Her narrative ranged from the acoustic diversity of signals and noises in urban street space to the invisible and inaudible signals written and transmitted by induction loops, sensors and scanners. She explained why car data is omnipresent in Frankfurt’s data landscape, while data on other forms of mobility is only available to a very limited extent and is manually stitched together into data patches on an ad hoc basis. The presentation explored the question of how politics is inscribed in data assemblages and how these data ultimately express political meanings themselves.

Street noise: tracing data politics in urban traffic infrastructures

Panel

Voicing Places

Author

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.

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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.

During the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam in 2024, we discussed data supply chains in the public sector. In our presentation, we showed that transport data does not simply flow, but moves along sometimes bumpy paths through a network of actors and exchange relationships. While city administrations, companies and citizens generate, use and share data, these processes do not always run smoothly. Using two case studies, we discussed how classic market mechanisms mix with informal exchange practices and what tensions this creates for urban transport policy.

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

Authors

Catharina Dietrich and 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.