For the exhibition at the Historisches Museum „Bewegung! Frankfurt und die Mobilität“ (Movement! Frankfurt and Mobility), we collaborated with illustrator Jonas Gallenkamp to create a hidden object picture (Wimmelbild) that provides an overview of the mobility data landscape in Frankfurt. The busy scene is framed by an ethnographic comic that depicts the research project. In the exhibition catalogue, we wrote an accompanying article on the intertwining of data and politics and explained our approach to ethnographic research on data journeys.
When data goes travelling. An ethnographic search for clues in Frankfurt’s mobility data.
Authors
Martina Klausner, Catharina Dietrich, Janine Hagemeister
Citation
Klausner, M., Dietrich, C., Hagemeister J. (2024). Wenn Daten auf Reisen gehen. Eine ethnografische Spurensuche zu Frankfurts Mobilitätsdaten. In N. Gorgus, V. Asschenfeldt, I. Chhima, P. Henning, S. Roller, & S. Thimm (Hg.), Schriften des Historischen Museums Frankfurt: Band 45. Bewegung! Frankfurt und die Mobilität (Vol. 45, pp. 76—77). Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag.
At the Data Power Conference 2024, we discussed data work and power relations in a data-based transformation of urban mobility. Our presentation focused on the political significance of unequal data availability for different forms of mobility. While motorised private transport is comprehensively recorded, walking and cycling often remain invisible. It is often civil society actors who take the initiative on this issue and collect data themselves in order to bring their concerns into political decision-making processes
Data labor and power in the context of Verkehrswende politics in Frankfurt, Germany
Panel
(Inv)isibilities in environmental and spatial data
Author
Catharina Dietrich and 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.
Read more
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.
