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.
