An essay on “The Data City as Public Experiment?” that I wrote with Noortje Marres (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick) has just come out in London Ideas, a new publication from the Centre for London. You can download a PDF of the piece here. The précis is as follows:

Cities have long been imagined as “machines for living”, and today’s data technologies carry the promise of making them more “intelligent” – more attuned to the lives of citizens; better able to ensure feedback and the re-adjustment of relations between people, environments, and institutions. How might data, and data culture, play a role in reshaping city life, for whom, and to what end?

We are most grateful to the various people and projects who used open licenses and/or granted permission for us to reproduce images which accompany the essay, including Nerea Calvillo and the Yellow Dust project, Sohei Nishino‘s Diorama Map of London, Moritz Stefaner and the Selfie City project, and the Living Lots NYC project from 596 Acres.