A Study of Transformations in City Governance Due to the Use of Big Data Analytics

该奖项支持一个论文研究项目，一个发展中的智慧城市的案例研究。研究人员将对堪萨斯城进行为期一年的多地点人种学研究，在那里，公职人员，普通居民和当地企业家与思科，谷歌和Sprint等科技巨头合作，建立全市光纤宽带和试点智慧城市系统。她将研究大数据分析的采用如何改变地方政府的做法和公民参与，以及这些变化对社会不平等，地方治理和城市政策的影响。它特别关注当智能作为技术创新不仅驱动本地问题的解决方案，而且还驱动发现和定义它们的方法时会发生什么。除了在学术文献中传播该项目的成果外，她还将与当地利益相关者团体和其他非学术场所分享研究结果，包括科学美国人和大西洋等主持的科普博客的意见专栏和客座文章。在这样做的过程中，结果将为围绕数据分析在城市中的文化作用正在进行的公共辩论提供信息。这些发现将帮助技术专家和地方政府官员认识到他们在技术基础设施中构建的文化范式和政治决策，并促进对这些范式的潜在替代方案的讨论，为实际系统的未来设计提供信息。该项目将有助于更好地了解城市如何使用智能技术。它将允许对城市大数据进行更细致入微的批评，了解这些数据是如何在不同社区中产生、共享和分析的;相反，它将展示城市如何将智能塑造为一种社会技术结构。它将挑战组织数据驱动的城市系统是一个自上而下的过程的观点，展示如何鼓励公民企业家通过智慧城市实验与城市官员和志愿组织合作。它还将研究在地方治理中推动社会问题产生的新机制，其中大数据分析的采用通过创新经济的激励和数据科学的认识论来识别城市中的新问题。市政官员和民间企业家并不打算立即提高效率或系统性进步，而是打算发现新的问题，而不是解决长期存在的问题。他们不断寻找新的问题或新的测量方法，这与智慧城市解决或旨在解决现存城市问题的期望形成了鲜明对比。通过展示新形式的算法城市管理的实际情况，这项研究将揭示一个由智能技术和城市数据支持的城市如何更有效地参与不同人口群体之间的排斥和差异。

This award supports a dissertation research project, a case study of a smart city in development. The researcher will conduct a year-long, multi-sited ethnographic study of a Kansas City, where public officials, ordinary residents, and local entrepreneurs have joined with tech giants such as Cisco, Google, and Sprint to build citywide fiber-optic broadband and a pilot smart city system. She will examine how the adoption of big data analytics is transforming local government practices and civic engagement, and what the implications of such changes are for social inequality, local governance, and urban policy. It particularly focuses on what happens when smartness as technical innovation drives not only the solutions for local problems, but also the methodology of discovering and defining them. In addition to disseminating the results of this project in scholarly literature, she will share findings with local stakeholder groups and in other non-academic venues including opinion columns and guest posts for popular science and technology blogs such as those hosted by Scientific American and the Atlantic. In doing so, the results will serve to inform ongoing public debates around the cultural role of data analytics in the city. The findings will help technologists and local government officials be cognizant of the cultural paradigms and political decisions they build into technical infrastructure and enable discussion about potential alternatives to these paradigms, informing the future design of actual systems.The project will serve to provide a better understanding of how cities use smart technologies. It will allow for a more nuanced critique of urban big data, one that understands how such data is produced, shared, and analyzed across various communities; conversely, it will show how cities shape smartness as a socio-technical construct. It will challenge the view that organizing data-driven urban systems is a top-down process by showing how civic entrepreneurs are being encouraged to collaborate with city officials and voluntary organizations through smart city experiments. It will also examine a new mechanism that drives the production of social problems in local governance, one in which the adoption of big data analytics leads to identifying new problems in the city through both the incentives of the innovation economy, and the epistemologies of data science. Rather than immediate efficiency gains or systemic advances, city officials and civic entrepreneurs intend less to solve long-standing problems than to discover new ones. Their constant hunt for new problems or novel ways of measuring stands in contrast to expectation that the smart city solves, or aims to solve, extant urban problems. By demonstrating an on-the-ground account of new forms of algorithmic city management, this study will reveal how a city enabled by smart technologies and urban data can engage more effectively with exclusion and disparities across different population groups.