This special theme explores how technology-enabled platforms have been taken up in urban governance processes through platforms variously labeled as big data, crowdsourcing, or the sharing economy. These emerging platforms and practices are challenging the tactics, capabilities, and authorizations employed to define and govern urban problems.
Setting aside the tired narratives of individual genius and unstoppable technological progress, this themed issue of Big Data and Society interrogates the emergence of digital platforms and smart city initiatives that rely on both the crowd (citizen-generated data and behaviors) and the cloud (on-demand, Internet-based technologies that store and process data) to generate and fold big data into urban governance.
List of Articles
- The Cloud, the Crowd, and the City: How New Data Practices Reconfigure Urban Governance?
P. Ashton, R. Weber and M. Zook
Big Data & Society, May 2017, 10.1177/2053951717706718 - Big Data, Urban Governance, and the Ontological Politics of Hyperindividualism
Robert Lake
Big Data & Society, May 2017, 10.1177/2053951716682537 - Data, Democracy and School Accountability: Controversy over school evaluation in the case of DeVasco High School
John West
Big Data & Society, May 2017, 10.1177/2053951717702408 - The Urban Geographical Imagination in the Age of Big Data
Taylor Shelton
Big Data & Society, May 2017, 10.1177/2053951716665129 - Crowd-sourcing the Smart City: Using Big Geosocial Media Metrics in Urban Governance
Matthew Zook
Big Data & Society, May 2017, 10.1177/2053951717694384
These articles were originally presented as part of a one-day symposium held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in April 2015, which was sponsored by UIC’ s Department of Urban Planning and Policy.