Urban indicators, city benchmarking, and real-time dashboards: Knowing and

governing cities through open and big data

Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault, and Gavin McArdle

NIRSA, NUIM

Introduction

• Over past 25 years there has been a proliferation of urban indicator and city benchmarking projects

• More recently such projects are becoming open, real-time, and visualised through (interactive) dashboards

• This paper considers what these projects mean for how cities are known and governed; how they are enrolled in the production of smart cities

• We argue that indicator and benchmarking projects promote a narrowly conceived but powerful realist epistemology – the city as visualised numbers - that is reshaping city governance

Framing

• Our discussion is framed by: • a critical understanding of data that recognizes

that they do not exist independently of the ideas, instruments, practices, contexts, knowledges and systems used to generate, process and analyze them - there is a politics to data assemblages, such as indicator/benchmarking initiatives.

Data Assemblage

Attributes ElementsSystems of

thoughtModes of thinking, philosophies, theories, models, ideologies, rationalities,

etc.Forms of

knowledgeResearch texts, manuals, magazines, websites, experience, word of mouth,

chat forums, etc. Finance Business models, investment, venture capital, grants, philanthropy, profit,

etc.Political economy Policy, tax regimes, public and political opinion, ethical considerations, etc.

Govern-mentalities /

Legalities

Data standards, file formats, system requirements, protocols, regulations, laws, licensing, intellectual property regimes, etc.

Materialities & infrastructures

Paper/pens, computers, digital devices, sensors, scanners, databases, networks, servers, etc.

Practices Techniques, ways of doing, learned behaviours, scientific conventions, etc.

Organisations & institutions

Archives, corporations, consultants, manufacturers, retailers, government agencies, universities, conferences, clubs and societies, committees and

boards, communities of practice, etc.Subjectivities &

communitiesOf data producers, curators, managers, analysts, scientists, politicians,

users, citizens, etc.Places Labs, offices, field sites, data centres, server farms, business parks, etc,

and their agglomerationsMarketplace For data, its derivatives (e.g., text, tables, graphs, maps), analysts, analytic

software, interpretations, etc.

Framing

• Our discussion is framed by: • a critical understanding of data that recognizes

that they do not exist independently of the ideas, instruments, practices, contexts, knowledges and systems used to generate, process and analyze them - there is a politics to data assemblages, such as indicator/benchmarking initiatives.

• our own practices of creating/managing indicator projects since 2005 through AIRO (All-Island Research Observatory) and a new dashboard for Dublin City Council – Dublin Dashboard (not yet launched)

• How’s Dublin Doing• Dublin Indicators and Benchmarking tools

• Dublin Real-Time• Real-time data from sensors across Dublin

• Dublin Mapped• Detailed Census maps for 2006 & 2011

Census• Dublin Planning

• Zoning and Planning Permission• Dublin Near To Me

• Community and service accessibility maps• Dublin Housing

• Various housing modules, commuter maps• Dublin Reporting

• FixMyStreet/CityWatch• Dublin Social

• Live map of activity in Dublin based on social network interactions

• Dublin Data Stores• Access to data used in the dashboard

• Dublin Modelled• Proposed modelling and Scenario tools

• Dublin Apps• Directory of apps relevant to Dublin

• Have Your Say• Feedback from Users

Indicators, benchmarking and real-time dashboards

Indicators

• Different types of indicators, generated for varying purposes• Single direct and indirect

indicators• Composite indicators• Descriptive/contextual

indicators• Diagnostic, performance and

target indicators• Predictive and conditional

indicators

City benchmarking

• Standardized indicators for comparison within and across cities.

• Enables performance to be benchmarked with other places and against best practice; to identify relative strengths and weaknesses

• Can produce league tables and ranks of relative performance and to set targets.

• Used to formulate policy and undertake place promotion

• JLL detail over 150 city benchmarking initiatives.

• cityindicators.org is a joint project of The World Bank, UN-Habitat, the World Economic Forum, OECD, the Government of Canada that are also working on an ISO standard for city benchmarking indicators.

Real-time dashboards• Mainly real-time

operational data• Generally feeding

control rooms, sometimes open

• Big urban data

• Centro De Operacoes Prefeitura Do Rio

• 30 real-time systems + public administration + crowdsourced data

• Surveillance + dataveillance

Epistemology, politics of data, governance

Realist epistemology• Indicators, benchmarking and dashboards promote a realist

epistemology by privileging a particular ontological framing (city as numbers) and modes of analysis (data viz) with respect to cities and their citizens

• Supposedly provide well defined measures that are: • objective, neutral, value-free, and independent of external influence;• Systematic and continuous in operation and coverage (rather than one

off and constrained by time, geography and limit sampling)• verifiable and replicable; • timely and traceable over time; • easy, quick and cost-effective to collect, process and update• easy to present, interpret, and to compare across locales through

interactive graphs/maps• Makes claims with respect to the truth about urban systems and

life and has utility by facilitating action in relation to that knowledge

Critique

• Not simply technical tools: they are framed socially, political, ethically, philosophically in terms of their form, selection, analysis and deployment

• Indicators express a normative notion about what should be measured, for what reasons, and what they should tell us - full of values and judgements shaped by a range of views and contexts

• And they have normative effect - being used to influence decision-making, modify institutional behaviour, condition workers, etc. ... but also enact Campbell’s Law

Critique• Indicator projects promote an instrumental rationality based

on a narrowly framed episteme and techne that:• is reductionist – atomizing complex, contingent relationships into

simplified, one-dimensional measures that do not give full picture; decontextualizes the city from history, political economy and wider set of social, economic and environmental relations

• undermines and replaces other scientific forms of urban knowing that are less systematic and continuous – policy analysis, interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc; as well phronesis (knowledge derived from practice and deliberation) and metis (knowledge based on experience).

• enables longitudinal analysis, but this often ignores the temporal register of urban processes (that different processes and policies work at different speeds) demanding quick change and response

• Full of absences and silences – phenomena that are difficult to quantify or are politically contentious.

Critique - indicators• Quality of indicators is dependent on veracity and

provenance of data• rarely are indicators published with metadata concerning

measurement, sampling frame, handling, veracity (accuracy, fidelity), uncertainty, error, bias, reliability, calibration, lineage.

• Composite indicators can be opaque in method (aggregation, normalization, weightings) and sources, quality and commensurability of data; and can have issues of multicollinearity and be highly sensitive to adjustment (e.g. of weightings)

• There are spatial boundary issues (where is the city?) and leakage (cities are open, porous systems)

• Somewhere in the translation from data indicators gain confidence and stature and shed constraints and parameters.

Critique - benchmarking• Difficulty of standardizing measures across jurisdictions• Selection of indicators, parameters, weightings inherently tend to favour

some locales over others• Is set up as a zero-sum game – ranked 1 to n• Benchmarking assumes there is a normative standard by which places

should be judged, some ideal state they are all seeking to achieve• Glosses over fact that phenomenon/places differ from one another often

for good reason, and that different places should have varying goals/policy• Places have different histories and trajectories, varying political economies

and varieties of capitalism, different forms of state apparatus and governance structures

• Promotes imitation and copying rather contextualised policy

• Despite criticism indicator/benchmarking projects are being widely rolled and translated into policy, planning and decision-making; this reinforces the rationale for their use

Indicator initiatives and city governance

Governance• How cities view indicators, the kinds of indicators that are chosen and

deployed, and how cities employ them varies markedly• Some municipalities use indicators to underpin forms of new

managerialism, wherein they are used to guide operational practices with respect to specified targets and to provide evidence of the success or failure of schemes, policies, units and personnel

• Metrics are used to discipline under-performance, reward those meeting and exceeding targets, and to guide new strategies, policy, and budgeting.

• Technocratic, proscriptive and mechanistic• Underpinned by/promotes neoliberalism• Baltimore’s Citistat; Atlanta dashaboard• “The Atlanta Dashboard ... uses weekly meetings of the mayor’s

cabinet to review performance reports. Each week the performance of selected departments is reviewed against the departmental plan, with programmatic changes formulated as necessary to address shortfalls.”

Governance• In other cases, indicators are used in a more descriptive way to provide

robust and clear city intelligence, which complements a variety of other information, to help inform policy making and implementation

• Here indicators are more contextual rather than performance/target orientated.

• E.g., Dublin and Belgium• Formulation of initiatives can be expert-led, consultancy-led,

stakeholder-led, community-participatory-led; business-led• Many benchmarking initiatives are created by businesses and supra-

national bodies• In all cases indicators form a key element in the move towards data-

driven, evidence-based policy formulation and operations management• Open systems promotes transparency, accountability and participation;

also reinforces the value of the realist epistemology by promoting the value of indicator data as the means through which the citizen can make sense of the city and engage the state

Conclusion• Indicator, benchmarking, dashboard projects have proliferated in

recent years; trend is for such projects to become more open and real-time

• Form a central pillar in the conception and roll-out of ‘smart cities’• Promote a realist epistemology for knowing cities• Translated into how cities are managed and governed• However, how cities develop and utilise indicators projects varies

markedly• And within city administrations there are complex and paradoxical

processes at work: open vs closed, regulation/control vs transparency/participation, etc.

• Smart cities coming into being in different ways – need a variegated and more nuanced narrative

• Need some in-depth comparative work to explore the ways in which indicator projects are deployed in different cities; to tease apart their data assemblage

Rob.Kitchin@nuim.ie@robkitchin

http://www.nuim.ie/progcity@progcity

MIT Press, 2011 Sage, Aug 2014

Kitchin, R. (2014) The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal 79(1): 1-14