FCJ-217 Socio-Technical Imaginaries of a Data-Driven City: Ethnographic Vignettes from Delhi

As an imagination, the 'smart city' is rapidly becoming an integral part of our urban futures. Situated in the contemporary moment of 'data revolution' and India’s techno-urban context, this paper is an attempt to reflect upon the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven urbani...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFibreculture journal no. 29; pp. 94 - 114
Main Author Mertia, Sandeep
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Open Humanities Press 31.07.2017
Subjects
cities
data
Delhi
smart cities
urbanism
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Summary:As an imagination, the 'smart city' is rapidly becoming an integral part of our urban futures. Situated in the contemporary moment of 'data revolution' and India’s techno-urban context, this paper is an attempt to reflect upon the socio-technical imaginaries of data-driven urbanism and the incumbent reconfigurations of how we know, experience and govern a city. The author provides ethnographic vignettes of five little traditions of data-driven urbanism in Delhi pertaining to: the new 'image of the city', the changing nature of expertise, civic data activism, data-driven consumer applications and political communication and analytics. Foregrounding the generative potentials of each of these socio-technical sites, the paper argues for a meta-analytics of data.
ISSN:1449-1443
1449-1443
DOI:10.15307/fcj.29.217.2017