Met steun van de KWP Urban Big Data heeft onderzoeker Dr. Emiel Rijshouwer een paper geschreven over de maatschappelijke percepties op de smart cities. Hoe zien burgers de smart city en hun rol in de vorming daarvan? Het uitgebreide abstract vindt u hieronder. Het paper ligt nu ter beoordeling van een wetenschappelijk journal en zal na acceptatie gedeeld worden.
Datafication of public space has significant impact on how cities are developed, used,
perceived and governed, and on who benefits or suffers most from these developments. Hence we
argue that datafication should be part of a continuous public debate, and that it should be considered
and treated as a social problem. In nine focus groups we invited respondents to join a gamified survey,
through which they could explore instances and dilemmas of urban datafication. Through subsequent
group conversations we investigated which interpretative repertoires they used to frame datafication
of public space as a social and actionable problem. Following Blumer’s and Gamson’s theories on the
social construction of problems and on collective action frames, we assessed respondents’ discursive
interpretations and their subjective construction of their senses of injustice, agency and identity
regarding this subject. We find that—in the context of the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands—
citizens do not experience and consider datafication of public space as a social and actionable
problem. Although they do associate these developments with potential dangers and threats, this does
not change or constrain their sense of ‘actionability,’ nor their behavior, as they consider themselves
as powerless individuals regarding the—in their eyes—complex, elusive and inevitable developments
they are confronted with. Besides that, they enjoy the convenience and the benefits of digitization and
datafication, which, as far as they are concerned, take place in a political space they consider to be
relatively safe.