The city has certainly some seductive power in international affairs. It is comforting, for many that argued for the importance of cities in international politics, to notice a growing interest in urban matters on the pages of journals and magazines of foreign affairs. ‘Global cities’ make now regular appearances in international media outlets. Mayors are also increasingly in the spotlight as they extend their political reach from cities to city diplomacy and international networks. The impact and importance of the ‘urban’ in climate change is widely acknowledged and a thoroughly studied issue across many disciplines and international fora. Last, but not least, in this growing list of internationally-relevant themes, the emerging interest in ‘big data’ is likely to bring even more ‘urban’ into diplomatic discussions.
In this sense, it is now critical for international analysts to engage thoroughly with the development of contemporary urban studies understandings of the 21st century city and its immense complexity. Not surprisingly, one of the increasingly popular approaches to the city is the expanding demand for an ‘urban science’. We are now capable of harnessing the vast amount of data available in present-day metropolises and of making sense of the ways of living and patterns of development of millions of urban dwellers worldwide. For instance, with this data is its possible to convey urban morphologies and mobility patterns with increasing detail.
Amongst urbanists, there is a mounting consciousness that cities should be understood—as University College London professor Mike Batty or Santa Fe Institute director Geoffrey West have argued at length—less as clusters of technologies or large ‘machines’ of modernity, and more as ‘organisms’ or as complex ecological systems whose processes can be unpacked by urban studies scholars by deploying more refined qualitative and quantitative analytics. As scholars like Yale’s Karen Seto and CUNY’s Bill Solecki have advocated, the time might have come for an ‘urbanization science’ capable of understanding some fundamental ‘laws’ of cities. In its broadest formulation, this thesis is seen to be able to offer better and more actionable empirics of the urban (not least to diplomats and policymakers) and put urbanization in context with its interconnectedness with other realities of the earth system, from climate to social inequality and food chains. It is, with no doubt, an exciting time to work at the lead of these new analytical trends—trends of enormous potential when it comes to bring ‘the city’ into practical discussions of ‘the international’.
Yet it seems imperative, in the midst of all of this urban excitement and these grand quantitative reforms, not to forget the valuable and still very much central questions posed by those long-lived engagements with urban studies emerging from the spatial sensibilities of geography, the in-depth ethnographic expertise of anthropology or the careful practical considerations of planning. Urban science, after all, is no novelty.
The list of useful tools that this heritage offers us to grasp the intricacy of the city, with its ‘urban questions’ (to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre’s concern on the socio-political nature of the city), as much as with its evolving spatiality and its endless horizons, might all be far more than a short article could render justice to. However, I would like to note some key challenges that this ‘scientific’ lineage of urban studies needs to come to grips with and that yields to critical considerations for the impact of urbanization on the international analyst’s understanding of ‘the city’.
First, amidst the growing emphasis on data, quantification, scientific evaluations, and empirically sound assessments of urbanization, it remains fundamental not to lose sight of the informal reality of the contemporary city. As we run toward the comfort of scientific appraisals, human geographers and urban anthropologists alike all remind us that that entity that is ‘the city’ and the process that is ‘urbanization’ might very often slip off the charts and maps of the legally tangible, empirically quantifiable, or globally blatant.
The informal sector of the city, from waste pickers to peri-urban mobility networks and pop-up activities in the cultural domain, represents a substantial reality for contemporary urbanization. For instance, recent estimates have highlighted how the complex of informal activities around the waste sector might account for up to a not negligible 2 percent of employment globally. Informal public transport systems, like community buses and semi-formal carpooling systems move on a daily bases millions of commuters worldwide. However, these, and many other informal practices—from unregulated dwelling to alternative urban space use or informal support networks for migrants—are often yet to be fully grasped and integrated in the explosion of urban metrics and scientific assessments of the processes of urbanization. This is not just a challenge for the scientists of cities, but also for those diplomats now increasingly concerned with predominately urban matters (like climate change) and the political leaders (like mayors) that are directly responsible for the many city-zens partaking in this sector.
Following from this, scientific assessments of cities are also confronted with the challenge of the ‘unavoidable continuity’ (as Columbia’s Robert Beuregard puts it) of the city. Precisely because of their centuries of history, and indeed centuries of informality, cities are not just simple organic systems to be translated into big data analysis. Bid data-speak and big data-driven assessments are often very much oriented to the present (where the data comes from), the recent past (where some of the data can be retrospectively collected), and the future (where most of the data hopes to have some impact). This creates relatively narrow horizons that are at the very same time intensely crowded with information. The long-lived legacy of the city disappears in the immediacy of ‘real-time’ floods of data, and the attention span of the uninitiated urbanist, as diplomats and statesmen might be, plummets dramatically. Moreover, for its global appeal, a continuing and somewhat paradoxical problem of big data is that it is very often quite unreliable as small data. This means that, while good at gathering overall impressions of how cities work, big data analysis tends to struggle with the finer grain of urban dwelling and everyday individual mundanity. Big data shows us captivating snapshots of incredibly complex metropolises like New York or Delhi, but naturally omits the long-lived experience of the city, its people’s particular realities in this trajectory, and the many uncountable gestures on which the city also stands.
This is not, however, to say that developing more sound scientific assessments of the city, as Mike Batty argues in its forthcoming The New Science of Cities, is the wrong way to go. From a diplomat's perspective, this is on the contrary a much-needed toolset. As urban settlements grow and mutate in both developed and developing world, global urban challenges mount as critical tests for those in charge of cities, and states, to cope with cities. Diplomats do indeed need a better ‘science of cities’. Yet, they also need a nuanced appreciation of how data, information and systematic assessments must confront the historical and informal experience of everyday city living. Statistics tend to promote a birds-eye view of urban processes. Yet, cities also demands us to pay some close attention, where not ethnographic sensibility, to make sense of their ever-changing and multi-layered complexity.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's November/December 2013 print edition.
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Urban Science and the Challenge of Big Data
November 5, 2013
The city has certainly some seductive power in international affairs. It is comforting, for many that argued for the importance of cities in international politics, to notice a growing interest in urban matters on the pages of journals and magazines of foreign affairs. ‘Global cities’ make now regular appearances in international media outlets. Mayors are also increasingly in the spotlight as they extend their political reach from cities to city diplomacy and international networks. The impact and importance of the ‘urban’ in climate change is widely acknowledged and a thoroughly studied issue across many disciplines and international fora. Last, but not least, in this growing list of internationally-relevant themes, the emerging interest in ‘big data’ is likely to bring even more ‘urban’ into diplomatic discussions.
In this sense, it is now critical for international analysts to engage thoroughly with the development of contemporary urban studies understandings of the 21st century city and its immense complexity. Not surprisingly, one of the increasingly popular approaches to the city is the expanding demand for an ‘urban science’. We are now capable of harnessing the vast amount of data available in present-day metropolises and of making sense of the ways of living and patterns of development of millions of urban dwellers worldwide. For instance, with this data is its possible to convey urban morphologies and mobility patterns with increasing detail.
Amongst urbanists, there is a mounting consciousness that cities should be understood—as University College London professor Mike Batty or Santa Fe Institute director Geoffrey West have argued at length—less as clusters of technologies or large ‘machines’ of modernity, and more as ‘organisms’ or as complex ecological systems whose processes can be unpacked by urban studies scholars by deploying more refined qualitative and quantitative analytics. As scholars like Yale’s Karen Seto and CUNY’s Bill Solecki have advocated, the time might have come for an ‘urbanization science’ capable of understanding some fundamental ‘laws’ of cities. In its broadest formulation, this thesis is seen to be able to offer better and more actionable empirics of the urban (not least to diplomats and policymakers) and put urbanization in context with its interconnectedness with other realities of the earth system, from climate to social inequality and food chains. It is, with no doubt, an exciting time to work at the lead of these new analytical trends—trends of enormous potential when it comes to bring ‘the city’ into practical discussions of ‘the international’.
Yet it seems imperative, in the midst of all of this urban excitement and these grand quantitative reforms, not to forget the valuable and still very much central questions posed by those long-lived engagements with urban studies emerging from the spatial sensibilities of geography, the in-depth ethnographic expertise of anthropology or the careful practical considerations of planning. Urban science, after all, is no novelty.
The list of useful tools that this heritage offers us to grasp the intricacy of the city, with its ‘urban questions’ (to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre’s concern on the socio-political nature of the city), as much as with its evolving spatiality and its endless horizons, might all be far more than a short article could render justice to. However, I would like to note some key challenges that this ‘scientific’ lineage of urban studies needs to come to grips with and that yields to critical considerations for the impact of urbanization on the international analyst’s understanding of ‘the city’.
First, amidst the growing emphasis on data, quantification, scientific evaluations, and empirically sound assessments of urbanization, it remains fundamental not to lose sight of the informal reality of the contemporary city. As we run toward the comfort of scientific appraisals, human geographers and urban anthropologists alike all remind us that that entity that is ‘the city’ and the process that is ‘urbanization’ might very often slip off the charts and maps of the legally tangible, empirically quantifiable, or globally blatant.
The informal sector of the city, from waste pickers to peri-urban mobility networks and pop-up activities in the cultural domain, represents a substantial reality for contemporary urbanization. For instance, recent estimates have highlighted how the complex of informal activities around the waste sector might account for up to a not negligible 2 percent of employment globally. Informal public transport systems, like community buses and semi-formal carpooling systems move on a daily bases millions of commuters worldwide. However, these, and many other informal practices—from unregulated dwelling to alternative urban space use or informal support networks for migrants—are often yet to be fully grasped and integrated in the explosion of urban metrics and scientific assessments of the processes of urbanization. This is not just a challenge for the scientists of cities, but also for those diplomats now increasingly concerned with predominately urban matters (like climate change) and the political leaders (like mayors) that are directly responsible for the many city-zens partaking in this sector.
Following from this, scientific assessments of cities are also confronted with the challenge of the ‘unavoidable continuity’ (as Columbia’s Robert Beuregard puts it) of the city. Precisely because of their centuries of history, and indeed centuries of informality, cities are not just simple organic systems to be translated into big data analysis. Bid data-speak and big data-driven assessments are often very much oriented to the present (where the data comes from), the recent past (where some of the data can be retrospectively collected), and the future (where most of the data hopes to have some impact). This creates relatively narrow horizons that are at the very same time intensely crowded with information. The long-lived legacy of the city disappears in the immediacy of ‘real-time’ floods of data, and the attention span of the uninitiated urbanist, as diplomats and statesmen might be, plummets dramatically. Moreover, for its global appeal, a continuing and somewhat paradoxical problem of big data is that it is very often quite unreliable as small data. This means that, while good at gathering overall impressions of how cities work, big data analysis tends to struggle with the finer grain of urban dwelling and everyday individual mundanity. Big data shows us captivating snapshots of incredibly complex metropolises like New York or Delhi, but naturally omits the long-lived experience of the city, its people’s particular realities in this trajectory, and the many uncountable gestures on which the city also stands.
This is not, however, to say that developing more sound scientific assessments of the city, as Mike Batty argues in its forthcoming The New Science of Cities, is the wrong way to go. From a diplomat's perspective, this is on the contrary a much-needed toolset. As urban settlements grow and mutate in both developed and developing world, global urban challenges mount as critical tests for those in charge of cities, and states, to cope with cities. Diplomats do indeed need a better ‘science of cities’. Yet, they also need a nuanced appreciation of how data, information and systematic assessments must confront the historical and informal experience of everyday city living. Statistics tend to promote a birds-eye view of urban processes. Yet, cities also demands us to pay some close attention, where not ethnographic sensibility, to make sense of their ever-changing and multi-layered complexity.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's November/December 2013 print edition.
