ABSTRACT
Cities and technology have always been intricately connected. Human ingenuity and technological advancements enabled cities to grow into dense and diverse assemblages. Feeding today’s new technological chapter is a seemingly endless thirst for data. People, companies, and governments alike are trying to collect and use ever larger, ever richer data sets about all possible aspects of our lives and the places we live in. This chapter outlines how landscapes, particularly urban landscapes, have always been, directly and indirectly, affected by data. Moreover, by analysing how data and the urban landscape are inseparably connected in a social process in which they continuously produce and reproduce each other, the argument is that data cannot be a simple ‘solution’ to our social problems. The chapter ends with a closer look at the limits – the social and ethical implications – of the increased use of data and computational technology.
