ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical overview of data-driven urbanism focusing in particular on the relationship between data and the city, rather than network infrastructure, computational or urban issues. It starts by setting out how cities are being instrumented and captured as big urban data, how these data are being used to manage and control cities, and how data-driven urbanism is underpinning the emergence of smart cities. The chapter then examines a number of problematic issues related to data-driven urbanism, including: corporatization of governance (data ownership, data control, data coverage and access); the creation of buggy, brittle, hackable urban systems (data security, data integrity); and social, political, ethical effects (data protection and privacy, dataveillance, and data uses including social sorting and anticipatory governance). It further argues that data-driven urbanism is the key mode of production for what have widely been termed smart cities. The smart cities that data-driven, networked urbanism purports to create are then smart in a qualified sense.
