The Worldâs Most Valuable Resource
The world has made two significant transitions in the new millennium. The first involves the transition to a knowledge economy where the most lucrative industry is now the production and management of information or âdataâ. âDataâ is the new âoilâ of our age (The Economist, 2017). The second significant transformation is the transition from a rural to an urban world, a process known as urbanisation. Today most people live in cities (United Nations, 2014). As the world has crossed these thresholds, there are new opportunities to address wicked policy problems such as environmental degradation, migration and climate change, through data-assisted solutions. This book endeavours to provide sound evidence and case studies to support renegotiating the terms for information exchange, ownership and data use in cities for the benefit of urban citizens. In other words, this book is about the best use of the worldâs most valuable economic commodityâdataâand how it can be used to assist the planetary transition to sustainable, productive, resilient and liveable urban futures.
Where has this incredible wealth come from? The data explosion has resulted from an urban setting where an extraordinary number of people carry around a powerful mobile device which, when linked to the World Wide Web, generates a rich information footprint. In this growing digital landscape, such devices are now also interacting with a growing number of Internet of Things (IoT), which is powered through a growing array of sensors. Such sensors are embedded in products ranging from TVs, watches and toasters, to cars, trains, building, precincts and cities. As Anthony Townsend (2013, 2014) has said, we are now outnumbered by our own digital devices. There are more than three devices for every human on the planet and this will increase to more than six by 2020 (Evans, 2011).
Today the worldâs largest economies and corporations trade in data and its products to generate value in new disruptive markets. The wealth and power that the information economy generates is dangerously concentrated. Current trends suggest this concentration will continue, leading to a greater divide across society (Manjoo, 2016; Pollock, 2018). The five wealthiest companies on the globe are all information communication and technology companies that monopolise their respective markets through a combination of âplatformâ economics and the inherent and emergent properties of the data economy (Andersson Schwarz, 2017; Pollock, 2018). In contrast to the fossil fuels that powered the economies of the twentieth century, digital information flows through the world economy in different ways as it can be reused and value added almost infinitely.
Facebook, one of the big US-based five infotech companies, now controls 80% of social media traffic. Even within the companies themselves, the power imbalance is extreme with a few founders and investors controlling the majority of the companyâs equity. The data economy has had such a big impact on cities because it is different kind of economy. The way it is mined, extracted, collected, collated, bought, sold, refined, processed and enhanced is distinctive from any other resource. For a start in many instances it can be easily duplicated with no or minimal cost.
This is what has made the rise of the big five, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, so rapid. When the zero cost of duplication is combined with a strong market platform and intellectual property rights, the right conditions are set for the formation of monopolies (Pollock, 2018). The economy built on this new information is staggering. Most of it has been gathered relatively cheaply or even for free. The business model of the platform capitalists is to create algorithms that invite participation by other businesses, governments and the general public who then generate the content, networks and interactions that create the value that is then on-sold at a profit. The information or data economy has changed the rules for markets and it is becoming ominously clear that a new set of regulations and approaches are needed for the new data market. In May 2018 the European Union (EU) introduced a significant regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (EU 2016/679 (âGDPRâ)). This was in a significant regulatory response to the opportunities and challenges facing us in a data-rich world. New moves from regulatory organisations in Australia are also rising to challenge such monopolies (Duke & McDuling, 2018).
The natural habitat for the information economy is the city. Platforms are locations or places where participants in an economy connect. Cities are the original platforms. Cities have always been centres for the exchange of information. This information has never been completely open but managed and administered according to complex bureaucratic, commercial and legal codes and interests. This intersection of information, finance and politics has dramatic repercussions for the city and its citizens. Despite the informational city being no new thing, as Castells (1989) makes clear, the infotech company, the data economy and the smart city all make use of radical technologies which change the way cities are used and are changing the way they conduct their business and are planned and governed. Hardware companies such as IBM, CISCO and SIEMENS have complemented the initiatives of information companies such as Alphabet and Microsoft, hardwiring both existing cities and new bespoke âsmart citiesâ, such as Koreaâs Songdo City, to handle the new data economy. Both new and old smart cities donât look so different from not so smart cities. Rather the smart city infrastructure that generates and supports data in all of its forms (open, big, dark, thick, etc.) is not so much a digital overlay, or physical redesign, but a rewiring of the way the city operates.
This chapter sets out initial arguments for the rethinking of todayâs informational society through the promotion and greater use of Open Data. It provides a critical framework for understanding and reflecting on the important contributions made by researchers in the ensuing chapters of this volume. This introductory chapter describes the nature of the new contested data landscape and then reflects on the call for action for more and better quality Open Data and an overview of the complexity of openness. The arguments for Open Data are situated in a collaborative, networked vision of society in place of a hierarchical, monopolistic structure. The chapter then provides a high-level discussion of three critical themes which organise the structure of the book. These are (1) urban inclusion and social entrepreneurship, (2) knowledge ecosystems and resilience and (3) civic innovation and transparency. These themes address major needs within the new economy of the global data landscape and set the context for the diverse chapters which follow.
Challenging Urban Information Monopolies
The provocative scholar Greenfield (2017) has stated âthere is no such thing as raw dataâ as all data has its patterns. The mining, refinement and processing of data improve the signal to noise ratio so that it is intelligible. Urban big data is a case in point. The patterns of human and machinic movement that occur within cities have until recently only been perceptible through simple arithmetic methods of the census and manual record keeping. Todayâs web of sensors, information infrastructures and the Internet of Things make the production and accounting of information exponentially greater in volume, velocity and variety but also in intelligibility. The combination of mobile devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) and rapid urbanisation is resulting in a spatialised or urban intelligence, but this intelligence is not equally shared or accessible amongst those who reside in our cities.
The ability to direct and influence the dataspace by a few powerful players has resulted in a string of corruption and infotech scandals over the last few years. These scandals are commonplace today. Ranging from business-government scandals such as the Cambridge AnalyticaâFacebook Scandal (Cadwalladr, 2018; Richterich, 2018), to Facebookâs Russian and a long list of other scandals (Debatin, Lovejoy, Horn, & Hughes, 2009; Weâre keeping track of all of Facebookâs scandals so you donât have to, 2018), to the 5-billion fine handed out to Alphabet by the EU for monopolistic practices (Cassidy, 2018; Finley, 2017), to government mishandling of data indicated by whistleblowers such as Snowden (Greenwald, 2015) and WikiLeaks (Benkler, 2011; Domscheit-Berg, 2011; Roberts, 2012), these events are powerful signals of the breach of trust between government, business and the citizen.
The present status quo threatens the norms of a free society with democratic access and participation. Such power dynamics exclude choice and coerce the citizen. There has been much written on how information monopolies limit freedoms and influence how we think, behave and act (Bridle, 2018). Less has been written about how urban infotech companies are changing the way people interact with cities. From share-ride companies such as Uber to delivery and digital retail companies such as Amazon, urban patterns and movements are being re-choreographed without our conscious understanding of the consequences. For examp...