Whose Data Builds the City? Critical Data Practices for Socio-Environmentally Just Urbanization

Paper Title

Whose Data Builds the City? Critical Data Practices for Socio-Environmentally Just Urbanization

Publication Info

• Topic area: Urban data systems and their role in equitable urbanization.
• Keywords: Urban data, environmental justice, community knowledge, speculative design, urban planning, Bangalore, data justice, socio-ecological systems, postcolonial urbanization, participatory design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Dominant urban data systems, such as satellite imagery and administrative records, prioritize top-down, technocratic approaches that marginalize community knowledge and socio-ecological dependencies. This results in inequitable urban planning that exacerbates environmental and social harms.
• Significance: Addressing these issues is critical for fostering socially just and climate-resilient urban futures, particularly in postcolonial and climate-vulnerable contexts like Bangalore, India.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research highlights the limitations of datafication in urban governance, including its neglect of lived experiences and local knowledge. While HCI and urban informatics have explored participatory and critical design approaches, the structural conditions that perpetuate these exclusions remain underexamined.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A speculative probe in the form of an urban data platform that integrates top-down city data with bottom-up community data to surface frictions and structural inequities in urban data infrastructures.
• Novelty:
  1. Employing environmental justice as an analytical lens to critique urban data systems.
  2. Using speculative design to foreground tensions between institutional and community-generated knowledge.
  3. Centering a Southern, postcolonial perspective on urban datafication.
  4. Offering sociotechnical considerations for equitable urban data infrastructures.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Top-down analysis: Spatial mapping of Bangalore’s ecological and urban transformations using QGIS and satellite imagery.
  2. Bottom-up investigation: Ethnographic fieldwork in five slum settlements to collect community data, including narratives, geotagged photographs, and sketch maps.
  3. Speculative probe design: Prototyping an interactive urban data platform to integrate and visualize city and community data.
  4. Multi-stakeholder workshop: Engaging 20 stakeholders to discuss the platform and surface tensions in urban data practices.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Bangalore’s urbanization has led to a 17% reduction in water bodies since the 1960s, with 837 lakes converted for urban uses.
  • Community data revealed disruptions to livelihoods, increased flooding, and health risks in slum settlements, which were overlooked in official datasets.
  • Institutional data systems prioritized technocratic approaches, neglecting socio-ecological dependencies and marginalizing community voices.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • The speculative probe revealed structural inequities and epistemic hierarchies that static, top-down urban data systems obscure.
  • Highlighted the need for hybrid data infrastructures that integrate lived experiences with institutional data.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted a four-phase research process, including spatial analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, design sessions, and a multi-stakeholder workshop.
  • Collected diverse data types: 1,000 pages of documents, 245 pages of field notes, 21.5 hours of audio recordings, and 450 photographs.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study was researcher-led, limiting community control over data interpretation and use.
  • Future work should focus on empowering communities to produce, control, and mobilize their own data.
  • Ethical guidelines for data sharing and protections against exploitation need further development.

Summary

This study critiques the dominance of top-down urban data systems in Bangalore, India, revealing how they marginalize community knowledge and socio-ecological dependencies. Using a speculative probe, the authors integrated institutional and community data to surface structural inequities and epistemic hierarchies in urban planning. Employing environmental justice as a lens, the study highlights the need for hybrid data infrastructures that support equitable urbanization. The findings underscore the importance of designing urban technologies that prioritize care, accountability, and community empowerment, particularly in postcolonial and climate-vulnerable contexts. Future work should focus on enabling community-led data practices and addressing the ethical challenges of data visibility and representation.