Researching Ambient Infrastructures:How to do impact while doing research?

Until recently, large IT corporations alongside local governments were considered the primary ‘publics’ of smart city discourse. More recent initiatives in European cities and elsewhere have however begun to strongly emphasize citizen and NGO voices, as ways of moderating and perhaps ‘undoing optimisation’ (Powell, 2021), and treating smart cities as a means to various ends rather than the end itself (Halegoua, 2020). In the process, academic critiques around, for example, one-dimensional urban benchmarking (White & Kitchin, 2021) or an overemphasis on paradigmatic cities (Shelton et al., 2015) and tools such as data dashboards (Mattern, 2015) have become mainstreamed. While these critiques appear to reassert ordinary people’s voices in previously technical and managerial debates, as McQuire (2023: 166) argues, such voices are increasingly articulated through "digital urban infrastructure, where embodied interactions are also constantly mediated in various ways." Yet policymakers tend to ignore existing forms of ambient datafied participation, such as in social media (Rodgers & Moore, 2020), or imagine ‘data’ as straightforwardly mediating urban infrastructures such as transport, rather than being fundamentally infrastructural (Tavmen, 2020). Concepts like the smart city can support quite different aspirations (Lara 2016, Baykurt & Raetzsch 2020) but public awareness of such emerging ambient infrastructures is often marginal. This roundtable brings together scholars from urban studies, media studies and critical data studies to discuss the possibilities and problems of civic critique and public engagement in relation to smart (or datafied) cities and the ambient infrastructures they instate. We understand urban publics as the alignment of different actors around how ambient infrastructures and datafied solutions contribute to the public good. Our intent is to unpack dominant practices and propose equitable alternatives that respect democratic representation, inclusive participation, and co-creation. The roundtable will bring together these scholars: (1) Germaine Halegoua, who will draw from her early-stage project, exploring both the degree to which publics feel they can resist, intervene in, or influence smart city initiatives, as well as confidence of their literacy to do so; (2) Scott Rodgers, who will question whether the promise or threat of the smart city entails fundamentally different mediums of democratic publicity, and in turn shifts in who might be able to legitimately speak for the city; (3) Myria Georgiou, who will draw from her recent book Being Human in Digital Cities, and interrogate the politics at stake in paradoxical and contradictory claims to competing humanisms, in place of technocentric imaginaries of digital cities; and (4) Christoph Raetzsch, who will discuss potentials of cross-sectoral civic communication practices between city governments, data journalism and civic tech initiatives in selected European cities.