Juliette Davret, postdoctoral researcher within Data Stories project, took part in the AMS Scientific Conference from 23 to 25 April 2024. In the second edition of “Reinventing the City”, the overarching theme was “Blueprints for messy cities? Navigating the interplay of order and messiness”. In three captivating days, they explored ‘The good, the bad, and the ugly’, ‘Amazing discoveries’ and ‘We are the city’.

DAY 1: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY  

The first day of the AMS Scientific Conference primarily focused on messiness: the various aspects of urban development and innovation. “The good” refers to success stories and positive developments in cities. “The bad” relates to challenges and issues that cities face, and “the ugly” pertains to less attractive aspects of urban development. This theme explored how cities, both in terms of space and users, are evolving in positive and negative ways.  

On this first day, Juliette presented a paper entitled “Counting matters, but how we count matters too: considering the spatial and data politics of homelessness”. Building upon the insightful work of Cobham (2020), which underscores the significance of what we count, this paper argues that the methods employed in counting are just as crucial. As demonstrated by Cobham (2020), policies and decisions are underpinned by evidential data; thus, being excluded from these datasets equates to being overlooked. This paper delves into the analysis of homelessness counts and considerations in Ireland, aiming to illustrate how counting methodologies lead to significant underestimations of the homeless population. Utilizing a critical data approached combined with interviews of state and NGO stakeholders, this paper seeks to document and reconsider the political, social and spatial implications of homelessness data flows and their implications for homelessness and housing policies. In the context of digitization, it highlights the data politics of administering homeless services, inaccessibility of census services, the lack of coordination among data-collection organizations and financial and resource constraints that contribute to fragmented efforts and the underrepresentation of the most marginalized populations. The paper contends that achieving a more comprehensive understanding of homelessness is essential for informing effective policies and interventions to address this humanitarian crisis. By exploring the intricacies of counting methodologies and their impact, it aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the importance of robust data collection in shaping policies that truly reflect the realities of homelessness.

This paper was presented during a session on ‘Data for Inclusivity’ in which participants discussed the lack of certain datasets to support city governance. 

DAY 2: AMAZING DISCOVERIES  

The second day of the conference concentrated on pioneering research and innovations, both technical and social in the field of urban renewal and sustainability. Participants presented and discussed news and exciting discoveries that have a positive impact on urban areas. The focus was on areas such as mobility, food, circularity, energy, climate resilience, and smart city.

DAY 3: WE ARE THE CITY 

This theme emphasised that the people living and working in cities play an essential role in urban renewal and development. This can involve community engagement, citizen participation, public-private partnerships, and the importance of involving all stakeholders in the city.  

On the final day, Juliette presented a paper entitled “The role of citizens in the urban planning process: power and inequality through the analysis of data flows”. This presentation discussed how the digitalization of the planning process can potentially improve stakeholders’ involvement. Indeed, digital tools potentially improve interaction between planners and citizens, reduce barriers to participation, encouraging creativity and expression. However, this can only be an improvement if citizens are able to participate effectively. As Rosener (2008) has shown, it is not enough to evaluate the success of participation based on more citizens taking part, but rather its impact, to achieve better public policy. This study examines the challenges faced by citizens in actively participating in the planning process in the digital age through an ethnographic approach of a citizens’ association in Dublin. Specifically, this paper investigates how citizens strive to gather and mobilize data and integrate themselves into the planning system to voice their opinions, particularly during the planning appeals stage. In the context of the increasing digitization of the planning process, this paper scrutinizes the data flow within the system and its implications for citizen interaction within the planning and building control process. Additionally, this research examines how citizens leverage data to pursue collective or personal goals, probing the extent of their influence on the planning process. By demonstrating the significance of citizen engagement, this makes it possible to assess its impact on transparency and accountability, shedding light on biases in participation. The paper discusses power inequalities within the planning process, underscoring that only a minority of citizens familiar with the process are actively involved. This analysis encourages reflection on open data and transparency on the generation, flow, and analysis of planning data, and how citizen participation can be enhanced and equitably distributed in the age of digitized urban planning.

This paper was presented during a session on ‘Digital Tools for Cities (Digitalization)’ in which participants presented different tools to improve the digitalization of urban planning or to reflect on the challenges of digitalization.

Conference website: https://reinventingthecity24.dryfta.com/ 

References:

Cobham, A., 2020. The uncounted. Polity press, Cambridge Medford, Mass. 

Rosener, J. B. (2008). Citizen Participation: Can We Measure Its Effectiveness? In The Age of Direct Citizen Participation. Routledge. 

This is the third of three calls for papers from the Data Stories team for the next International Geographical Congress (IGC) in 2024. 

IGC 2024 is an international conference bringing together geographers from all fields, from the social sciences to physical geography and beyond. The theme for 2024 is “Celebrating a world of difference”, for which 44 different commissions are proposing sessions. The IGC 2024 will be held in Dublin from August 24 to 30: https://igc2024dublin.org/ 

CFP Critical perspectives on planning and housing data  

Dr. Carla Maria Kayanan (chair), Dr. Juliette Davret, Prof. Rob Kitchin, Dr. Sophia Maalsen, Dr. Samuel Mutter and Dr. Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn are organising a session on critical perspectives on planning and housing data.  

Session abstract: Planning and property data are the key evidence base for how cities are understood, planned and developed (e.g., Kitchin, 2021; Loukissas, 2019; Marquarts, 2026; Meng and DiSalvo, 2018). The increased use of data in urban planning, housing management and development financialisation has led to profound shifts in how we understand, design, and manage our built environments. However, this transition towards a more data-driven approach raises a series of critical questions concerning who controls the data infrastructures, the generation, analysis, and interpretation of data, and data-driven decision-making, as well as issues of spatial justice, privacy, representativeness and data ethics. 

This session aims to examine the most crucial and contentious aspects of data politics and power in urban planning and housing management. We seek contributions that explore critical perspectives on planning and housing data, including but not limited to the following topics: 

• Data infrastructures of planning and housing; 
• Data utilization in addressing housing crises;  
• Data capitalism and housing financialisation 
• Biases and inequalities in housing and urban data; 
• Activist uses of planning and housing data 
• The impact of automation and artificial intelligence on urban planning; 
• Ethical and privacy issues in planning and housing data practices; 
• Visual narrative and other representations of data in urban planning; 
• Historical perspectives on data in urban planning and housing; 
• Challenges of public participation in a data-centric context; 
• New methodologies for critically analysing data in urban planning. 

The deadline for abstract submission is on 12th January 2024. Abstract submissions must be made via the conference website. Details on submitting can be found here: https://igc2024dublin.org/call-for-abstracts/ 

The Congress Commission for this abstract is C.42 Urban Commission. Ensure you make clear you are submitting for this session when submitting your abstract. 

Please direct questions to session chair: Carla.Kayanan@mu.ie  

See our two other blog posts for calls for papers for the pre-event and the IGC conference. 

Links: 

• Call For Papers (1/3) – Reimagining local governance: Just, sustainable and diverse. 
• Call For Papers (2/3) – The digital turn in planning practices and policy making. 
• Call For Papers (3/3) – Critical perspectives on planning and housing data. 

This is the second of three calls for papers from the Data Stories team for the next International Geographical Congress (IGC) in 2024. 

IGC 2024 is an international conference bringing together geographers from all fields, from the social sciences to physical geography and beyond. The theme for 2024 is “Celebrating a world of difference”, for which 44 different commissions are proposing sessions. The IGC 2024 will be held in Dublin from August 24 to 30: https://igc2024dublin.org/ 

CFP The digital turn in planning practices and policy making  

Dr. Juliette Davret (chair), Oliver Dawkins, Dr. Carla Maria Kayanan and Prof. Rob Kitchin are organising a session on the use of the digital in planning and policymaking.  

Session abstract: Planning has long used digital tools such as GIS and decision-support systems. Yet, much of the practice of planning has remained paper-based. In recent years, a concerted effort to digitalise planning has occurred, shifting all aspects of planning (from strategic, to development, to enforcement) onto an amalgam of data infrastructures and systems. This digital turn is altering the day-to-day work of planners, shifting external body engagement, enabling wider access to information, raising questions about the public’s proficiency and ability to engage, and enabling new data flows (Daniel & Pettit, 2021; Willow & Tewdwr-Jones, 2020). The change management introduced by the adoption of digitally-mediated planning is not straightforward and is complicated by the multiplicity of sectors, stakeholders, data systems and flows intersecting through different stages of planning processes. 

This session explores the impact of digitalisation on the field of planning (Potts, 2020; Datta, 2023). We seek papers that shed light on innovative approaches, challenges and opportunities presented by the digitalisation of planning whilst also implementing a critical lens (e.g., critical data studies, critical geography, critical planning studies, STS, etc.).  

Topics include (but are not limited to): 

• Digital change management of planning systems and practices; 
• Planning’s data infrastructures and data ecosystem; 
• Smart cities and urban planning;
• Data-driven decision making; 
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in planning; 
• Emerging technologies in planning development; 
• Sustainable and resilient infrastructure planning; 
• Community engagement in the digital age; 
• Policy implications and ethical considerations of digital planning; 
• Data policy in digital planning. 

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit abstracts. 

The deadline for submitting an abstract is on 12th January 2024. Abstract submissions must be made via the conference website. Details on submitting can be found here: https://igc2024dublin.org/call-for-abstracts/ 

The Congress Commission for this abstract is C.31 Local and Regional Development. Ensure you make clear you are submitting for this session when submitting your abstract. 

Please direct questions to session chair: Juliette.Davret@mu.ie 

See our two other blog posts for calls for papers for the pre-event and the IGC conference. 

Links: 

• Call For Papers (1/3) – Reimagining local governance: Just, sustainable and diverse. 
• Call For Papers (2/3) – The digital turn in planning practices and policy making. 
• Call For Papers (3/3) – Critical perspectives on planning and housing data. 

This is the first of three calls for papers from the Data Stories team for the next International Geographical Congress (IGC) in 2024.

IGC 2024 is an international conference bringing together geographers from all fields, from the social sciences to physical geography and beyond. The theme for 2024 is “Celebrating a world of difference”, for which 44 different commissions are proposing sessions. The IGC 2024 will be held in Dublin from August 24 to 30: https://igc2024dublin.org/ 

Pre-IGC CFP (23-24 August) 

Prior to the official start of the congress, the IGU Commission Geography of Governance is hosting a free two-day conference on the topic ‘Reimagining local governance: Just, sustainable and diverse’. The event will take place on our Maynooth Campus with Dr. Carla Maria Kayanan as co-conference convener and head of the Local Organising Commission.

Three tracks will shape the event: 

• Track 1 – Territorial Reforms, Multi-level Governance, and Democracy 
• Track 2 – Sustainability, Resilience and Justice in Local Governance 
• Track 3 – Spatial Planning Systems and Local Governance

For more information and to submit an abstract, visit: https://sites.google.com/view/geogov2024/home  

See our two other blog posts for calls for papers for the week-long IGC.

Links: 

• Call For Papers (1/3) – Reimagining local governance: Just, sustainable and diverse. 
• Call For Papers (2/3) – The digital turn in planning practices and policy making. 
• Call For Papers (3/3) – Critical perspectives on planning and housing data. 

This November saw the introduction of a new festival of art and technology on Dublin’s annual arts calendar: Beta Festival. The festival programme centered around a free two-and-a-half-week exhibition running from the 2nd to the 19th of November at the Digital Hub in Dublin’s Liberties. The Data Stories team were pleased to be invited to exhibit Data City Dublin for the festival’s opening and first weekend.

The purpose of Data City Dublin is to collect and present evidence regarding Dublin’s housing crisis in a public forum, and to stimulate debate. Combining a large 3D printed model with projected data overlays, the exhibit seeks to bridge the gap between official accounts of housing, planning and property issues and the individual experiences of the city’s inhabitants. While searching the surface of the model for points of interest such as schools, homes and workplaces, visitors are encouraged to share their stories and experiences with each other. In this way the model provides a tangible reference linking spatially located data to personal narrative via their association with familiar places across the city, here represented in miniature.

A new element introduced especially for Beta Festival was the incorporation of news headlines concerning housing, planning, and property stories from the past twenty years. Borrowing the concept from Jeneen Naji’s work River Poem, this stream of news headlines was projected floating down the River Liffey and out to sea. By revisiting the diverse range of opinions, reactions, and speculations represented by these headlines, visitors were prompted to reflect on the events leading to the current housing crisis and encouraged to consider alternative approaches for the future.

Accompanying the exhibit was a dedicated website which provided further information about each of the datasets being projected onto the model. Access to the website was exclusive to Beta Festival visitors who could access them by scanning QR code on their mobile phones. Data City Dublin was just one of many exhibits including photographic images, films and computer animations, installations, an interactive AI chatbot and a large central 360-degree immersive space. However, measuring 3.5 x 2 metres, the 3D printed model and vivid data overlays comprising Data City Dublin provided a strong physical and visual presence in the space.  

Data City Dublin’s appearance in the festival aligned well with Beta’s overarching themes of critically engagement with emerging technologies and interrogation of their societal impact. Emphasising values of collaboration, integrity, empowerment and curiosity, Beta provided an ideal forum for a work like Data City Dublin which combines novel uses of technology with critical research. With a five-year commitment from The Digital Hub to host the festival we look forward to it becoming a key event for future explorations of the crossover between art and technology.

Links:

• Beta Festival 2023
• Data Stories and the Synthetic City: Exploring Urban Living through the Data City Dublin Exhibit
• River Poem by Jeneen Naji

On November 8, 2023, to mark the occasion of the 74th World Town Planning Day, the Irish Planning Institute (IPI) hosted the themed webinar ‘Learn Globally, Apply Locally’. The theme focused on the value of learning about planning systems and cultures around the world, fostering innovative, sustainable and equitable solutions to global challenges.

The Data Stories team used this opportunity to present work carried out during the summer of 2023 on the Irish planning data ecosystem. We were joined by Claragh Mulhern, from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, with a presentation titled ‘Planning Action for a Just Transition to a Net Zero Climate Resilient World’ and Sinéad O’Donoghue, from the Land Development Agency, with a presentation titled ‘From Depots to Duplexes – Reimagining Public Land’. Over 100 people registered for the event and many represented international backgrounds. 

The work presented by the Data Stories team identified and mapped the numerous data systems and flows across different planning stages and clients. These mappings were derived from analysis of documentation and system demos received from, and interviews conducted with, a sample of Local Authority planners and other stakeholders involved in producing and managing planning data in Ireland.  

The presentation sought to communicate something of the complexity of the data ecosystem, as well as the extent of variation and drift between different systems, properties which make it difficult to produce reliable and comparable official statistics. The presentation concluded with a set of high-level observations and recommendations, with a hope that the improved understanding of the ecosystem provided by this project can help in working towards a greater degree of standardisation across systems, and in turn to more accurate, detailed information for informing transparent and coherent planning decisions.
 

You can find further information, including a recording of the webinar as well as our presentation slides, on the Irish Planning Institute website. 

We would like to thank and acknowledge the various consultees who took the time to meet with us and supply data as requested. 

We’re pleased and excited to introduce the first cohort of artists to join the Data Stories team. Joan Somers Donnelly, Mel Galley and Augustine O’Donoghue will be helping the team to explore arts-based methods as a means for research-creation. Typically, arts-based methods are integrated into research projects toward their conclusion to communicate findings to the public in novel ways.

What makes this method stand out is that, with the integration of our artists and their specific skill sets, we will embed creative approaches throughout the entire research process. So rather than giving the artists our findings and asking them to share them to the public, they are working with us at the onset to change the way we approach our own work and challenge our pre-conceived understandings of Dublin’s planning, property and housing systems.

In the coming months each artist will team up with one Data Stories researcher to create data stories that respond to issues and challenges raised during our mapping of the policy, planning and housing data ecosystem in Ireland. While working with our researchers and various external stakeholder organisations, each artist will also develop their own data story concepts that express their unique approaches to artistic practice.

We hope you look forward to seeing the outcomes as much as we do.

Joan Somers Donnelly

I am an Irish artist based between Brussels and Dublin, with a collaborative practice that moves between performance, writing, research and organising. Previous work includes a human choir that performed for cows; a piece for swimmers in the Irish sea; an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing in Dublin; a video essay about social spaces of gig economy workers made with my father; and performances and other invitations for lamp posts, zoom calls, U-bahn stations and apartments.

My practice is primarily concerned with examining existing social rules and structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using performance and other live situations as a testing ground for experiments in different ways of relating. Much of my recent work has focused on the creation of frameworks for playful encounter, exchange, and co-creation, such as the group improvisation practice messing, the platform for collaboration You and Me, an Anger Club, and a first manifestation of a practice-sharing space for women and non-binary multimedia artists called In practice(s): The wood and the trees. My work is currently supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and radical_house, Brussels.

I was drawn to the Data Stories project because of a long-standing engagement with the politics of space and space-making in Dublin, both in and outside of my artistic practice. I am also looking forward to working as part of an interdisciplinary research team, and to the new challenge of working with stakeholders across the public, private and civil society sectors. A practice-based research approach has become increasingly present in my work, particularly around the question of how to create conditions for collaboration between diverse actors from and in different contexts, so this residency presents an interesting next chapter in that trajectory.

• Website: joansomersdonnelly.com 
• Instagram: @someradonbelly

Mel Galley 

Currently based in Dublin, Ireland, I grew up between the Dales and Cumbria in the UK. My closeness to these rural landscapes has heavily influenced my research; specifically how industrial or military activity exists alongside motifs of ‘wilderness’ in these areas. Growing from an early (and ongoing) love of science-fiction and anti-/utopian literature, in my practice I construct unreal places, translating ideas through mediums from contemporary technologies of CAD and CGI to laser etching and printmaking. Creating these unreal places allows me to analyse and reorder research, offering an alternative point of entry into existing discussions on place, ecology and ethics. Frequently my works are shown as multiples, such as pamphlets or handouts, which the audience can take out of the arts space with them and into the landscapes that they consider. The draw to join the Data Stories project, for me, was the focus around data and place, specifically through the lens of politics, ethics and narrative. I’m excited to be spending a year working alongside the researchers on this project to develop art works and workshops with and about the data!

I’ve shown work across Ireland and the UK, participated on artist residencies in Manchester, Cumbria and Dublin, and delivered classes and workshops at three universities. In 2021 I was awarded 2nd Place Practitioner Category in the RIBA Eye Line awards and in 2020 received the award for Young Cumbrian Artist of the Year (a real joy to be recognised by the county I’m from). Two of my works are held in the collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, whilst many more are on the walls and shelves of people I care about – which is equally meaningful to me.

• Website: melgalley.co.uk 
• Instagram: @melfrangalley

Augustine O’Donoghue   

I am a socially engaged visual artist based in Dublin. My artwork engages with a range of local and global socio-political issues. Over the last two decades my art projects have been research based and collaborative throughout their development and creation. I use an array of socially engaged and participatory approaches to develop interdisciplinary projects and have collaborated with diverse groups of people including students, scientists, migrant workers, academics, refugees and social organisations across Ireland, Latin America and Africa.

The Data Stories project really captivated my interest as it was an opportunity to draw together many topics and strands of my art practice that I feel really passionate about. The projects original research concept of using data stories to explore the data and analytics relating to property and planning, the opportunity of using creative methodologies to work with stakeholder groups that may not traditionally work with artists and having direct access to the research team and their vast knowledge and experience will allow me to create new work in an exciting and innovative way. More importantly it will allow me to create new work with a level of criticality that would be challenging to achieve without this project.

• Website: https://augustineodonoghue.com  

To learn more about the use of arts-based methods in research creation, please read the project working paper ‘Arts-based methods for researching digital life.’  forthcoming as a chapter in ‘Researching Digital Life’, James Ash and Agnieszka Leszczynski’s co-authored book.

PDF: https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/16870/ 

The Synthetic City conference took place at Dublin City University (DCU) on the 6th and 7th of September 2023. Hosted by the ECREA Media, Cities and Space Section, the conference attracted researchers in cities, media and the arts from across the globe to explore the impact of artificial intelligence and digital media on cities and urban living. 

The Data Stories project attended in order to demonstrate the Data City Dublin exhibit as one of the conference’s several practice-based interventions. Data City Dublin is a large-scale 3D printed model of central Dublin which covers 28 sq. km of the city from Phoenix Park in the west to the Dublin Docks in the east. The model is then animated by projected data visualisations representing spatial patterns and change over time.

Excitingly this was the first public exhibition of Data City Dublin. The piece was first created as an end of project exhibition for the Building City Dashboards project. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible due to the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The exhibit is now being used by the Data Stories project as one of several creative and art-based methods for exploring stories about the housing crisis in Ireland through property and planning data.

The Data City Dublin exhibit will continue to evolve as the Data Stories project progresses. On this occasion we displayed several visualisations from the earlier iteration, including eye-catching heat maps of air quality and noise pollution from Dublin’s open data archives. Focusing on our theme of planning and property data, we displayed data from the Inside Airbnb advocacy site representing the distribution of Airbnb properties across the city. This was juxtaposed with distributions of land uses across central Dublin on a building-by-building basis derived from data provided by Tailte Éireann.

New for this exhibit was a time series of orthographic imagery depicting changes in Dublin’s built environment from 1999 through to 2019. Depicting the city in photographic detail in this way enables  us to contextualise the current state of the city by showing how the city changed during the period known as the Celtic Tiger and subsequent financial crash, up until the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Supporting the exhibit our Creative Technologist Oliver Dawkins presented a talk ‘Data City Dublin: Grounding Data Through Hybrid Media and Physicalisation’ which contextualised the new work on Data City Dublin in relation to his prior research using sensing devices on the Internet of Things, gaming technologies and augmented and virtual realities to help understand how people interact with buildings and cities in real-world contexts.

New visualisations and data stories will be added to Data City Dublin as the Data Stories project continues to develop. In doing so the team hope it will provide a valuable resource for engaging both professional stakeholders and the wider public with debates in housing, property and planning in creative and exciting new ways. 

Links:

• The Synthetic City: Exploring the Impact of AI and digital media on urban living 
• European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) Media, Cities and Space Section 
• Building City Dashboards 
• Inside Airbnb 
• Tailte Éireann