Call for papers, with travel bursaries 

The use of research creation and arts-based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment
9 – 10 September 2025
Maynooth University, Ireland
Organisers: Rob Kitchin, Carla Maria Kayanan, Juliette Davret and Oliver Dawkins  

We are seeking participants for a two-day workshop that will explore the use of research creation and arts-based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment. The workshop is organised as part of the ERC funded project, ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories about and with Planning and Property Data’ (https://datastories.maynoothuniversity.ie/). 

We are offering: 

• 10 travel bursaries for speakers, 5 up to €800 with 3 night’s accommodation (for beyond-Europe travel) and 5 up to €250 with 2 night’s accommodation (for within-Europe travel). The bursary is open to doctoral students, early career researchers, senior academics and artists. 

• 3 travel bursaries for doctoral students to attend the workshop of up to €250, plus 2 night’s accommodation.  

Workshop focus  

Over the last two decades, there has been a turn towards using creative and arts-based practices within social sciences to research aspects of society. Research-creation is an approach that utilises creative and arts-based practices and methods throughout the entire research process from the formulation of a project, through its enactment, to its dissemination (Loveless 2019, Truman 2021). Methodologically, such research might use various forms of creative writing (e.g., speculative fiction, poetry, short stories, creative non-fiction), art and craft practices (e.g., painting, photography, sculpture, textiles) and performance (e.g., theatre, film-making, music) as participatory methods to generate shared insight into an issue. Using a research creation approach provides opportunities for opening up new ways to conceptualise and understand issues related to housing, planning and the built environment.  

This workshop aims to explore and theorise:  

• the potential of research creation as an approach for making sense of housing, planning and the built environment; 

• the implications of different artistic / creative practices for the co-production of knowledge  

• the implications of different models of collaboration (e.g. the artist plus researcher pair vs. the artist doing research/researcher doing art)  

We are open to other exploring and thinking through other relevant issues and questions. While we will organise traditional paper-based sessions, we are also open to alternative modes of presentation and session formats. Following the workshop, selected speakers will be expected to contribute a full chapter to an edited academic book of the workshop proceedings. 

We invite applications to attend the workshop from scholars, artists and scholar-artists who are using a research creation approach or arts-based methods to conduct housing, planning and built environment research. We seek contributions that emphasise epistemological inquiry rather than those that primarily showcase the outputs of using arts-based methods. Papers that critically consider arts-based methods in the social sciences, engage with data, and focus on housing, planning, and property will be prioritised.

Application process 

To apply to present a paper and receive a travel bursary please submit a short cover letter explaining why you would like to attend, a title and a short abstract (150 – 200 words) to both carla.kayanan@mu.ie & juliette.davret@mu.ie (using the subject line ‘CFP RESEARCH CREATION WORKSHOP’) by 14th March 2025. 

To apply for a doctoral student travel bursary to attend the workshop please submit a cover letter explaining why you would like to attend to both carla.kayanan@mu.ie & juliette.davret@mu.ie (using the subject line ‘BURSARY RESEARCH CREATION WORKSHOP’) by 14th March 2025. 

A decision on selection will be made by 14th April 2025. 

For any queries please jointly email carla.kayanan@mu.ie & juliette.davret@mu.ie 

On December 1^st 2024 an interdisciplinary group of researchers gathered at UNSW Sydney on unceded Bidjigal land, gathered around the question ‘what can’t data hear?’ The day involved presentations, provocations, discussion and reflection that explored the implications of the datafication of the social world for processes and practices of political voice and listening. Throughout the day, participants considered questions around the increasing ubiquity of datafied voice and listening in a context of widespread neoliberalism. This blog post overviews some of the discussion generated through the workshop. The full program, including abstracts and bios from each speaker, is available here. The workshop was convened by Associate Professor Tanja Dreher, Dr Poppy de Souza and Data Stories post-doc, Dr Danielle Hynes with excellent and essential assistance from Mitchell Price.

Questions of what is left absent when voice and listening are increasingly datafied within neoliberalism are relevant across many topics and disciplines, including (to name just a few) health, housing, education and politics. Reflecting this, the workshop was split into two broad themes: housing and care. The workshop was split into 5 sessions; 4 involved presentations from speakers followed by short discussion, and the final hour was dedicated to discussion and reflection between the whole group. The names of each presenter and a brief word on the focus of their presentation is included here (check out the program for full abstracts of each presentation and a little more detail on the premise of the day).

Housing

• Claire Daniel – Platformisation of urban planning
• Sophia Maalsen – Know your Landlord: Bringing attention to data silences
• Linda Przhedetsky – Being ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ by algorithmic systems in rental housing
• Alistair Sisson – On counting homelessness: The ambiguous function of By-Name Lists
• Chris Martin – Rental vulnerability, advocacy and assistance
• Jacek Anderst – Social housing waitlist data invisibilising housing needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Care

• Georgia van Toorn – Ontological misrecognition: Datafication of support plans in the NDIS undermining self-determination
• Andrew Whelan – Big mental health data for care-less futures
• Linda Steele – Disability, violence and reparative justice
• Poppy de Souza – (Un)training the algorithm in an age of datafied (non)care
• Mitchell Price – Speaking against oneself
• Diane Stapleton – Desire at the heart of datafication: trans visibility and trans erasure

The remainder of this post recounts some of the discussion that was generated throughout the day.

Image: Workshop participants in discussion

The day began with a focus on housing, generating questions around the tension between platform values and public values, and the increasing dependency of public institutions on platforms in a context where public institutions are increasingly reliant on, and providing funding to, private platforms to facilitate urban planning. The trend of power imbalances being exacerbated through these platforms is not unique to planning and housing, and participants noted there may be a possibility of alliance building across different areas in relation to this.

Discussion following the second session, also focused on housing, generated questions around lived experience/lived expertise, and how we might better attune to and present lived expertise as a vitally important way of understanding how data driven systems works in practice and impact people. Participants noted that it is important to begin with strength based, rather than a deficit based perspective – understanding that lived expertise can constitute forms of knowledge that contribute to theorising and conceptualising how things work, not only descriptive story, or trauma focused (as important as these contributions also are). People impacted by datafied systems use innovative methods of ground truthing to find ways to function/survive within systems that influence their lives, such as (in a social housing related example) driving around town to figure out which properties are empty and requesting to be housed in these specific properties, challenging claims that ‘nothing is available’. The session concluded with a caution; lived expertise can be incorporated into larger systems without meaningfully affecting change, potentially co-opting the potential of this type of knowledge. This theme was to recur throughout the day.

Moving to a focus on care (and acknowledging that care and housing are deeply intertwined), conversation revolved around the importance of mutual recognition, the social nature of identity formation and the difficulty (or impossibility) of fulfilling the need for human recognition of experience and identity through datafied systems. This surfaced across conversations about the datafication of multiple aspects of healthcare, including support plans in Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), mental health, and violence and disability. Also prevalent in this conversation was the individualisation of proposed datafied solutions to what are often social problems. Certain values come to be baked into these systems, and these values can be obfuscated. It is important to interrogate how these values come to exist within these systems, and how they are secured.

Important in this discussion was challenging the view that all that is needed is more/better data, and bringing in the idea of reparations. For example, NDIS support plans, plans that are specifically targeted to individuals which are intended to name their self-defined goals and the supports needed to achieve those goals. To be effective, these plans must be monitored and updated continually. An algorithmic system is used to generate a blueprint of support plans for individuals, and the combination of algorithmic bias and funding cuts means that what is meant to be a basic blueprint reviewed carefully by an expert, can become the final support plan without sufficient review. Linked to this was bringing into the conversation the long history of diagnostic criteria that is grounded in eugenics, and the close ties this has to colonialism – noting that bringing the concept of disability into Australia has been part of the violence of the settler colonial project.

Following this the conversation moved to another aspect of care, that people do care about stuff; and the questions were raised ‘how can we recognise and honour what people care about, and recognise the systems that corrode care and make it difficult? Is there another way we could organise our societies?’ One point to follow in response to this is valuing the interdependent and collective nature of care, linking to the history of disability justice movements. Within this exists a tension – at times people are able to build collective, peer led mutual aid groups that provide mutual support, but the existence of such groups may be taken as an opportunity to gut the state aspect of support provision.

Image: Mitchell Price and Associate Prof Niamh Stephenson

Finally, we concluded the workshop with a reflective session. Throughout the day everyone had access to blank index cards, bringing an analogue element into play as we wrote thoughts, questions and points towards a manifesto on these cards. These served as prompt for our final discussion, and were collected and transcribed by Poppy de Souza (thanks Poppy! More to come from this soon). What is written here arose from the verbal discussion, rather than the index cards. Discussion focused on a few themes: the politics of (in)visibility and transparency, how to interrogate the values embedded in systems, what constitutes ‘enough’ data, and the importance of attending to history.

There are tensions around the value and politics of visibility and transparency. Thinking about theories of change and transparency; while transparency is an important principle, it isn’t necessarily clear how it can activate change (as some of the workshop participants have written about). It’s important to remember that transparency and visibility are not end points in themselves – a transparent system may well be unjust and uncaring. Related to this, it is vital to look at the values embedded in systems, more transparency without shifting embedded values will not activate change. A participant asked, ‘how is it possible to understand what values are embedded in systems?’ Some methods suggested included:

• Discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis
• Looking at resource allocation/follow the money, e.g. the Australian Tax Office is not sufficiently resourced to investigate/recover corporate tax fraud, but it is highly resourced when it comes to investigating welfare fraud, what value does that represent?
• Exploring ‘at what point does it stop being possible to see?’: looking up, tracing a system, where is the point that we can’t see anymore. That is a value project, when does it become possible to obfuscate (e.g. resource allocation, values, who’s involved)
• Looking to perverse outcomes, such as people seeking a type of social housing that doesn’t meet their needs because they know the wait time is shorter for that housing type and that in turn being interpreted as a reflection of the demand for that type of housing, or homelessness By-Name List numbers going down being celebrated as representing a reduction in homelessness when it really represents disenchantment with the system from service providers and people experiencing homelessness and a lack of resourcing for staff to add people to the list. Perverse outcomes such as these show cracks, that the system can never fully recuperate what it claims to represent.

At what point do we have ‘enough’ data? Particularly when it comes to cases where people have shared their stories, their trauma, and there has been little or no action. In these cases the call cannot be ‘we need more data’. The data needs to do something/something needs to be done with it.

Finally, and fittingly, came the reminder about the importance of attending to history, and always asking ‘are the problems and issues with data and datafication new, or are they extensions of existing patterns, systems and power relations? What precisely is new or different?’ Categorisation has long been an essential element of colonisation – the process of dividing and naming. Digitalisation and datafication are also about splitting and demarcating. The digital at its heart is a system of 0s and 1s, a binary system, and there are certainly things that the binary can’t hear.

Some key overlapping themes throughout the day were:

• The importance of hearing/listening to lived experience/lived expertise as data
• Attending to perverse outcomes of data generation/collection/analysis
• Why collect data and what is ‘enough’ data? This linked to theories of change (what is the intended outcome of collecting this data? How will it change things?), data saturation (is collecting more data about this necessary?), and data collection as procrastination (rather than doing something about an issues, are we instead collecting more data about it? Is more information truly needed, or is action needed)

We would like to extend an enormous thank you to all the presenters, facilitators and participants for their generous and generative contributions throughout the day.

The Data Stories project is please to announce the publication of a new book – Critical Data Studies: An A to Z Guide to Concepts and Methods – authored by Rob Kitchin and published by Polity Books.

The book is available as an open access download, as well in paperback and hardback, from the publisher website.

The book provides a glossary for the field, consisting of 413 entries about key terms. Each entry sets out a definition, a descriptive overview, and further reading.

The text is designed to be a pedagogic resource that enables students and researchers to look up terms that might be used in the classroom or in publications but in a way shorn of a detailed explanation of their meaning, and to act as a guide for discovering ideas, concepts, and methods that might be of value in their studies and analysis.

This information sheet lists all the entries by topic, which provides an overview of the content and might be useful for those seeking related sets of concepts and methods.

Oliver Dawkins (Data Stories – Maynooth University) and Gareth W. Young (TRANSMIXR – Trinity College Dublin)

Last week, we had the privilege of presenting a series of XR Masterclasses at Dublin’s BETA Festival. The workshops were designed to help participants explore the possibilities for creating and sharing activist narratives and stories using extended reality (XR) technologies like virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR).

The sessions were proposed by BETA to support their presentation of the immersive augmented reality experience Noire. Noire tells the story of Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old black girl who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, one day in March 1955. Until writer Tania de Montaigne retold this story, it had largely been forgotten and overshadowed by a similar encounter involving Rosa Parks nine months later, made famous through the support of Martin Luther King. Noire uses Microsoft Hololens 2 headsets and spatialised sound to restage Claudette’s earlier encounter in holographic form for six simultaneous participants who share that space in mixed reality.

Taking a creative lead from Noire, our workshops invited participants to explore the use of similar technologies to create and share their stories about activist causes. In particular, we focused on demonstrating the potential for new forms of previsualisation and immersive storyboarding using VR headsets (Meta Quest 2) with open-source software (Open Brush), which is free to use and enables users to draw scenes and environments from the inside out. Participants draw or paint a scene around them in three dimensions. In this way, they get an immediate sense of what the scene will feel like when they share it as an immersive experience for others. The tool can be used to quickly sketch ideas in 3D but offers excellent scope for painterly expression. Using Open Brush with the Meta Quest headset’s ‘passthrough’ mode also lets designers test what their creations might look like in mixed reality at a fraction of the cost of the more expensive Hololens headsets.

Each session started with an introduction to Noire and a discussion with their team members. In our Tuesday session, we were joined by Emanuela Righi and Louis Moreau, who discussed the production and technology involved in Noire. Tania De Montaigne joined us for our Wednesday session to discuss narrative and storytelling. After a brief break, we moved to a broader discussion of XR technologies and their use in storytelling with the aid of technologies like volumetric video capture and 360° cameras. While volumetric video is fully spatialized, it is costly to produce and generates unwieldy volumes of data that must be processed. 360° video, by distinction, is cheaper to produce but typically limits movement to three degrees of freedom, with the viewer effectively stuck in a bubble. Both have different affordances with different implications for accessibility, interaction, and immersion, impacting the types of experiences that can be created and how they are produced. The unique characteristics of XR require adjustments to traditional storytelling methods.

We also considered the importance of realism and artifice with reference to the documented experiences of users in VR who have reported great feelings of immersion and empathy even toward 3D animated content, suggesting that these are not as dependent on realism as we might suppose. Hence, immersive media show great potential for engaging creators and users in their capacity to affect and be affected by digital media in performative virtual and mixed-reality environments through which users can enact their imagination in ways that can support empathy and identification with a character or cause. At the same time, creators need to be authentic and take responsibility for the stories they tell. They must engage with their subject fully to ensure its validity and veracity. In particular, they must ensure that their production does everything possible to respect the ethics and privacy concerns relevant to their subject material, mainly when representing individuals. These concerns extend to issues of accessibility and inclusivity by ensuring that creators recognize the needs, capacities, and diversity of their intended and potential audiences.

To introduce the practical component of the workshop, Gareth demonstrated the use of Open Brush by streaming the video feed from his VR headset to a shared screen in real-time. Visitors then put on the headsets we provided and worked on their own scenes for about 50 minutes. While some participants took our prompt and worked on storyboarding a scene with activist or empathetic intent, others were satisfied exploring the capabilities of the tools. Both Louis and Tania from the Noire team participated. While Louis was familiar with the technology, Tania had less experience with headsets. Tania was initially skeptical about how her experience would be due to her prior understanding of VR as an isolating technology. However, the activity felt much more connected and collective with the headset’s passthrough feature enabled. Tania enjoyed painting in 3D as much as our other participants, who all became deeply engrossed in the scenes they were creating.

For the workshop’s final part, we asked each participant to talk about what they created and share it with the other participants. On the first day, technical difficulties prevented each person from streaming their video feed, so each took turns trying each other’s headsets after a brief description of what they would see. On the second day, we fixed the issue with streaming the video so each participant could provide a tour of their creation from within the headset.

In each case, the embodied testing of each other’s scenes, rather than merely seeing them on the screen, had the most impact for our participants. What came across in the session was the unique value of being able to both create scenes and share the creations of others in a fully spatialised and embodied way. We also saw the potential for the development of unique personal styles of expression by way of comparison.

We concluded the session by suggesting creative next steps for participants who wish to develop these new workflows further. We thanked both the participants and the team from Noire for their inspiration and kind participation. Moving forward, Gareth and I are excited to explore the potential for immersive storytelling in new research and hope to encourage others to pursue their own journeys in the XR field.

[Image source: Research Centre for New Social Housing, TU Wien]

From 16 to 20 September 2024 Data Stories post-doctoral researcher, Danielle Hynes, attended the 2024 Summer School on New Social Housing. This was the seventh edition of the annual summer school, and this year it was held as a collaboration between TU Wien, the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Fourteen participants came from many parts of the world to learn about the past and present of the Viennese model of social housing. As the theme this year was ‘housing experiments revisited’, there was a particular focus on the past, with the participants visiting a number of housing experiments in Vienna. These included the Heimhof ‘one kitchen house’, or Einküchenhaus, a 1920s experiment in liberating women from the kitchen, which was abandoned with the rise of Austrofascism and the building was renovated to add kitchens to each of the apartments. Heimhof is now municipal housing, with beautiful rooftop gardens and onsite childcare.

[Image source: Danielle Hynes. A historical photo of one of Heimhof roof terraces, where the students now stand and hear from cultural studies scholar and historian, Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah, about the history of the building]

We also visited housing cooperative Sargfabrik (which translates to coffin factory, as the building is located where there once stood a coffin factory), an inspiring example of cooperative living that offers an alternative form of tenure to homeownership that is equally stable, but not based on private property. As well as visiting other social housing experiments, we saw community space Amerlinghaus, a site of community building and skill sharing that was able to remain a community space through activists squatting the property in the 1970s. During each of these excursions we heard from experts about their history and place in the current Viennese housing system, and had the opportunity to ask questions and connect aspects of these examples with our own contexts.

[Image source: Danielle Hynes. Students hear about the past and present of Sarfabrik from one of the founding members of the cooperative, shown here in Sargfabrik’s bath house]

As well as visiting these experiments, participants presented work of their own. Offering perspectives of housing experiments past and present from India, Croatia, Italy, the UK, the US, Colombia and Guyana. Danielle presented work building on her PhD thesis, considering how the neoliberal imaginary of housing shapes and constrained what is considered possible and desirable with regard to social housing. Alongside presentations from students, faculty members presented on the history of social housing in Vienna from multiple perspectives (sociology, urban studies, architecture). Finally, participants had the opportunity to work together on a small research task, bringing together some of the ideas we had considered during the week and connecting them with our own work, and presented these at a public event attended by officials from the City of Vienna, who responded to our presentations, generating lively discussion.

[Above image source: Danielle Hynes. Mapping housing experiments and related issues in order to generate discussion and consider the research task. Below image source: Caterina Sartori. Danielle Hynes, Anna Marocco, Arianna Scaioli and Randolph Hunte (left to right) present their research during the final seminar]

The summer school was a fantastic opportunity to connect with housing academics and practitioners from across the world, coming from many different disciplines. Whilst the summer school was not focused on issues relating to data, it offered many opportunities to connect with work relating to the Data Stories project. Presenters spoke of issues relating to the register-based census Austria conducts (instead of a traditional census), the use of data and technology in housing activism, as well as discussing methods and approaches to undertaking arts-based housing research like we do in the Data Stories project.

Danielle would like to thank the organisers, curatorial team and funders for the wonderful opportunity to participate in what was an inspiring and generative summer school.

 The 5th International Data Power Conference has just concluded, offering a thought-provoking exploration of the power dynamics behind data practices and their wide-reaching social, political, economic, and cultural impacts. This year’s conference centred on moving “beyond data universalism”, challenging us to consider how data is shaped by the power relations in specific contexts. Researchers and practitioners from various disciplines gathered to discuss critical issues such as the influence of place and time on data, the infrastructure that sustains data power and the methodologies required to study these dynamics both locally and globally. Throughout the event, conversations emphasised justice, inequality and the role of resistance in an increasingly data-driven world. The Data Stories team were involved in various sessions of this conference.

Artist Joan Somers Donnelly led one of the ‘Making & Doing’ sessions on the first afternoon of the conference, introducing some of the arts-based methods she has used to undertake collaborative research as Phase 2 of the Data Stories project. The workshop drew mostly on work she has done with a citizen-led group, the Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance, together with researcher Juliette Davret. So far, the collaborative stage of the case study has involved facilitating the group to (a) reflect on the structure of their network and how they use it to tell different stories with planning data and to (b) continue strategising on how they might re-position themselves within the ecosystem of planning and public participation in order to amplify those stories.

Two of the exercises were analogue 3D mapping exercises; one using paper, pens and objects that participants undertook from the perspective of a current project they are working on; and another using our bodies in space to map consensus / dissensus on different statements, in this case about the potential future directions of a citizen-led group at somewhat of a crossroads (scenario from the case study). The third exercise was a role-playing exercise where participants focused on inhabiting the different points of view of the people they work alongside or (want to) collaborate with. For this exercise participants again chose scenarios from their own work.

The exercises generated lively discussion, in pairs and the wider group, on the topics that emerged as well as on the methods used. Many of the participants expressed that it was refreshing to do something active and hands-on, and to think in general about the possibilities research creation / arts-based research can open up in terms of collaborating with people who are not researchers by training, particularly groups that are self-organised and might not have access to institutional resources or platforms. There was also discussion about the fact that working with tactile materials can be an interesting bridging strategy when bringing together people from different disciplines or backgrounds.

Towards the end of the session, Joan shared some of her ongoing reflections on collaborative arts-based research with stakeholders, and fostering fertile conditions and relationships for these kinds of approaches. For example, that it can be a way to feed research insights back to a group on the ground that is also generative for them, and that an artistic praxis can do a lot more than create artworks, for example creating different frames and ways of talking, thinking, making and doing. While she stressed that it takes time, patience and willingness to engage in an open-ended process to build the relationships and trust needed, she discussed how integrating collaborative art practices in particular, i.e. art that involves the participation of people without an arts background, can serve to shift attention to the relational and affective aspects and subjectivities at stake in research, activism, policy work and other fields.

There were several other presentations at the conference that dealt with the topic of participant-led research, research-creation, arts-based research, and research co-production (among the many terms used by people from different contexts to describe these related research practices) including an inspiring keynote by Kim Sawchuk and Eric Craven about drawing data ecosystems as swamps with older individuals. It was very enjoyable and productive to swap (swampy) notes with other researchers and artists, both about the challenges of implementing these kinds of practices and the different kinds of knowledge exchange that they can open up. 

[Image Source: Stiefkind Fotografie Graz]

Juliette Davret had the opportunity to present a paper* on the intersection of open-access data, data capitalism and urban planning during the Situating Open Data Practices session on Friday 6th. Drawing on West’s (2017) theories of data capitalism, the paper explored how the commodification of data creates asymmetrical power relationships, particularly in the realm of open-access data. The paper examined how capitalist models transform raw data into valuable products, flipping the dynamics so that the creators of open-access data often become its buyers.

[Image Source: Stiefkind Fotografie Graz]

Findings emerged from one of our case studies in the Data Stories project, which focused on a company specialising in the commercialisation of open-access data within the Irish urban planning system. The study revealed the intricate process of consolidating disparate data systems into one unified product, a task that involved breaking down data silos, validating information and merging these data streams into a coherent whole.

The research was built on a robust set of methods, including four semi-structured interviews with key employees, two meetings to discuss their operations and three walkthroughs of their data processes. This data was further explored through three speculative fiction-based workshops designed by artist, Mel Galley, offering a creative lens into the company’s data philosophy.

One of the paper’s key insights was an understanding of data flows between Ireland and data intermediaries as far afield as South Asia, illustrating the complexities of managing multiple data systems. We highlighted how a capitalist approach to data streamlines data infrastructure, making information management more efficient and strategic, but also raising crucial questions about data ethics and the roles of intermediaries.

Finally, the paper examined how the rise of digital planning processes and the open data movement (Lund, 2017) is challenging traditional capitalist data models. As urban planning becomes more digitised, it’s essential to strike a balance between economic gain and ethical use of open-access data, ensuring that this valuable resource is managed responsibly in the public interest. 

The paper presentation was followed by a lively discussion with the other panellists, focusing on the long-running debate about the role of the state in the open data movement. For years, researchers have questioned the extent to which governments should be responsible for the quality, accessibility and ethical use of open data. While many argue that the state has a duty to regulate and maintain high standards, some panellists have raised the provocative point that it may not be the government’s role to guarantee the quality of open data.  

This discussion focuses on the idea that open data, by its very nature, thrives in decentralised and collaborative environments, where multiple stakeholders – private companies, researchers and civil society – can contribute to the validation, refinement and use of data. Rather than placing the responsibility solely on the state, there is a growing belief that the open data ecosystem should be self-regulating, with market forces, public control and third-party organisations playing a greater role in ensuring data quality and ethical use.  

This shift in perspective challenges the traditional view of governments as the central authority for data governance. It suggests that while the state can and should facilitate access to data and define general ethical guidelines, its role may be more limited when it comes to exercising practical supervision. As open data initiatives continue to evolve, the question remains: can we trust other actors to enforce quality and ethical standards, or must the state still play an active role in safeguarding the public interest? This ongoing debate is crucial, as open data becomes an increasingly powerful tool for shaping society.

[Image Source: Stiefkind Fotografie Graz]

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the conference organisers, who did a remarkable job ensuring everything was as enjoyable as possible for us. 

References:  

*Davret J., Mutter S., Kayanan C. M., Kitchin R. & Galley M. (2024) Open access data, data capitalism and urban planning, Data Power 5.0, Graz, Austria. 4-6 September 

West, S.M., 2019. Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy. Business & Society 58, 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185 

Lund, A., 2017. The Open Data Movement in the Age of Big Data Capitalism. Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS), University of Westminster. 

On the 2nd and 3rd of September 2024 a group of academics, practitioners and activists gathered at Maynooth University for a two-day workshop to examine the data politics shaping and underpinning housing and planning. With material drawing from case studies on Ireland, Australia, the US, UK, Kenya, South Africa and the Netherlands, the presentations featured a variety of regional perspectives.

Professor Rob Kitchin opened the workshop with an introduction to the Data Stories project. He discussed key points of data politics, and key ‘data debates’ relating to housing, planning His opening was followed by five themed sessions: 1) Property information; 2) Planning; 3) Financialisation, platforms, residential/commercial real estate; 4) Renting, landlords, evictions, vacancy; and 5) Data activism and counter-data activism. We concluded the workshop with a panel discussion summarising overarching issues/themes of the workshop.

This blog post outlines key topics that arose throughout the workshop, structured around each of the themed sessions and the final panel discussion.  

Day 1 

Property information  

In the session, Dr Mariana Reyes presented the work of herself, Dr Dennis Muthama and Prof Ayona Datta on the development control aspect of the planning system in Kenya, a system in transition after the introduction of automation. While the automation process is billed as improving efficiency, reducing corruption, speeding up the planning process and increasing investment, the transition has not been simple due to developers using multiple strategies to avoid planning processes, including constructing buildings at night. This presentation was followed by Dr Elsa Noterman, who discussed the concept of ‘data deferral’ through recounting the arduous process of submitting a freedom of information act request. This concept assists in naming a variety of strategies that hinder access to what is ostensibly ‘public’ data, as those seeking to access the data are continuously denied, redirected and delayed.

Dr Daan Bossuyt examined the processes and techniques resulting in the privatisation of public property through analysing how the Dutch Central Real Estate Agency and the Ministry of Defence deal with public real estate. Contrary to expectations, Dr Bossuyt found that the sale of public land held by the Ministry of Defence is not oriented towards the financialised nature of assets, but rather focused on cost metrics and replacement value. This focus leads to attention on short-term outcomes and avoiding high maintenance costs. Finally in this session, Dr Juliette Davret presented the work of herself, Dr Samuel Mutter, Dr Carla Kayanan, Prof Rob Kitchin and Mel Galley. Dr Davret examined processes of commodification of open data, considering the implications of open data being scraped, cleaned, put together with other datasets by private companies and then sold – sometimes back to those who originally produced the data.

Planning

Through an analysis of a metropolitan strategic plan, Prof Stephanie Dühr examined the political framing of data needs within such plans. Questions that arose included – what data is needed to meaningfully evaluate strategic policies? How does this compare with the datasets that are already available? Can the mismatch between the two point to instances of ‘policy based evidence making’? Then, Dr Carla Kayanan discussed work done along with Dr Juliette Davret, Dr Samuel Mutter and Prof Rob Kitchin on the data mobilities and data politics of planning. By examining the evolution of Ireland’s data ecosystem, the presentation sought to move beyond questions of inequalities that arise from access to technology, to consider how data practices and day–to–day operations demonstrate alternative forms of inequality and power dynamics.

Continuing the discussion of strategic planning, Dr Claire Daniel considered the unintended consequences of open planning data and analytics. Whilst the open data movement began with (and continues to espouse) the values of transparency and citizen empowerment – this does not capture the full view of open data. In reality, it can be difficult to use, invoke neoliberal models of individual agency and have unintended harmful consequences. Dr Daniel considered whether the use of open data by intermediaries, such as consultants, in effect makes the planning processes less transparent. Finally for the planning session, Dr Scott Markley discussed the rise of ‘municipal data solutions startups’ – startup companies offering a supposed solution to the problems arising from the highly fragmented, scattered, vague and confusing zoning system in the US. These companies are proliferating, claiming to, as one company’s tagline states, ‘empower the property industry’. The data these companies produce appear to be replete with errors and inconsistencies, as is the source data they are working with, due to zoning boundaries being poorly digitised and sourced from different places, at times not matching up. It is not clear how companies handle these issues, and someone, somewhere in the company must make (potentially arbitrary) decisions about where a boundary falls, or how a region is zoned. In some of these cases, as Dr Markley said, ‘to make a decision is to become the authority’.

Financialisation, platforms, residential/commercial real estate

Kick starting this session, Dr Julien Migozzi discussed how urban housing markets drive digital capitalism, and how digital capitalism upholds wealth inequalities and segregation within the context of global real estate networks. Dr Migozzi considered this through three key dimensions: legal, algorithmic and financial. Looking at this through public facing housing property portals in South Africa, Dr Migozzi found these portals recode housing inequalities, recycling apartheid boundaries for neighbourhood boundaries. PropTech, he argues, is RentTech – it fosters a traditional rentier model through the market, creating algorithmic rents from data services and software, and brings housing into the information economy. Next, Dr Sophia Maalsen discussed working with social media content creators to advocate for tenants’ rights, research done with Drs Peta Wolifson and Dallas Rogers. Dr Maalsen considered the difficulty of navigating multiple relationships with non-academic peers, as well as external partners, alongside the benefits of sharing academic research through storytelling on non-traditional platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. These considerations were made in the context of a project considering the (im)possibility of tenants having as much information about their landlords, as landlords have about tenants. The project advertised a fictional app, Know Your Landlord, that would allow tenants to vet their landlords.

Then Dr Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn discussed the transformation of Dublin’s Docklands drawing on Erin McElroy’s theory of siliconization. Examining the history of the area through various data sources, Dr Nic Lochlainn recounted the increasing financialisation of the area in the particular context of how Ireland was marketed as a safe, secure, desirable, English speaking location to invest in. In continuing to examine how the increasing financialisation of the city has been, and continues to be possible, Dr Nic Lochlainn found that doing this critical urban research ‘is partly like solving a crime that happened long ago, and partly like watching a very long and very slow car crash’. Closing out the day Dr Richard Waldron discussed work done in collaboration with Dr Declan Redmond and Dr Bernie O’Donoghue-Hynes examining the intricacies of understanding emergency accommodation use patterns of homeless families in Ireland. This is not straightforward work, as how this is recorded is not consistent (for example, in some cases children are not recorded at all, or are not recorded as part of a family unit so appear separately). Dr Waldron considered whether administrative data from emergency accommodation providers assist in monitoring presentation by families.

After a delightful dinner at Maynooth’s Pugin Hall and some well-earned rest, attendees gathered again bright and early for Day 2 of the workshop.

Day 2

Renting, landlords, evictions, vacancy

Dr Rachel Slaymaker opened up the second day of the workshop discussing the changing data landscape in the Irish Private Rental Sector (PRS). Slaymaker demonstrated how two new metrics included in the data collected by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) can help better understand trends in PRS. However, Slaymaker cautioned that certain challenges remain in the data collection and analysis process, such as frequent housing policy changes and slow administrative changes related to data collection. Dr Erin McElroy then brought our focus to the various types of data methods tenant and housing organisers employ, mostly in San Francisco but also in other cities across the US and the globe, to identify corporate ownership trends and organise multi-building tenant associations and unions. McElroy’s presentation served as a powerful demonstration of the role of collective resistance against evictions, and how data stories can highlight issues of displacement contribute to resistance. An existing challenge to Ireland’s inability to address housing availability is the flattened categorisation of what constitutes as ‘vacant’ in Irish policy. Dr Cian O’Callaghan and Dr Kathleen Stokes grapple with this issue in their research. Their presentation provided a critical reading of how vacancy is understood in Ireland and the different narratives that emerge based on these interpretations. Providing additional empirics on the role of policy shaping the data landscape, Prof Michelle Norris closed off the session with findings from the analysis of Ireland’s Social Housing Assessments Report (SSHA) and Housing Assistant Payment (HAP) data sets from 2016 – 2022. The work, undertaken alongside Dr Cliodhna Bairéad, charts the increased reliance on data to inform policy, but the problematic that emerges in relation to data analysis in a period when housing and its accompanying policy is politicised, scrutinised and contested. Prof Norris was at pains to stress the troublesome issues that emerge with data analysis when fickle policy can change the direction of collection.

Data activism and counter-data actions  

In the final session, Dr Juliette Davret and Dr Samuel Mutter presented work completed with artists Joan Somers Donnelly and Augustine O’Donoghue, outlining similarities and divergences between the tactics of direct action and lobbying as data activism. They discussed the potential of these two approaches to resist neoliberal urbanism and defend the right to housing, and considered whether social movements could be thought of as data infrastructures. Wonyoung So, Asya Aizman and Chenab Navalkha presented on work completed with Catherine D’Ignazio, examining the motivations behind various housing data projects and the possibility of making data useful. They found some actors take a position of ‘strategic neutrality’, portraying a neutral position in order to be taken seriously in certain circles, and to have greater potential for influence (e.g. with policy makers). They called for more equitable and justice oriented housing data infrastructures.

Dr Danielle Hynes examined the implications of increasing datafication of processes of participation for social housing tenants, and considered whether datafication impedes the possibility of political voice and genuine listening for tenants. Finally, Jillian Crandall presented their research, examining how dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement of low-income Black communities is perpetuated through housing speculation and financialisation. Jillian outlined how cadastral mapping has caused disaster – echoing the findings of Dr Migozzi in outlining how cadastral mapping is tied to redlining, inequitable taxation and has been used as a tool of colonialism.

Final panel

The workshop concluded with a panel discussion between Prof Rob Kitchin, Dr Daithi Downey, Prof Michelle Norris, Dr Sophia Maalsen and Dr Erin McElroy. The panel members reflected on some themes repeated throughout the workshop, and then all attendees engaged in discussion around these themes. The discussion touched on:

• The fragmentation and harmonisation of data.
• The importance of understanding the contexts of power.
• Access to, usability and translatability of data.
• Potential harms of open/opening data.
• The inescapability of certain data infrastructures: Amazon, Google, and the contradictions that throws up when undertaking anti-capitalist data projects.
• The limited nature of our workshop internationally – the majority of research (with some exceptions) presented was based in Ireland, the UK, US or Australia.
• Digitalisaiton and datafication are processes that are incomplete and still underway in Ireland, and different departments are at different stages in this process.
• The tension between a simple narrative that can form part of lobbying/communicating a message effectively, and fully telling a nuanced story, or communicating all the nuances related to a dataset.
• Instances of people strategically using numbers that they know are not correct in order to further their argument.

Finally, many questions were considered as part of this discussion, including the following:

• What could community control of data look like?
• What problems that we see as data problems are new/unique to data, and what already existed but are easy to chalk up to issues of contemporary technology?
• Within the activist realm especially – what are the affective dimensions of this data work? How does energy and community grow? How does this relate to datafied processes? Is this something that can’t be datafied?
• What are the different genres of (housing) data? How are data stories told?

The Data Stories team would like to thank all the presenters for their insightful presentations. We are also grateful to the Irish stakeholders who took time out of their busy schedules to attend and contribute to developing the conversations. A special thank you is very much reserved for Orla Dunne, who dealt with all the travel and lodging logistics. Over the coming months, we will compile many of the presentations into an edited book. Keep an eye out! For now, most of the presenters have given us permission to share their slides with the public.

Presentation Slides

• Workshop agenda and presentation abstracts: Programme with Abstracts
• Mariana Reyes (UCL, UK) and Dennis M. Muthama (BIEA, Kenya) – Keeping up with peripheral urbanisation: the automation of urban planning in Kajiado, Kenya
• Elsa Noterman (QMUL, UK) – Data deferral: Speculating about property information
• Daan Bossuyt (Utrecht University, Netherlands) – The data politics of state property regimes: A case-study of the Dutch Central Real Estate Agency
• Juliette Davret (Maynooth University) – Open access data, data capitalism, and urban planning
• Stefanie Dühr (University of South Australia) – The data politics of strategic spatial planning: Experiences from the metropolitan spatial strategy for Greater Adelaide, South Australia
• Juliette Davret, Carla Kayanan, Rob Kitchin and Sam Mutter (Maynooth University, Ireland) – Charting the data ecosystem, data mobilities and data politics of planning
• Claire Daniel (University of New South Wales, Australia) – Are we just feeding the beast? Addressing unintended consequences of open planning data and analytics
• Scott Markley (Cornell University, USA) – Who is public planning data for? Zoning and the rise of the “municipal data solutions” startup
• Julien Migozzi (Oxford University, UK): PropTech is RentTech: (Re)coding housing into an asset class
• Sophia Maalsen (University of Sydney, Australia) – Know Your Landlord: inverting the data collection narrative as a means to tenancy advocacy in the private rental sector
• Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn (UCC, Ireland) – Diffracting Dublin Docklands: Fieldnotes from a technocapitalist frontier
• Richard Waldron (QUB), Declan Redmond (UCD) and Bernie O’Donoghue-Hynes (LGMA) – Understanding the Emergency Accommodation Use Patterns of Homeless Families: The Case of Dublin
• Rachel Slaymaker (ESRI, Ireland) – The Changing Data Landscape in the Irish Private Rental Sector
• Erin McElroy (University of Washington, USA) – Storying Landlord Geographies: Parsing Together Evictor Data to Narrate (Dis)possession and Resistance
• Cian O’Callaghan (TCD, Ireland) and Kathleen Stokes (DCU, Ireland) – Telling stories with vacancy data: Navigating between politics and praxis
• Clíodhna Bairéad and Michelle Norris (UCD, Ireland) – Does data change when housing need is met? Comparing Social Housing Assessment and Housing Assistance Payment Data (2016-2022)
• Juliette Davret, Sam Mutter, Joan Somers Donnelly, Augustine O’Donoghue (Maynooth University, Ireland) – A Critical Comparison of Direct Action and Lobbying as Data Activism: The case of housing and planning in Dublin
• Wonyoung So, Asya Aizman, Chenab Navalkha, and Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT, USA) – Housing Data Activism
• Danielle Hynes (Maynooth University, Ireland) – What data doesn’t capture: Voice, listening and participation in Australian social housing
• Jillian (Lee) Crandall (University of California, Berkeley, USA) – Who Owns Oakland?

(Source: RGS-IBG)

Between the 28th and 30th of August 2024 Samuel Mutter, postdoctoral researcher on the Data Stories team, attended the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) annual international conference in London, UK. The conference theme was ‘mapping’.

Data Stories PI Rob Kitchin was also virtually present at the event as a keynote speaker. Rob gave a live streamed presentation from the International Geographic Congress (IGC) conference in Dublin on ‘Digital twins, deep maps and the nature of mapping’, which discussed recent work exploring emerging developments in 3D mapping with our Creative Technologist Oliver Dawkins.

(Rob Kitchin gives his keynote. Source: Maynooth University)

Sam’s own presentation was co-authored with one of the Data Stories artists-in-residence, Augustine O’Donoghue. Entitled ‘Public Luxury: Building a data-informed board game for tenant organising’, their presentation was included in the session organised by Anil Sindhwani (Durham University & Queen Mary UoL) titled ‘Redefining the Housing (Activism) Question’. Their presentation focused largely on a discussion of Augustine’s recent intervention ‘Doormats in Anticipation of Doorknocking Politicians’ (the topic of a previous post on this blog) and her new concept for a housing activism board game to be co-created with members of the Community Action Tenant’s Union (CATU) in Dublin.

(Project artist Augustine O’Donoghue. Source: author)

The presentation sought to situate these artistic interventions within the wider Data Stories project, highlighting the benefits of deploying artistic ways of doing and thinking and the ways this had shaped research processes – including engagement with citizen groups – and outputs. It also reflected on some of the challenges of organising co-creative processes in the context of the Irish housing crisis, manifesting not only as a shortage of available, affordable and suitable housing, but also a shortage of available, affordable and suitable public and community spaces in which citizens, artists and activists can do or make things together.

The presentation provided an interesting point of comparison with other papers in the session. These included research on the practice of ‘rent bidding’ in the UK private rental market by Noterman & Barry-Born and studies of the blurring of public/private space in experiences of homeless populations and the community groups working with them by Burgum & Pojuner.

Overall, the conference enabled Data Stories to share different elements of the project’s work with academic audiences working in related fields.

Amidst the flurry of all the other events crammed into the last two weeks of August and the first week of September, Data Stories chaired a second session at the IGC with colleagues , Dr. Nic Lochlainn, from Cork City University, and Dr. Maalsen, from University of Sydney. Both Dr. Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn and Dr. Sophia Maalsen presented papers, along with Dr. Danielle Kerrigan from Simon Fraser University.

Considering how the increased use of data in urban planning, housing management, development and financialisation has led to profound shifts in how we understand, design, and manage our built environments, Critical Perspectives on Housing and Planning Data aimed to examine the most crucial and contentious aspects of data politics and power in urban planning and housing management. This research agenda is a response to how the transition towards a more data-driven approach raises a series of critical questions concerning who controls the data infrastructures, generation, analysis, and interpretation of data, and data-driven decision-making, as well as issues of spatial justice, privacy, representativeness and data ethics.

Dr. Nic Lochlainn started off the session with a presentation titled, Casing the joint: Repurposing planning and housing data for critical urban property research. With its methodological focus on how critical urban property research is conducted, in this presentation, Dr. Nic Lochlainn walked us through the idea of ‘casing the joint’, which involves undergoing a series of digital/material research methods to better understand how space is socially produced and how the production creates a data trail useful for critical research. This process of groundtruthing involves repurposing mundane and social data and determining what pieces matter, when and how.

Dr. Kerrigan followed with the presentation, The rise of own-use evictions and the limits of eviction data to understanding Canadian rental markets. This work was developed alongside Cloé St. Hilaire, University of Waterloo, and Dr. David Wachsmuth, McGill University, and inquires into the discrepancies of own-use eviction data with the starting point that in Canada own-use evictions are the most common type of eviction, but that the use of it is not even across the Canadian provinces. Deeper analysis of own-use eviction data is important, the authors argue, to provide planners and policy-makers with a better understanding of their housing landscape.

Dr. Maalsen closed off the session with the presentation, Know Your Landlord: Inverting the data collection narrative as a means to tenancy advocacy in the private rental sector. The research was produced alongside Associate Professor Dallas Rogers and Dr. Peta Wolifsonn, both at the University of Sydney. Dr. Maalsen showcased the fictional “Know Your Landlord” app to raise awareness of the power discrepancies between landlords and tenants. The presentation also highlighted methodological challenges that emerged in developing the app between the researchers, the design firm and the social media influencer.

Two additional scholars were meant to present in this session, but had unforeseen circumstances that prevented them from joining us. As chair, Dr. Carla Maria Kayanan used the extra time to allow the individuals to sit at the front of the room for a question and answer session and a more lengthy discussion on the topic.

Data Stories team would like to thank all the presenters for their insightful research and to the lively participants who joined us and asked such great, thought-provoking questions.