Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards

TLDR

Since the mid‑1990s, cities have adopted numerous indicator projects and benchmarking efforts, and more recently have embraced open, real‑time data from sensors and social media displayed in interactive dashboards. This paper examines these initiatives, arguing that they promote a realist epistemology that frames the city as visualised facts and reshapes how managers and citizens govern urban spaces. The authors describe how cities employ indicator, benchmarking, and dashboard initiatives and the purposes they serve. They contend that while such initiatives aim to increase transparency and improve decision‑making, they are driven by naive instrumental rationality, vulnerable to manipulation, and plagued by methodological and technical shortcomings, and they propose re‑imagining them as politically infused socio‑technical data assemblages that actively shape cities.

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s a plethora of indicator projects have been developed and adopted by cities seeking to measure and monitor various aspects of urban systems. These have been accompanied by city benchmarking endeavours that seek to compare intra- and inter-urban performance. More recently, the data underpinning such projects have started to become more open to citizens, more real-time in nature generated through sensors and locative/social media, and displayed via interactive visualisations and dashboards that can be accessed via the internet. In this paper, we examine such initiatives arguing that they advance a narrowly conceived but powerful realist epistemology – the city as visualised facts – that is reshaping how managers and citizens come to know and govern cities. We set out how and to what ends indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives are being employed by cities. We argue that whilst these initiatives often seek to make urban processes and performance more transparent and to improve decision making, they are also underpinned by a naive instrumental rationality, are open to manipulation by vested interests, and suffer from often unacknowledged methodological and technical issues. Drawing on our own experience of working on indicator and dashboard projects, we argue for a conceptual re-imaging of such projects as data assemblages – complex, politically-infused, socio-technical systems that, rather than reflecting cities, actively frame and produce them.