Kitchin, Rob and Lauriault, Tracey P. and McArdle, Gavin (2015) Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards. Regional Studies, 2 (1). pp. 6-28. ISSN 0034-3404

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	urban indicators; benchmarks; dashboards; critical data studies; performance; open data; administrative data;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > National Institute for Regional and Spatial analysis, NIRSA
Item ID:	5694
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2014.983149
Depositing User:	Tracey Lauriault
Date Deposited:	21 Jan 2015 10:35
Journal or Publication Title:	Regional Studies
Refereed:	Yes
Funders:	European Research Council
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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