Abstract
How do the idealised promises and purposes of urban informatics compare to the material politics and practices of their implementation? To answer this question, I ethnographically trace the development of two data dashboards by strategic planners in an Australian city over the course of 2 years. By studying this techno-political process from its origins onward, I uncovered an interesting story of obdurate institutions, bureaucratic momentum, unexpected troubles, and, ultimately, frustration and failure. These kinds of stories, which often go untold in the annals of innovation, contrast starkly with more common framings of technological triumph and transformation. They also, I argue, reveal much more about how techno-political systems are actualised in the world.
Introduction
Data dashboards have become an essential part of the digital governance arsenal. No aspirational smart city, region or country wants to be without a variety of dashboards at their disposal. Dashboards are a way to aggregate, analyse and visualise various data streams from different sources. These streams are brought together in a central interface that provide informational representations based on data patterns over time and/or updated in real time and/or projected forward in time. Urban spaces, in particular, have become important sites for the creation, acquisition and analysis of new forms of data. And, in turn, these data have been fed back into systems of territorial governance at different scales, contributing to the creation of ‘urban operating systems’ and ‘computational logics’ that have a range of epistemological, ontological and political implications for how those spaces are understood, experienced and planned (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2020).
As critical work on the politics of urban media and digital governance has argued, these data-based abstractions of places, people and processes transform both the means and ends of urban governance (Bartlett and Tkacz, 2017; Kitchin et al., 2016). In addition to providing city leaders with new tools, assessments, frameworks, imperatives and goals to apply in practices of governance, they also mediate how the city is approached as an object of governance. The purposes of command and control are apparent in how companies design dashboards and market their uses to governments. For instance, Siemens calls its dashboard the City Cockpit because it allows mayors and planners to be the captain of their city: ‘All of the important information flows into a central system that processes the data for convenient display and indicates to what extent specified objectives are being met’ (Siemens, 2011: 94).
In a lucid history of the urban dashboard, Shannon Mattern (2015) crystallises the techno-political dynamic at play: ‘dashboard designers are in the business of translating perception into performance, epistemology into ontology’. By bringing together indicators, benchmarks, dashboards and visualisations, this mode of data-driven urbanism ‘privileges a realist, quantitative epistemology, enacts an instrumental rationality, and fails to recognize and denote their contingent unfolding, their inherent politics, and their technical and methodological issues’ (Kitchin et al., 2015: 24). Through the use of surveillance systems and algorithmic analytics that capture the city, the aim is to make space/society legible and controllable (Iveson and Maalsen, 2019; Shapiro, 2021). These transformations are motivated by an ontology that conceives of the city as a computer (Mattern, 2021) and the universe as made of data (Sadowski, 2019). In this view, the city (or region or country) is reconfigured as a ‘system of systems’. The promise of technologies like data dashboards and operations centres is that the city’s components are connected, its infrastructures are interoperable and its every aspect is abstracted and accessible via digital interfaces (Raetzsch et al., 2019).
In Automated Media, Mark Andrejevic (2019) describes how these data-driven, networked and automated technologies are used to market an ideal model of smart urbanism as the ‘operational city’ and materialise a techno-politics of technocratic anti-politics: Machines can step in to take on the information load that has become too heavy for humans to bear, thus resolving the inefficiencies and shortcomings that result in political conflict. If enough information can be collected and processed, the whole complex system can be made sense of and sorted out, freeing humans up from having to manage society. (Andrejevic, 2019: 101)
This is a model of the city produced by/with urban informatics, or a field based on applying data science and information technology to study urban systems and solve urban problems (Barns, 2017; Townsend, 2015). In other words, we can understand urban informatics as engaged in a ‘set of practices’ that Slota et al. (2020) call prospecting, which aims to render ‘data, knowledge, expertise, and practices of worldly domains available or amenable to engagement with data scientific method and epistemology’ (p. 1). As an application of data science, urban informatics establishes itself as being able to traverse across other domains, positioning itself as a universal(izing) method that sits at the centre of knowing and doing. This powerful combination of methodology, technology and ideology makes models like ‘smart urbanism’ and applications like ‘urban informatics’ attractive to those who govern cities, make strategic plans and oversee its operations. It is no wonder that this model of understanding the power of data-driven governance has garnered so much attention both by practitioners who want to harness it and by scholars who are critical of these aims (Fourcade and Gordon, 2020; Johns, 2021).
At the same time, however, this analytical model of the technology’s operations does not always fit the reality of its implementation. Scholarship investigating how smart cities are made (Bulkeley et al., 2016; Dowling et al., 2021) has shown how the ‘actually existing’ processes and outcomes of building these systems and integrating them into governance very often do not live up to the hopes and intentions (Shelton et al., 2015). The real smart city takes shape in ways that are ad hoc, piecemeal and retrofitted. Like most technologies and policies, its development must contend with existing contexts, unexpected barriers, insufficient resources and a multitude of delays, detours and dead ends – all issues I explore further in the empirical analysis below. As is so often the case with hyped technologies, they are victims of their own marketing and fail to meet expectations for any number of reasons. Rather than a universal application, what emerges are variegated implementations (Sadowski and Maalsen, 2020).
Following this line of analysis – and exploring the tension between aspirations and implementation – this article asks the question: How do the idealised promises and purposes of urban informatics (and more specifically, data dashboards) compare to the material politics and practices of their implementation? Through an ethnographic case study of the design, construction and politics of urban dashboards, I argue that attempts to put cities under the domain of data and computation can result in systems that are far more troublesome to operationalise than they initially appeared. In short, the idealised application of urban informatics contrasts starkly with the actual attempts to implement these systems.
My argument here is not only about the glitchiness of technical system – the unexpected and unavoidable errors of operations – but, even more so, about the obduracy of institutions, the momentum of bureaucracy and the failures of policy (Hommels, 2005; Lovell, 2019). As Katie Wells (2014) argues, ‘it is necessary to pay attention to the interruptions, exceptions, and stalled attempts at policymaking’ (p. 475) – and, I would add, technology-making. We know these are key features of political and technological change, but they are so often assumed away in favour of idealised models of how techno-political transformation happens by companies who are selling disruption, policymakers who want to court innovation and critics who base their analyses on the claims of the former (Sauter, 2019; Vinsel and Russell, 2020). A recent article in this journal theorises the ‘performative effects of hype and its critique’ as a form of ‘hot air’ that articulates and produces sociotechnical imaginaries of the future – good or bad, desired or unwanted (Hockenhull and Cohn, 2021: 302).
I contribute to scholarship on the processes and politics of digital governance by tracing the (attempted) development and (attempted) implementation of two data dashboards by strategic planners in an Australian city over the course of 2 years. By ethnographically studying these technologies from their origins onward, I uncovered an interesting story of frustration and failure. I argue that these kinds of stories, which often go untold in the annals of innovation, reveal much more about how techno-political systems are actualised in the world compared to the typical stories of success.
In doing so, I follow in the footsteps of foundational work in the field of Science and Technology Studies, which argued for an analytical symmetry that paid close attention to studying both the success and failure of artefacts. For example, Pinch and Bijker (1984) provide an in-depth history of the bicycle as exemplary of the multidirectional development process that looks more like a spoked wheel than a straight line. Or consider Latour’s (1996) study of a rapid transport system in Paris that failed not because somebody ‘killed’ it, but rather because the network of actors involved in its creation did not come together to sustain it. An instructive contemporary case study is Tennant and Stilgoe’s (2021) analysis of the persisting narrative of ‘autonomy’ in self-driving vehicles and the persistent inability to make good on those promises My intention here is not to claim that the study of technological failure has totally disappeared. Instead, I aim to bring renewed attention to failure as an endemic feature of technology and to empirical approaches that seek to uncover the processes of how and why failure happens.
The next section of this article explains the methods used in this project. The third section details an ethnographic case study of the Future City Unit (FCU) in the Department of Strategic Development and Outcomes in the City of Parramatta, Australia (The unit and department are also called by planners, respectively, ‘City Future’ and ‘City Strategy’.). This unit is in charge of strategic planning for smart initiatives. Many of its projects focus on building capacity within the government for collecting and collating data, as well as creating digital interfaces (e.g. dashboards) to interact with data and communicating the meaning of this data/media to policymakers and the public. By tracing the development of two data dashboards from conception, I pay particular attention to ways past experiences and future aspirations compounded with present challenges – ultimately leading to an uncertain fate for the dashboards. I then conclude the article by further considering the problems that can arise in the process of making the ideal real and the need for future studies to focus more on techno-political failure.
Methods
This case study is the result of an ethnographic project conducted for nearly 2 years (2017–2019) with the FCU in the Department of Strategic Development and Outcomes in the City of Parramatta. In a broad sense, this project’s aim was to understand the nitty gritty details of how a ‘smart city’ is made, who’s involved in making it and why they are doing it. More specifically, the research this article is based on was concerned with understanding the processes involved in actually trying to develop and implement new technologies into practices of governance. (For a macro-level analysis of the development and governance of smart urbanism in Australia, which complements this detailed ethnographic account, see Dowling et al. (2021) and Sadowski and Maalsen (2020)).
Empirical data for this project have been collected in the following ways:
Semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews (ranging 30–120 minutes, averaging 45 minutes) with 20 key informants – many of whom were interviewed multiple times over the project – who hold key positions related to smart urbanism in the city government (e.g. head of FCU, head of IT, city councillors, Smart City Advisory Committee members) or with vendors contracted to provide smart city services to the government.
Informal, unrecorded conversations with over 30 people involved in smart city operations and/or urban innovation in Parramatta. They ranged 10–45 minutes and took place in a wide variety of different settings, such as before/after meetings, while getting coffee, riding on a train and so on. Key takeaways and quotes from these conversations were later summarised in field notes.
Dozens of hours of participant observation while attending internal meetings where smart city matters were planned and presented, such as FCU project meetings, Smart City Advisory Committee meetings, a leadership meeting for the City of Parramatta and a masterclass on city innovation hosted by the IT department. I also observed FCU members while they worked and chatted in the government offices. These meetings were documented in field notes.
Analysis of a large corpus of both publicly available and internal documents relevant to smart urbanism in Parramatta, including smart city master plans, project reports, slide decks, meeting minutes and marketing materials.
Through these methods, my goal was to get inside the government bureaucracy and get close to the planners who are, under the rubric of ‘smart city’ or ‘future city’, attempting to construct various data systems and digital media and harness the powerful capacities they offer for governance. The impetus of this project takes direction from Kuus’ (2015) argument for embedded empirical research on the operations of bureaucratic institutions. ‘The question is not only what claims circulate or whether they have merit but also how this happens’ (Kuus 2015: 443). Thus, with a focus on process tracing, I explain how actually existing technological changes happened within government – or, as we will see, how things did not work out exactly as planned.
‘Building Australia’s Next Great City’
Parramatta is the ‘Second CBD’ of Sydney, the geographical heart of the Sydney Metropolitan Area, and the sixth largest economy in Australia. Becoming a ‘smart city’ and ‘future city’ is front-and-centre in Parramatta’s ongoing efforts to realise its mission of ‘Building Australia’s Next Great City’. These initiatives are meant to project a more entrepreneurial and future-oriented image, which is also meant to counteract the long-standing perceptions of Parramatta as an undesirable, poor and/or dangerous place – perceptions often tied to fears about race and migrant communities (Fraser, 2013; Mar and Barns, 2018). In many ways, Parramatta, which is known as ‘the cradle of the colony’ because of its site as the first European settlement in Australia, is looking to the future as a way to leave behind its past. That is not to say the city wants to erase its heritage. But rather choose what to embrace and how to present it. Indeed, as I was finishing my fieldwork, City Future was starting work with a local heritage organisation to create digital renderings of artefacts that would be preserved and publicly accessible in an online and virtual reality museum.
Parramatta has been working on smart city initiatives since 2009. This is quite early on the global scene, and extremely early in the Australian context. For example, IBM and Cisco, two corporate forerunners in smart urbanism, only announced their smart city projects in 2008 and 2009, respectively. In that time, oversight of these initiatives has moved from the Information Technology (IT) department to the Marketing and City Identity department to the City Strategy department, where it now sits with the creation of the FCU and the Smart City Advisory Committee in late 2016. Each departmental shuffle has changed the character and focus of what the smart city means for Parramatta. An in-depth description of that transition is outside the scope of this article. But it provides useful background for how the actual manifestations of sociotechnical imaginaries like smart urbanism and systems like urban informatics – which are often sold as universalized, idealised models – are, in reality, highly contextual and malleable, changing shape depending on who takes charge of them (Sadowski and Bendor, 2019).
I instead focus on a major initiative, which took place during my ethnography, centred on the simultaneous development of two online data dashboards for the purposes of strategic planning, organisational management and public engagement. One is a ‘city dashboard’ that is available to the public via a website, which displays general information grouped within categories like ‘our growing city’, ‘our community’ and ‘our people’. Parramatta already provided some of these data to the public, but it was spread, in a somewhat disorganised manner, across multiple websites managed by different government departments. The city dashboard aimed, in part, to rectify this issue by formalising the protocols for data management, centralising the data in one convenient location and visualising it for easier consumption. The other is a ‘corporate dashboard’ that is only accessible by city government employees, which provides data about key performance indicators (KPIs). The term ‘corporate’ here refers to the bureaucratic organisation of the city government, which is managed by C-level officers like a CEO and COO that are unelected but are appointed by the city council. The organisation is broken up into departments that oversee different functions. Users of the corporate dashboard must login through an online portal; their level of access to data on KPIs depends on the user’s position in the government.
Both of these dashboards were still in the process of being created during my fieldwork. Thus, rather than retrospectively studying a finished product, I focus on tracing the phases of their development and implementation. The ethnographic emphasis on process tracing is appropriate for studying a technology that is just as much a method as a tool for governance. Compared to the material hardware of control rooms that have been the subject of much research on smart cities and urban informatics (see Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2020), the types of dashboards in Parramatta are more virtual. Yet not necessarily any less consequential for urban governance. This case study illuminates the power and authority possessed by these data-based representations of the city’s operations, as well as the issues that can frustrate and prevent their actualisation.
I will focus on describing three different phases of these dashboards’ development. I first examine the conception of the dashboards, which finds its origins in an old, abandoned dashboard. Second is the creation of the new dashboards, which I explore by tracing the process of scoping the projects, determining their purpose and designing the products. Third is the dashboards’ current state of ‘limbo’ – as of the end of my ethnography in late 2019 – as unfinished and unused technologies. The ethnography of these dashboards shows how attempts to actualise the governing power of urban informatics can run up against many unanticipated and unwanted challenges.
Conception
Development of the dashboards was initiated by a motion in a City Council meeting in February 2018, which outlined a policy recommendation for the city government to ‘undertake creation of an online performance dashboard for Councillors’. The motion then listed over 40 KPIs that the dashboard should include, ‘but not [be] limited to’ (e.g. staff turnover, development applications, energy usage, revenue from fines).
A couple of weeks after the Councillor’s motion, a team of people from FCU and the IT Department convened a major project meeting focused on writing the Request for Quotation for the dashboards. That is, a description of necessary and desired criteria for the dashboards, which vendors respond to with proposals. In the meeting, the team began talking about the City of Parramatta’s existing dashboard. I was surprised to hear that there was already a dashboard. I had already been doing fieldwork with the FCU for 6 months at this point and it was the first I had heard of a data dashboard. Moreover, the impetus for, and discussion about, the new dashboards made it seem like these technologies were being built where nothing had existed before – not as replacements for an obsolete system.
The old corporate dashboard was still online. So the team leader pulled it up on the big screen for everybody to examine. The old dashboard looked like a technology out-of-time, like an artefact from the 1990s, even though it was created in the 2010s. Yet the website stated very clearly that the dashboard was currently up-to-date. I asked if that was really true. ‘The dashboard is fibbing’, said the team leader (Fieldnotes, March 2018). Out of the long list of metrics it showed, I was told that only a few components of the old dashboard, which certain people still actually used, were kept updated. ‘But, by and large, it is dead’ (Fieldnotes, March 2018). The obsolete dashboard was an obdurate relic of old decisions, old technologies and old bureaucracies that still exist in some way and still exert an influence even though they were supposedly dead and buried.
When I asked why the existing corporate dashboard was neglected and left to die, there were three interrelated reasons (the following is from fieldnotes about the project meeting).
First, organisational: A past CEO of Parramatta used the dashboard – specifically, the KPIs it collated and tracked – as a tool of accountability. The CEO would ‘haul up managers’ during leadership meetings, as an FCU project officer put it, and hold them to account for their KPI performance. Managers would be forced to explain why certain KPIs were up, down or stagnant. After a new CEO took over, who had a different leadership style, the corporate dashboard was not used in such a central, routine way.
Second, cultural: People resented being browbeaten with KPIs. Thus, by extension, their ire was directed at the corporate dashboard; it became a despised tool of control. Once the dashboard became a less central part of management practice, there was wilful neglect of its operation. In other words, nobody was motivated to maintain a technology – such as by uploading their data or updating its design – that was used to make one’s work/life harder. It was easier to just ignore it and let it degrade.
Third, technical: When the city government changed their computer system some of the core functions, like automated updates and network connections, ‘broke and were never repaired’. Such problems with compatibility and interoperability are common parts of system changes, but since the dashboard was not a priority – newer staff were unaware it even existed – there was no reason to devote resources to fixing it. Why upgrade a system that most people did not like, did not use, or did not know about?
The ways the old dashboard was used in Parramatta echoes the ‘statistical rituals’, as Didier (2018: 519) called them, wherein the ‘top brass’ in police departments used quantitative management technologies (e.g. CompStat) to enforce expectations and evaluate performance, at times through public humiliation meant to ‘denigrate commanders who had failed’. Similar kinds of ritualistic behaviours took place when the CEO singled out specific managers and made them explain their numbers. While describing the process of wilful neglect, an information and communications technology (ICT) analyst in the project meeting jokingly said, ‘Don’t tell the CEO about the new dashboard!’ (Fieldnotes, March 2018). This betrayed a fear that the project team might be creating a new tool of managerial control, which in turn sparked conversations in the meeting about how to design the new dashboards to promote different values, cultures and goals. In a very real way, the haunting presence of the ‘dead’ dashboard loomed over the attempt to design two different dashboards.
Rather than reviving the dead dashboard – and perhaps as a way to keep its undesirable features buried – the FCU saw an opportunity to start fresh and lead the way in creating new technologies that exceed the bare requirements outlined in the Councillor’s motion. The decision to create two types of dashboards – one for the government and one for the public, even though the council policy only required the former type – already showed larger ambitions at play. With the corporate dashboard, they wanted to design a technology that balanced the needs of different governing bodies and different time horizons in Parramatta: the short-term of political election cycles and managerial changes, and the long-term of organisational operations and strategic planning. With the city dashboard, they wanted a technology that would provide information for, and interface with, different public audiences, including residents, tourists and businesses.
Creation
Deciding to create dashboards, coming up with the parameters for their design, and finding a firm with the right skills is the easy part. Delivering on dashboards that approximates the project brief and general desires is where unexpected troubles arise. I will focus here on examining the processes and politics of developing of the dashboards.
The city dashboard and corporate dashboard share a similar basic purpose: communicate information to its users. More complexly, the dashboards are each put in the position of being multiple representations for multiple audiences of the city’s performance, people and place. Matching these purposes to the product proved to be tricky. In a lengthy quote, the head of FCU, who was also involved in creating Parramatta’s old dashboard – and had a more positive attitude towards it than was expressed by other more junior people in the planning and IT departments – laid out his vision of how the new dashboards should be integrated into city governance: So [the dashboard] requires what I would call an understanding of the interaction between things. My view is we had a corporate dashboard which was quite sophisticated and used extensively. I was waving my arms and getting all ideological the other day with the consultants who have been brought in to do it. I said to them, the dashboard is not about the communication of data, it’s about the communication of the shared responsibility of all those managers in that room – to manage their part of the organisation with a common goal. By putting it up and showing it to a large group, if you don’t do it in a blame environment, again don’t use the information to performance manage those managers, but discuss [. . .] the expectations of the organisation. It’s binding people together around shared objectives. It has very little to do with the data actually – where the data comes from. It’s simply a way of demonstrating units – how units contribute to divisions and how divisions contribute to an organisational average. [. . .] There are some measures that might appear in the [each dashboard] but they’re all – what you’ve got to do when you look at each measure is ask yourself that basic question. What’s it telling me? Why is that useful to the audience, and should I put it in? So you have all these 20 different people with 20 different expectations. The only way you can bring coherence to that sort of madness is to say in this instance it’s actually [multiple] dashboards and they might share some measures. (Interview, April 2018)
This statement reveals a nuanced understanding of the purpose of the dashboards and the many challenges of implementation. The different dashboards offer a way to present a coherent narrative of the city, while also tailoring representations that are targeted at specific audiences. The dashboards thus act as mechanisms for filtering and framing information about the city in a multitude of ways. They do not only present data-based abstractions of the city’s different aspects; they must also show how those things – or, more specifically, data representing those things – relate and interact with each other. The dashboards mediate access to and understanding of the city in various ways by telling different stories to different users for different purposes.
But, as the head of FCU remarked above, the dashboards do ultimately have to construct a shared understanding of how the city exists and the best way to manage it. Otherwise, it would be ‘madness’ and the purpose of the dashboards as tools of governance would break down because there would be no agreement on the model. Interestingly, the ability of dashboards to tie people together into a shared simulation may even be independent of their apparent purpose as a way of collating and communicating data. As the informant said, ‘It has very little to do with the data actually’. In some cases, the content of the abstraction can be superseded by the existence of the artefact itself. In other words, the meaning of the data matters, but what can matter even more is the medium of the dashboard.
Ultimately though, for the dashboards to fulfil their purposes, they do have to be made. Different designs have to be prototyped to find the ones that fit the values and goals envisioned by the city planners and council members. This next phase in the process faced fundamental problems that threatened to undermine the entire project.
Held up as the exemplar of a data-driven technology, the dashboard is a nexus of various different data practices – undertaken by different people with their own expertise and interests – that ultimately need to be coordinated for it to function. These include gathering, mining, sharing, cleaning, modelling, analysing and visualising data. The data itself may not be seen as paramount in the managerial operations of the dashboard, as just discussed, but it is necessary in the technological construction of the dashboard. The core organisational problem of securing and managing data posed a material barrier to the political desire of creating dashboards from the scratch. Without a steady stream of updated and reliable data, the dashboards will, like their predecessor, fall into disrepair and disuse.
By interviewing designers from the data visualisation firm contracted to build the dashboards, it became clear that the biggest impediment to implementation started at the beginning of the pipeline: a lack of available data. The data deficit arose for multiple reasons. Some data were unavailable because it had not yet been collected or was outdated. Some data were inaccessible because its owners within the government would not or could not share the data with other agencies/departments. ‘It's not uncommon for the client to say we've got this data and we want to visualise it and then when it comes to actually getting the data for us, they run into a lot of roadblocks’, said a lead designer at the firm building the dashboard (Interview, July 2018). Moreover, organisations often think they possess ‘good’ data, but what they provide is too ‘dirty’ and thus can’t be used. As the firm’s manager explained: There is an element of, okay, we need to do what the client wants but we also have educated them as well around making sure that the data is in a good format. It’s a good quality. It’s not dirty with different results in different years. Just that’s half the battle; getting data in a good state [. . .] I mean for one example is they say they’ve got data and then they give you a scanned document from 1986 and you’re like, this is not data. This has got coffee stains on it and it was typed, written on a typewriter. It’s not something we can consume and use. (Interview, July 2018)
The informant went on to say that these problems with acquiring data are not unique to Parramatta or to city governments, but are common across other large, hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations. (This firm also works with other corporate and government clients of varying sizes to do data visualisation.) Indeed, this observation resonates with research in public administration that limits to data sharing arise for a range of reasons, such as different procedures between departments or reticence to be judged by performance metrics (Lips et al., 2011; Zhou et al., 2020).
Barriers to creating functional prototypes often stem from a mismatch of desire and capacity. Governments have a sense that they need a dashboard. They have been told by consultants and companies that being data-driven is crucial for doing ‘smart’ governance. They have seen stories in the media about other cities that have achieved reputations for being future-oriented by embracing cutting-edge technology. However, they do not necessarily have the resources, knowledge or ability to readily implement the technology. This exchange between myself and the designer overseeing Parramatta’s dashboards shows how possessing this technology has become a common aspiration (Interview, July 2018):
[Governments] usually come and say, ‘We want a dashboard’. It’s a buzzword.
It seems there’s a sense that governments are like, ‘We have all this data. We don’t know what to do with it, but we think we’re supposed to have a dashboard’.
Exactly. [. . .] It’s about having an open and honest discussion, educating them around what other options there are.
Yes, the dashboard is a buzzword, but it is also an object of desire. What is desired is the power of urban informatics that the dashboard symbolises and the promise of an urban imaginary that the dashboard actualises. The amount of influence that data visualisations can have over those in charge of governing the city became apparent once a mock-up of the dashboard had been created.
An FCU project meeting focused on checking out a prototype of the dashboards before it was presented to the Smart City Advisory Committee became dominated by questions about specific numbers in the dashboard and concerns with how the committee members would react to those numbers. Even though all the numbers were completely fake: the prototype was only meant to present the visual design of the dashboard. The meaning of the data – in this case, the meaninglessness of the data – could not easily be disentangled from the medium of the dashboard. As I wrote in my fieldnotes after this project meeting: There was so much attention needed to reminding committee members that this is fake data, this is not real, this is just what it will look like visually. There was so much concern internally, within the Future City Unit, about ‘We have to make sure that the committee knows this is fake, it’s a simulation’. It was surprising to see how something that should be really easy to understand – this is just a mock-up – was such a central point of contention and potential confusion. (Fieldnotes, June 2018)
As the FCU team rightfully anticipated, when the dashboard prototype with fake numbers was presented to the Smart City Advisory Committee, the members kept trying to treat the data as real and determine what certain numbers meant. Even after it was explained that the visualisation was not based on real data. I had never seen a clearer example of the idea that if the presentation of data looks authoritative and accurate, then that alone can be enough for it to ‘become forceful at a human level’ (McQuillan, 2018: 263). I asked the dashboards’ designers about this reaction to the data visualisation. They had also anticipated this kind of confusion based on seeing other clients react in similar ways. Explaining the dynamic, one designer said, ‘It’s numbers, numbers don't lie – but how you present them can make it lie. [. . .] [That’s why] we would always try and make sure that we used real data’ (Interview, June 2018).
The dashboards are meant to represent reality, but they can influence perception so much that they bend reality. Modelling changes the things being modelled. As social theorist Brian Massumi (1987) wrote, ‘Simulation is a process that produces the real, or, more precisely, more real (a more-than-real) on the basis of the real’ (p. 92). It is not a new insight that epistemological tools have ontological effects. But what’s especially interesting in this case is that even an explicitly ‘fake’ version of the dashboard, populated with arbitrary numbers, still possessed an unexpected amount of authority. This echoes an important point made earlier: the power of the dashboard is not just in the content of the abstraction, but in the form of the artefact.
‘Limbo’
After confronting the various technical, operational and political challenges described above, progress on the dashboards project stalled. A year after the contentious Smart City Advisory Committee that I ended the last section with, I followed up with a senior project officer in the FCU who had been working on the dashboards from conception. I inquired about the current status of the dashboards. ‘They’re in limbo’, the informant told me. The city dashboard (for public communication) and corporate dashboard (for internal governance) ran up against different problems that provided to me far more troublesome than expected. As the project officer explained: The city dashboard we weren’t happy with what we got from the external contractor who created the city dashboard for us, and that was more that we ended up with something that had data on what we could provide, as opposed to telling a particular story about the city. And that was mainly to do with resistance from people who’d say, ‘oh yeah, I can give you that data’, and when you actually ask for it they couldn’t, or they’re like, ‘oh no, it’s buried in [the system]’ – and they’d have to do it manually. So, we were left with a city dashboard that wasn’t [functional]. It looked fantastic but didn’t update and just didn’t really tell a cohesive story about the city. It was just bits and pieces of information. (Interview, July 2019)
For the corporate dashboard, production has been stalled by organisational politics. Recall that the old dashboard was killed, or at least fatally wounded, by a new CEO of Parramatta who had a different managerial style. It appears history repeated itself within the government organisation: We’ve had a change in CEO and our new acting CEO is not interested in the corporate dashboard, so it’s ground to a halt. And it’s like, in my head, I’m thinking, that the corporate dashboard should live beyond any CEO because it is helping all managers see how the business is tracking. What’s that got to do with who’s in charge? It is a tool to be used by all, not just one. [. . .] It is a project that needs to be done and there’s a need; how can it be halted because someone says, ‘I’d rather just have profit and loss statements’. [. . .] Anyway, the corporate dashboard is dead – well, limping along, just in limbo, paused – not dead yet. So yeah, it’s frustrating. (Interview, July 2019)
I ended my ethnography about 5 months after this interview. At that time there was still no movement on rescuing the dashboards from their stalled state. The FCU still hoped they would be finished, still believed in them tools of governance and still included them in strategic roadmaps for Parramatta’s development as a future-oriented smart city. Limbo – that liminal space between being and becoming, materiality and imagination – is a perfect term for the place where so many technologies that we hear so much about and garner so much attention, like urban informatics, actually exist.
Conclusion
These are not the stories of technological development that we usually hear. Stories of failure and frustration, of delays and dead ends, are extraordinarily typical features of the work done in government and technology. But these stories run counter to the narratives of innovation meant to sell smartness (Sadowski and Bendor, 2019) and the frameworks of hype cycles meant to drive development (Van Lente et al., 2013). Even critics must accept some of the responsibility for basing their criticisms on analytical assumptions that the technologies will exist and work the way companies claim they will (Vinsel, 2021). There are countless examples of divergent pathways in the social construction and history of technology (Bijker et al., 1987), but it is not often we have the opportunity to trace – unwittingly – these processes and politics as they are happening. As scholars of technology and media studies, we need to tell more stories about failure and frustration, about stuff just not happening despite the desires, aspirations and best attempts of those in power.
Through a detailed ethnography focused on the bureaucratic processes involved in technological development, and the governance and operational problems that arose, my aim in this article has been to cast ‘the praxis and politics of building urban dashboards’ in a new light (Kitchin et al., 2016). There have been excellent studies explaining how data dashboards have been or can be successfully designed (Kitchin and McArdle, 2016). They have analysed how these systems have been prototyped for purposes of participatory planning (Morozov and Bria, 2018) or implemented as tools for disciplinary governmentality (Bartlett and Tkacz, 2017; Vanolo, 2014).
However, rather than exploring a case study of the implications of data-driven governance in action, for better or worse, I instead detailed the ways in which techno-political systems may not come to pass. My purpose here, therefore, aligns with Wendy H. K. Chun’s injunction to not ‘overestimate the power of control systems’ and the ‘need to insist on the failures and the actual operations of technology’ (Chun, 2006: 9).
As I showed above, the strategic planners in Parramatta’s FCU had sophisticated ideas about what it meant to govern with data. They understood the politics of perception involved in making a city smart. They knew that technologies like dashboards are designed to frame the city in certain ways and tell different stories to different people. The dashboards – not just the data, but the medium through which content is communicated – are meaning-making machines. By collating individual data streams about KPIs and showing how they all interact with each other, the dashboards construct an ontology of the city’s operations. The FCU’s engagement with these more theoretical aspects of data politics was thoughtful. They were careful in how these technologies were presented to policymakers. However, they did not fully account for the multitude of institutional, interpersonal, operational and technical barriers that would have to be overcome in building and implementing these systems.
Things like smart cities and urban informatics are commonly framed as universal systems/standards/logics that can be integrated anywhere (White, 2019). This approach appears to be based on the premise that all one must do to harness the power of disruptive innovation is to simply plug-and-play. Even if emerging technologies are as frictionless and user-friendly as their creators claim, it is likely that most towns and cities will not be able to access or afford the next-generation planning tools produced by multi-national tech corporations like Alphabet or IBM. Having the resources to design and develop their own bespoke versions is likely to be even further out of reach for many of these local governments. By studying struggling technologies like the dashboards in Parramatta, scholars may find that they reveal more about how smart cities and urban informatics are actualised. After all, there are more places like Parramatta in the world than the global cities like New York or London that tend to attract our attention and tend to be the basis for generalisations about everywhere else. Thus, making the experiences of these towns and cities important touchstones for our theories of how techno-political change does or does not happen. Further case studies of how technologies have failed or stalled, like the one offered in this article, would be fruitful sites for future research.
Debunking technological determinism and recognising the contingency in how things develop is a long-standing bugbear for the social studies of technology. And there is no better method for driving these arguments home than chronicling – in real-time, if possible – the construction and implementation of technologies. In this way, we will encounter more stories of failure which can help counteract the overwhelming attention on stories of success. For every high-profile instance of some technological triumph held up as an exemplar of transformation and disruption, we should also seek out the cases that have been swept under the rug and left undocumented for posterity.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
