Engaged dialogue through data: For methodological pluralism in critical urban studies

Abstract

This commentary builds on Loretta Lees’ concept of engaged dialogue in critical urban studies to argue for more engaged dialogue through data. This type of dialogue would entail building critical theory from a more diverse and nuanced base of information, using mixed or plural methodologies. It could mean communicating with, about and through data with public-facing tools that incorporate participatory elements through the user interface. It would also require ongoing critical interpretation of the politics and political economy of urban data.

Loretta Lees offers a valuable and timely intervention into critical urban studies, showing the implications of scholarship based on the concept of engaged dialogue. In this model of urban research, ‘listening is the key’ (Lees, 2). And that listening must extend beyond our professional networks of other left-leaning ‘intelligentsia’ – ‘academics (but also journalists, writers, policy makers, and others) who have a privileged position and a platform on which to discuss their critiques of society, politics, and culture’ (3). The unfortunate truth is that too much critical urban research is written solely for consumption by other critical urban researchers – emblematic of the intellectual and ideological insularity that Davidson (2023) terms ‘dialogue within’ or Perry (2022) calls ‘distanced scholarly critique’. The result can be critique simply for the sake of criticism: studies that cite the celebrity critical theorist du jour and make grand claims about ‘big P’ politics, but which the non-intelligentsia may dismiss as ‘Scooby-Doo Marxist’ analysis (Attoh, 2022) – revealing after much fanfare, but to no surprise, that yes the villain was indeed capitalism all along. There are many possible solutions to this problem in the spirit of Lees’ framework for engaged dialogue. But this is only a brief commentary, and so I will highlight one:

Critical urban scholars should consider more engaged dialogue through data. By data I mean categorised and standardised records, which can subsequently be translated into useful information or integrated into broader systems of knowledge (Zins, 2007). Data has plural authorship from a diverse range of contributors across time and space – including public authorship through crowdsourcing and non-human authorship by automated systems. It can be organised into many different information structures, and does not necessarily conform to methodological binaries like quantitative/qualitative. And, of course, the supposedly authoritative veneer of data is just that: a layer of rhetoric that masks the reality that data is both comprehensive and incomplete, authoritative and messy, diverse and exclusionary. These properties suggest a need for methodological pluralism. The structures of data are so eclectic that no one methodological approach is typically sufficient for interpretation. Instead, a data-oriented critical urban studies would likely mean experimenting with mixed or hybrid methods, in the long tradition of urbanists calling for methodological pluralism through ‘hybrid geographies’ (Kwan, 2004), ‘strategic positivism’ (Wyly, 2009), or ‘urban science’ (Derudder and van Meeteren, 2019).

Equally important is an ongoing dialogue between data and critical theory. Data does not, by itself, tell us anything useful about cities. To make that step requires engagement with critical urban theory, for example to understand the political economy of big data (Prince, 2020); the social mediation between bodies, cities and code (Broussard, 2023; Leszczynski, 2016); the fragmented, uneven and incomplete nature of data governance (Kitchin and Moore-Cherry, 2021); and the ways in which data platforms (and their corporate owners) do not just document cities but actively participate in urban politics (Wells et al., 2023). In this sense, urban data analysis needs to run in tandem with analysis of what Söderström and Datta (2023: 3) term ‘urban data politics’ – ‘how we see the city and its citizens through a particular set of data, how the state uses data to visualize and govern its citizens and territory and how this data is then used by civil society and non-state actors for making the state and private actors accountable’.

Engaged dialogue through data would have both analytical and communicative elements. The analytical element involves listening to data, even when – especially when – the evidence contradicts our preferred theories. There are especially promising opportunities to ask ‘bigger’ questions through comparative and longitudinal research, using the geographically and temporally fine-grained records available in big, crowdsourced and real-time urban data. But the point here is not simply to have more data – increasing the quantity of information does not, on its own, lead us to qualitatively different knowledge about cities. The point is to leverage data to ‘listen’ in new ways in the spirit of what Lees describes – in this case listening to records of people, places and times that would otherwise be forgotten, and to the trends and patterns that only emerge by aggregating information at broader scales.

The rationale for more data analysis in critical urban studies is simply that it is increasingly possible to do. We inhabit a vastly different information landscape than that of even a decade earlier, with far more data available, and what is now available tends to be more nuanced, quality controlled, spatially-referenced and regularly-updated. Likewise, user friendly and open source (or low cost) tools have significantly lowered the technical barriers to entry. It is increasingly possible for critical scholars to analyse data to argue for social and environmental justice, as seen in data activist collectives such as Data for Progress or InsideAirBNB, data justice labs established at many universities, data journalism desks in many media organisations, or academic subfields like critical data studies, critical GIS, digital humanities, or QuantCrit methodologies. One recent critical urban studies example is housing research that uses evictions databases and mixed-methods mapping to analyse and organise against displacement in the United States. That includes scholar-activist collaborations like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (Maharawal and McElroy, 2018) and Princeton Eviction Lab (Gromis et al., 2022), and published research that uses evictions data to demonstrate, for example, that Black tenants are more likely to be evicted by absentee investor landlords (Raymond et al., 2021) or that landlords use serial evictions filings to harass and discipline tenants without actually intending to evict them (Immergluck et al., 2020).

A second element of engaged dialogue through data is communicative. This involves listening to data users, and presenting data in formats that are accessible for a more diverse audience. Framed this way, data visualisation and data storytelling can be mediums through which to engage in dialogue with others, especially through interactive, public-facing web tools that incorporate participatory elements through the user interface design. Engaged data dialogue is not a one-way conversation – this is not just about using web tools to disseminate our findings, though of course it is important to share data as publicly as possible. Engaged dialogue would mean using data tools as a method to facilitate conversation with our research stakeholders, especially residents and organisations who want to tell data stories about their communities.

The rationale is that of we wish to have engaged dialogue beyond the intelligentsia, we need to use the mediums that the public has increasingly come to expect from institutions perceived as authoritative. That often looks like the web-based data products one finds on the websites of data journalism outlets, government agencies, or non-profit organisations – some sort of interactive visualisation tool (maps, dashboards, etc.) with intentional user experience design, participatory and interactive components and multi-media data storytelling. One recent critical urban studies example is research on the urban data dashboard. Broadly speaking, a dashboard is a collection of interactive charts, maps and benchmark indicators that change based on real-time data feeds and each individual user's custom queries; a web-based descendant of an analog control panel with a multitude of gauges displaying real-time metrics (Mattern, 2017). Dashboards are widely used by city governments for managing municipal operations, monitoring infrastructure systems, visualising what-if planning scenarios and communicating data to the public. Critical urban scholars have deconstructed dashboards as a medium that reflect urban political power and its limits (Sadowski, 2024), and have explored alternative forms of dashboard design to, for example, incorporate participation (Lock et al., 2020), improve communication of real-time data (Stehle and Kitchin, 2020) or simplify and visualise urban complexity (Vertovec et al., 2022).

In sum, critical urban scholars should pursue engaged dialogue through data both because we can and because we must. Given the growing accessibility of data tools, expectations are also evolving around the question of what counts as a minimum level of evidence for persuasive research. If a student with introductory technical training can synthesize big data APIs into an ArcGIS story map or Tableau data dashboard, then the standard of evidence for scholarship by their professors needs to be higher than current empirical practices in critical urban studies – often a narrowly scoped case study or a curated collection of theory-relevant anecdotes. I do not say this to critique past forms of critical urban scholarship. Those empirical practices have produced insightful and important research. And I would be the first to admit that plenty of my work has used those same practices.

Rather, I pose this as an opportunity for expanding the scope and impact of critical urban research in the future. Data is increasingly available. Data tools are more accessible than they have ever been. What might we accomplish if we ask more ambitious questions, the kinds of questions that can only be answered through comparative and longitudinal data? Could we diversify our audience if we communicated with participatory technologies, interactive tools and user-centered design? Would our arguments be more persuasive if we made them deductively, building critical theory based on data rather than selecting data to fit our preferred theories?