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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the debate article titled Constructing a universal logic of urban control? International standards for city data, management and interoperability from 2018 by Seth Schindler and Simon Marvin, published in the City – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I though it would be interesting to include how standards approach data and urban management from a generalisation point of view. The article investigates 3 ISO standards promising to standardise cities as data, quality management and simplified decision-making. Furthermore, this article will be the basis of the next research episode which will debate the conclusions of this article.

The article starts with establishing what is the city: it is increasingly approached as a system that can be managed and transformed through scientific methods of data, analysis and automated responses. Cities are sets of actions, interactions and transactions, and even the constituents can be rearranged to interact and transact in new ways. The science of cities, the so-called smart city assimilates streams of real-time data informing automated interventions but smart cities are cautioned to create docile urban subjects and uneven development. Additionally, the data varies widely in availability, quality, and format from place to place, which hinders the ongoing attempts to internationalise smart city technologies. Therefore, there are expansinve efforts to standardise city data, management processes and interoperability internationally, led by the Interational Organisation for Standardisation, also known as ISO.

The ISO has been working to create international standards which ensures compatibility and interoperability among different systems. This can be crucial for global systems stretching across borders, like aviation and shipping. Many standards have reached far beyond their intended outcomes. This far-reaching nature puts the standards in front of the scientists to study the intended and unintended consequences. Schindler and Marvin set out to investigate 3 ISO standards: ISO37120:2014 sustainable development of communities – indicators for city services and quality of life; ISO37101:2016 sustainable development in communities – management system for sustainable development – requirements with guidance for use; and ISO30182:2017 smart city concept model – guidance for establishing a model for data interoperability (I will not use the numbers but the titles to make everyone’s life easier).

So these standards promise to standardise the representation of cities as data, quality management processes and simplified decision-making. They received media attention and public scrutiny and have far-reaching consequences. They encourage the adoption of the smart city concept, but it goes beyond to incorporate sustainabilty, resilience and sociality. Schindler and Marvin demonstrated how the standards try to be universally applicable and seek to know, measure, compare, manage and correct cities globally. This approach employs computational logic which requires simplification in the representation of the city’s complexity.

Schindler and Marvin argued that these attempts to standardise cities result in an imaginary urban space where the real citizen behaviour can be acknowledged as abnormal identified on global measures, which must be corrected with a universal logic. Additionally, the standards are missing performance indicators, so sustainability and resilience remain mainly unclear. Thus, the standards seem to reinforce a business-as-usual approach with a top-down and non-transparent management structure with the objective to employ computational solutions to reconfigure cityscapes, according to Schindler and Marvin.

The cities are represented as big data in the first standard for indicators for city services and quality of life. This standard offers an approach to sustainable development and resilience for communities, and a standardised set of indicators to help cities be consistent and comparable. The cities are described with 17 indicators as a basis for comparison, made up of core and supporting indicators. The 17 indicators are for the following areas: economy, education, energy, environment, finance, fire and emergency response, governance, health, recreation, safety, shelter, solid waste, telecommication and innovation, transportation, urban planning, and waste-water, water and sanitation. This standard provides a framework for representing cities as big data for helping to identify deficiencies and generic solutions.

This first sustainable development and communities standard employs a holistic approach: to reach sustainability, the whole city needs to be taken into consideration. Sustainability means planning for future needs must take into consideration current use and efficiency of resources in order to better plan for tomorrow, but the cities are not required to meet any benchmarks to be certified. Therefore, a community without any real effort can obtain a certification as a sustainable community so long as authorities annually report data on the core indicators. This standard understands cities as systems, and aspires to present them as big data. To receive the certification, cities must annually report data on the core indicators, but there are no standardised methods for data collection, the reporting agency is responsible for the methods, therefore, those can vary widely. This, in return, jeoperdaises the standard’s goal to compare cities on the same basis. Finally, certification for this standard opens up funding possibilities by only reporting data on the core indicators.

The second standard is for management system for sustainable development tries to establish a universal management system for sustainable cities. This standard establishes management framework for top managers of organisations that supposedly represent communities to plan and execute sustainable development policies. However, in most instances, the top management and organisation is imposed on a community rather than emerge from within. Therefore, the objectives are like to reflect a top-down imperative to make a city smart, entrepreneurial, sustainable, competitive and investor-friendly rather than to respond citizens’ needs for quality of life, environment, infrastructure and service improvements. Finally, the certification is more for the management processes than the particular objective targets.

The third standard tries to establish a universal interoperable city model with smart city concept model specially for decision-makers. This standard’s overall aim is to address the lack of interoperability in existing urban data which hinders to realise real potentials. Although it is aimed for decision-makers, it tries to facilitate discussion between the decision-makers and engineers, programmers, and IT specialists. Additionally, it aims to create a data ecosystem comprised of data from many different sources to support the integration and reuse of data to improve services, develop new products and gain insight into the quality of life of a city’s citizens. This standard’s use of standardised data and simplified relationships are utilised to produce operational, critical, analytical and strategic insights

This third standard assumes that interoperability is a critical feature of a well-functioning city but it lacks an analysis of what is currently disconnected and what needs to be connected and why. Additionally, quantitative data and managerial techniques are prioritised over qualitative, intuitive, embodied and informal ways of knowing and acting on the city. This quantitative approach is good for optimisation and logicstical management of populations and resources, and seeks to ensure a form of simplified and transactional urban decision-making. Finally, it seeks to affect the transformation of cities, but it is unclear what is the final state it wants to impose on cities. According to Schindler and Marvin, it is highly unlikely that rendering cities as data ecosystems and enabling automated interventions ahs the potential to address wicked urban problems such as social injustice and endemic socio-spatial segregation.

In conclusion, the city is re-envisioned as a rationally managed, stable and digitally enabled corporate entity with clear attempts to help the financial industry identifying investment opportunities. There is an ongoing attempt to standardise the urban epistemology and the management of cities with automated responses to rearrange the constituents of cities. Smart cities is the most visible manifestation of this regime and it is imperative not to lose sight of the work behind the scenes.

In Schindler and Marvin’s opinion, and I will not argue with them on the most important things, there are three distinctive findings:

1. There are systemic processes to constitute a universal logic of urban control and transformation informed by calculative logic, and these are meant to be universal techniques, metrics, processes, and management systems.
2. These standards amount to a regime of urban controls reconfiguring existing priorities, even rearrange the existing items and constitutents to match the presupposition and assumptions.
3. These ways of knowing the city are less concerned with transformation and normative debates about the creation of more just or greener cities, rather forms of simplification, datafication, standardised management, comparisons and metrics to optimise, stabilise and ensure the continuity of existing city systems.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions, the first three from Schindler and Marvin, and the following from me:

1. To what extent do these standards actively introduce new priorities and techniques?
2. What do these standards make visible, obscure and to what ends with their simplifications and what are the unintended consequences of such a narrow vision?
3. What alternative ways of knowing the urban context can deal with uncertainty and incorporate informatliy, qualitative knowledge and expertise and how can these alternative approaches counter the simplification of the standards for a more human-centred approaches to urban transformation?
4. What are the real aims of the standards? Should they establish such overarching and really hard to grasp concepts, seeing the problems with them? To what extent help or hinder standards the urban transformation?

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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