INTRODUCTION: DATA JUSTICE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
Morgan E. Currie, Jeremy Knox, Callum McGregor · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2022
This chapter argues that the concept of data justice can inform and enrich practices motivated by the Right to the City (RTTC).RTTC is, at heart, a radical concept of citizenship that calls for the collective design of urban life, of 'affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport.The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want' (Merrifield 2017).The comparatively nascent concept of data justice seeks to understand how datafication of everyday life, predominantly but not solely in urban contexts, compounds existing social injustices and creates new ones.While the lens of data justice helps illustrate how and why an analysis of datafication is today integral to the RTTC, the RTTC cautions against the political co-option of data justice into technocratic and privatised 'data for good' initiatives.Emerging work on data justice discourages the data fetishism tainting public, commercial and academic discourse on emerging data industries.By 'fetishism' we mean the habit of endowing objects and entities with an almost magical, or at least intrinsic, power to shape the world around us (Harvey 2003).Data fetishism is a form of post-politics par excellence that casts aside theory and ideology and reduces various social problems to systems engineering conundrums solvable with sufficient data and processing capacity (Han 2017; Eubanks 2018).Instead, data justice scholarship and activism in all its diversity understand datafication as a political phenomenon related to more established structural dynamics of social injustice, whether distributive (economic), recognitive (cultural) or representational (political) (Fraser 2005).