This talk explores the use of digital data as a tool of environmental urbanism. Building on work which has shown how digital technologies have profoundly shaped practices of urban governance and control, Dr. Knox questions what happens when existing repositories of environmentally relevant data become newly mobilised as a tool of urban transformation in the face of the climate emergency. The paper takes as its focus a citizen-oriented initiative called Oldham Energy Futures, which has sought to enfold climate and energy data into a social-justice informed attempt at urban transformation. Using data as an invitation for citizens to engage with and participate in infrastructural and environmental dynamics which would otherwise remain out of view, data here reveals itself as a powerful way of re-mapping places and the socio-material relations through which they are sustained. As data enables places to become newly profiled and configured, place is refigured from a bounded context for urban intervention, to a site of ambivalence, history, complexity and (dis)empowerment. This opens up new trajectories for change, whilst also posing difficult questions about the possibilities and limits of participation in urban life.

Source: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtcO2przMiH9AIZrYsZLhfT7WVPgwpbJ_K