by Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara

The first place I occupy in the world is my own body. The fact that I am a female, non-white migrant relying on a research visa to live in Austria is crucial to understanding how I see my research object and field. This perspective has been informing my academic studies and, consequently, my PhD research, in which I have been seeking to understand the interactions between bodies, data, and urban policies. Thus, my academic reflections, inevitably, are influenced by my Latin American female body, which is not necessarily welcomed in certain spaces in and outside Europe. Of course, it is not about my own body only.
This is because I must engage with other experiences and bodies to understand the complexities of living in the cities. The experiences of favelas’ inhabitants, members of the Palestinian diaspora or delivery app workers, for instance, will carry with themselves specificities in terms of their access to the urban environments they inhabit and the possibilities of living there as they wish. That said, I want to be transparent about whose existences I am concerned about when it comes to the increasing use of data to define urban policies: I am worried about those who are undocumented, disabled, trans, nonbinary, racialized, female, feminized, queer; the ones seen as ‘the others’ or ‘less human’ according to Western hegemonic thinking; the ones even unseen; the bodies that carry out low- and unpaid work; the ones that are often labeled by police forces as suspects of criminal offenses; those who are repressed when taking to the streets for their agendas, those that are deemed as ‘illegal’ or not welcome by state or conservative forces.
The deployment of big data in urban contexts is surrounded by several plans and goals: the improvement of urban safety, promotion faster automobile traffic, saving of energy consumption in public lighting — to mention only a few. Bearing in mind the scenario fostered by data-driven urbanism (Kitchin, 2017), I argue that body-territory helps me to challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ big data promises. ‘Body-territory’ claims that “it is impossible to cut apart and isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and landscape” (Gago, 2020). In this sense, I see body-territory as essential to problematize and challenge official speeches data-driven solutions as silver bullets to solving city issuesThe examples introducing this paragraph, for instance, raise some immediate questions, such as: Which bodies feel safer when a city’s common spaces are surveilled and monitored by public security forces? Who — and whose interests — benefit most from the traffic lights installed to make individual car drivers’ lives easier? Does automated public lighting meet the needs of female, feminized or queer bodies moving through the city when it is dark?
The Right to the City is a statement and call within urban debates. Introduced by Lefebvre in 1968 and translated into English in 1996 (Lefebvre, 1996), it claims that people have the right to interfere in urban life, making and remaking the city, participating and appropriating it according to collective needs (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008). Since hegemonic discourses on big data often present it as an objective, evidence-based resource to overcome “urban problems,” I want to raise awareness about how those narratives may picture and focus on a single standardized idea of ‘urban citizen.’ Citizens that inhabit the datafied city are not homogeneous: their existences in urban space are embodied and territorialized, which should be taken into consideration when big data becomes a central player in urban planning.
Since the body-territory promotes a de-liberalization of the notion of the body as individual property, specifying an “epistemological continuity [,] of the body as territory” (Gago, 2020), I believe that this Latin American concept can also be useful to analyze European cities. This is also because body-territory challenges “the masculine naturalized as the universal” since it is a concept that “can be postulated as an image that is antagonistic to the abstract character required by the individual property owner of (neo) liberal modernity,” as described by Gago (2020). It reminds us that all bodies should be considered, and that they cannot be seen as abstract since they are situated and territorialized. Thus, when applied to European cities, the concept of the body-territory can be used to challenge some big data narratives that ignore the fact that experiences in urban spaces are both embodied and territorialized, mainly because bodies and territories are intertwined.
Therefore, the notion fosters the idea that understanding the complexities of urban life requires an analysis that goes beyond looking at the individual only. My point here is to argue that overcoming (neo) liberal views of what an ‘individual’ can be, means also overcoming an abstract and individualistic idea about the ‘urban citizen’, who is constructed in institutional narratives and is essential when thinking about ‘digital’, ‘smart’, and ‘datafied’ cities. Body-territory addresses some of my concerns since the concept helps me to elaborate on the idea that data-driven urban policies may potentially ignore some embodied certain urban experiences if urban data management reproduces claims — or illusions — for a so-called ‘objectivity.’ As for the latter, if a city police is built over a single idea of ‘city inhabitant,’ it may, for instance, base itself solely on data traffic informing motorized vehicles flows towards downtown instead of taking into consideration female pedestrians that move throughout their neighborhoods to carry out care work.
Body-territory has been built by feminist, indigenous, peasant, and other social movements throughout Abya Yala. Gago states that the body-territory expands the way of seeing (2020), which, in dialogue with Haraway’s perspective on situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), leads me towards an approach that considers the ones that are “not allowed not to have a body” (Haraway, 1988, p. 575), fostering my own epistemological turn towards ‘smart cities’ or ‘urban data platforms’. If bodies carry with themselves the territories they inhabit,[1]2 ‘body-territory’ helps to think about a complex scenario that seems to not be easily represented in data-driven decisions.
This said, body-territory is a powerful tool to expand debates around, for instance, what authors have been referring to as “the right to the digital city”, “the right to the smart city”, and “the right to the datafied city” (Bria & Morozov, 2018; Cardullo et al., 2019). This is a connection that becomes even more evident for me when I recall Harvey’s (2020, p. 23) words stating that the right to the city goes beyond a right of individual access to the city resources since it “depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization”.
There is a long path to walk, of course, which includes looking at what has been done. It is important to recall, for instance, that the Data Commons Manifesto states that “Data is not neutral or unbiased, so it must bear a critical, political and ethical analysis” (Bass & Old, 2020, p. 59). What I desire is questioning liberal notions that may have been preventing us from seeing beyond data promises.
*Abya Yala ou Abiayala is the term in Kuna language given to the continent officially named as America. Over time, the term Abya Yala has been deployed by indigenous movements to refer to this territory, replacing its eurocentric name.
[1] See the card “Bodies Territories” at the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, available at https://www.transfeministech.codingrights.org/
Author Biography
Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara is currently a researcher at the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a PhD candidate at the STS department of the University of Vienna. She has been connecting feminist science and critical data studies to other feminist scholarship – primarily historical materialist and Latin American – to elaborate on the interaction between body-territories, big data, and welfare.
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References
Bass, T. & Old, R. (2020). Common Knowledge: Citizen-led Data Governance for Better Cities. Decode. European Union. https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/common-knowledge-citizen-led-data-governance-better-cities/
Bria, F. & Morozov, E. (2018). Rethinking the Smart City. Democratizing Urban Technology. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office. https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neu-denken
Cardullo, P., Di Feliciantonio, C. & Kitchin, R. (Eds.) (2019). The Right to the Smart City. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Cruz-Hernández, D. T. (2016). Una Mirada Muy Otra a los Territorios-cuerpos Femeninos. Solar, 12(1), 35-46.
Gago, V. (2020). Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Verso.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066
Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
Kitchin, R. (2017). Data-driven Urbanism. In Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T.P., & McArdle, G. (Eds.). Data and the City (p. 44-56), Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315407388
Lefebvre, H. (1996). The Right to the City. In H. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (1st ed., pp. 61–181). Blackwell.