Data Feminism, as conceptualized by D’Ignazio & Klein (2020), introduces intersectional feminism in data science and invites us to examine power relations and dynamics of oppression that are built into data infrastructures that underpin society today.
With principles like ‘Rethink binaries and hierarchies’, ‘Embrace pluralism’, and more, they provide a framework for interrogating the way we datafy society, and how such processes can reproduce inequalities and exclude the already marginalized. This is a much-needed reflection when it comes to how we govern and plan cities: Think for instance of the ‘redline maps’ of major US cities, that deemed majority black-and-brown communities ‘high risk’ and led to racialized disinvestment which still has an impact almost a century later on housing and financial opportunities. Or think about how many times you have seen a map with dots on it, colored red and blue to represent ‘men’ and ‘women’. Such maps do not only reproduce a binary of gender that does not take seriously how many people identify today. They also propose an isolated view of gendered issues encouraging planners to address social problems as stand-alone issues, without sensitivity to how, for instance, gender intersects with ethnicity or disability in shaping people’s urban experiences.
This makes clear that ‘spatial justice’, outlined by Soja (2013) as the ability to imagine more equitable possibilities for marginalized people’s relationships with the city, is entangled with questions of data justice: How people are rendered visible (or invisible) through data shapes the way we understand urban problems, and consequently what solutions we can imagine for them. In a reality where planning is increasingly data-driven, and where public participation has become foundational to city development from notions of equal ‘rights to the city’ (Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1996), it thus is critical to ask: Who has a voice in public participation? And how can we be more inclusive in the way we datafy cities? From 2020 to 2022, I explored these questions in the Urban Belonging Project with colleagues Anders Koed Madsen, Drude Emilie Ehn, and a collective* of planners and scholars from Copenhagen and Amsterdam. In collaboration with local community organizations**, the project invited people who self-identify as lgbtq+, deaf, physically disabled, mentally vulnerable, houseless, ethnic minority, and/or internationals to document their relationship to the city, using collaborative map-drawing and photovoice.
