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.
Over three months, 33 participants that identify with one or more of these identities went on 100+ walks in the city, took 1400+ photos, drew 200+ maps, and enriched them in workshops. The result is a unique catalog of photos, maps, and data visualizations that tells individual and collective stories about belonging in Copenhagen, which were exhibited to the public in 2022 at Urban 13 and Copenhagen Architecture Festival. Through this process, we learned four valuable lessons about how to operationalize a data feminist ethos when studying urban problems, and why it matters.
Lesson #1: Elevate marginalized voices through visual ethnography
The data feminist principle to ‘embrace pluralism’ insists that nuanced knowledge comes from synthesizing multiple perspectives, with priority to local, marginalized, and experiential ways of knowing. Yet, conventional citizen engagement struggles with attracting a diverse group of citizens, and typically favors those at the top of the social hierarchy, while marginalized citizens typically are silent, or do not feel invited to begin with. And by prioritizing statistical ‘representativity’, minorities are, moreover, often represented in citizen assemblies by just one or two people (if at all), further tokenizing them. The process feels exclusive. This is especially due to the fact that formats like citizen assemblies and citizen proposals put particular demands on participant’s written and oral capabilities to make themselves heard in a democratic forum. In a data feminist ethos, however, we can challenge this by imagining alternative forms of engagement via visual methods. Exploring this in the UB project, we asked participants to document their relationship to the city by drawing maps with digital ‘participatory GIS’ tools. We also developed a photovoice app, the UB App, that participants used to capture photos of the city. Rethinking participation like this, we observed several advantages of the visual approach:
- Makes participation accessible to more people by replacing written and oral participation, as expressed by a participant from the deaf community: “The Urban Belonging project gives us a chance to influence a city that is also good for us. The visual approach meant that we suddenly had a lot to ‘say’. That we too have a voice”.
- Visual participation creates high engagement from participants, who voiced renewed excitement and curiosity about engaging with their city in a visual way.
- Produces situated knowledge because it invites people to go into the streets of the city to document it, producing accounts of the city from particular view points. Using photo data helps anchor debates about urban issues in specific urban contexts.
- Can help planners, designers, and architects see the city through the eyes of citizens. Visuals like photos and video are especially powerful ways to communicate lived experience, just as evidenced in Copenhagen Architecture Festival’s Film Mosaic project.
- Visual materials are easily translated into exhibitions, making it possible to put community voices in dialogue with a wider public, as exemplified by the UB exhibition in 2022, which launched the exhibit in conjunction with a talk series on inclusive cities.
Lesson #2: Craft an intersectional understanding of the city
Engaging a pluralism of voices is the first step. But doing so does not lead to a diversified understanding of the city, as long as our techniques for representing identities remain binary and we try to isolate the problems of, for instance, designing a disability-friendly and LGBT+ inclusive city. This is expressed by one of the UB participants, the late Henrik Silvius, who says:
Being a disabled and queer person means there is no place for me in the city. When I try to go to gay bars, I cannot enter. And if I go to places with good accessibility, I don’t feel at home as a gay man. I don’t belong anywhere.
It is clear that we need new data languages for grasping intersectionality; a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how systems of oppression based on gender, sexual identity, gender identity, physical abilities, class, ethnicity, or other forms of marginalization intertwine to shape experience.
In the UB project we experimented with various ways of drawing intersectional portraits of people. One exploration involved asking participants to draw a shape on a map that indicates what 'Copenhagen' is to them. We then added a color to indicate if a person is marginalized in one or more ways, according to how they self-identify. More colors mean that a person holds multiple marginalized identities at once, creating gradients that flow together. The result is seen below.
The shapes reveal that for some the city boundaries spread wider, while for others, their perception of ‘Copenhagen' is a lot smaller. This may not only reflect different attachments to the city, but also differences in access. The gradients, moreover, use bright colors to celebrate diversity and difference, inspired by Crenshaw who writes that “(…) the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction” (1991, p. 1242). Whatever strategy taken, the provocation here is simple: planners need to cultivate an intersectional gaze on the city to design cities that work for all.
Lesson #3: Reframe participant ownership
When people submit their time to engagement processes, they are typically only invited to collect data, which can make participation feel extractive. Public engagement has also been shown to lead to ‘cherry picking’, in which data is used to serve political agendas that are already set, but are invisible to the participants. This relates to what has been termed ‘the problem with solutions’, characterized by the trend to plan cities through the prism of known solutions, letting solutions define the problem. In an interview we did with the City Architect of Copenhagen, Camilla van Deurs, she speaks to this:
We don’t do a good enough job with citizen engagement. One problem is that it often happens so late in a planning process that most decisions are already made.
Most engagement projects, in other words, do not take people’s potentials for reframing urban problems seriously. Among citizens, this shows up as a declining willingness to participate. In Holland, this has even led to ‘participation strikes’. Learning from data feminism, we need to move towards ‘non-solutionist’ planning that gives people ownership and allows them to help (re)frame a problem before we proceed to solve it.
Inspired by this, the UB Project took different steps to rethink community involvement:
- We partnered with local organizations that represent marginalized groups to build on existing trust and relationships with these communities.
- Community organizations were invited in early to help shape the process through interviews, and also gave input to design of the app and workshops etc.
- Community members collected and interpreted data, working together in groups. We also asked participants to discuss what ‘belonging’ means, rather than provide a definition.
- When launching the UB exhibition, participants took the stage with us as panelists.
The result was not only more qualified insights, but also that participants felt pride and ownership over the output. Many even expressed that the process itself had improved their sense of community and belonging in the city.
Lesson #4: Stop talking about blind spots. Start illuminating them.
In outlining ‘Design Justice’, Costanza-Chock writes: “Professional design jobs in nearly all fields are disproportionately allocated to people who occupy highly privileged locations within the matrix of domination” (p. 73). In light of this, it is often recognized that designers have blind spots when it comes to the needs of more diverse groups. Yet, such blind spots continue to be theoretical. Thinking through data feminism, planners could upset this attitude and start mapping blind spots. As partners in the UB Project, Gehl Architects agreed to fill out the same spatial questionnaire that participants had done, creating an opportunity for comparing how the city is experienced by the two groups. The planners for instance on average rank Copenhagen higher than the invited communities (3,4 against 3,0) when asked how inclusive they think the city is for all people on a scale of 1 to 5, indicating a different relationship to the city. To unpack this on a spatial level, we compared frequently visited areas drawn by planners (blue) and participants (dark blue) as seen below. The scratched map displays areas visited by participants, where the planners do not frequently visit.
Such mapping exercises can reveal blind spots in the relationship that professional planners have to the city and warrant further exploration and site-visits. Being creative about our data practices can hereby help illuminate power dynamics and asymmetries. As D’Ignzaio & Klein (2020) write:
Data is a double-edged sword. In a very real sense, data have been used as a weapon by those in power to consolidate their control – over places and things, as well as people. (…) Data are part of the problem, to be sure. But they are also part of the solution. (p. 14-17).
Data Feminism, in short, does not only offer planners, designers, and policy makers a much-needed framework for thinking critically about how we datafy cities. It also encourages us to invent data practices that make alternative ‘modes of knowing’ possible and look at urban issues in new ways.
Follow the project on Instagram, and reach out to the author on sofie-t@gehlpeople.com for questions about how you can use data-driven approaches to link spatial justice with data justice.
*Research partners: Gehl Architects, Techno-Anthropology Lab and Service Design Lab from Aalborg University, Center for Digital Welfare at IT University Copenhagen as well as Visual Methodologies Collective in Amsterdam.
**Community partners: LGBT+ Denmark, Danish Handicap Association, Mino Denmark, Danish Deaf Association, SIND Denmark, Hugs & Food.
Fact box
The Film Mosaic: Leave No One Behind film competition open call looks for films addressing inclusive architectural or design solutions found in the built, planned and/or grown environment
- max 3 min. long
- deadline: 1st of March 2023
- prize: 1st: 2500€; 2nd 1500€; 3rd: 1000€
Films are received on a daily basis and published ongoingly on the Film Mosaic platform.
With the aim of facilitating the production of short films, since Summer 2021 Copenhagen Architecture Festival has been conducting film & architecture workshops with a focus on inclusivity and filmmaking in close collaboration with local partner institutions around the world.
References
- Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Framework for Design Theory and Practice (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 3189696). Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3189696
- Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
- D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data Feminism. The MIT Press.
- Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. The City Reader, 1(6), 23–40.
- Holmes, R. (2020). The Problem with Solutions. Places Journal. https://doi.org/10.22269/200714
- Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on Cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Eds.). Blackwell Publishers. https://content.ub.hu-berlin.de/monographs/toc/ethnologie/BV025930364.pdf
- Soja, E. W. (2013). Seeking Spatial Justice. U of Minnesota Press.
