About the Workshop

Is the digital really ubiquitous to the urban, and is the language of the digital overwhelmingly reshaping debates about contemporary cities? With sensors, dashboards, data platforms, and command and control rooms, the urban is now known through data, algorithms, modeling, and a combination of visual and media channels. This new urban knowledge requires specialist techniques of analysis and visualization, one that approaches the urban as a ‘system science,” creating an urgent need at a pedagogic level to consider how the science of data can be combined with the science of learning, one that is not just about learning to code but to think in terms of critical data analytical skills. Our proposed workshop takes up this challenge by focussing on new learning pathways that need to be charted as part of a critical pedagogy of the digital urban. Taking up the question of how this will transform our education practices and process, this workshop, with an empirical focus on Hyderabad, engages with the methodological excursions needed to empirically bring data science in resonance with the reality of our social worlds. This workshop will be a ‘testbed’ to explore how we can combine systems theory and the science of cities with critical urban studies debates with a focus on two specific aspects of how data is construed as a new urban utility: 1. Engaging with the ‘real-time analytic’ as a prominent feature of data capture and 2. How can we bring in ‘social data’ to open up the rationalities of the urban system science that is driven largely by the interest of big data? The workshop will conduct ‘data analytic’ exercises in groups, encouraging you to explore Hyderabad through a suite of dynamic, interactive and user-friendly visualization/mapping while simultaneously reflecting on where data is collected from, how is it ‘calculated’, and ‘communicated'.

Register here: https://la.iith.ac.in/