Global urban policy and the geopolitics of urban data

Abstract

Cities have gained prominence in global sustainability discourses. The United Nations ‘2030 Agenda’ highlights in at least four key agreements the need to engage local stakeholders as key partners for the implementation of global policy objectives. As a result, the rise of a ‘cities agenda’ has led not only to an increased role for cities in global politics but also to a reshaping of the knowledge-base underpinning international agreements and their implementation. This paper argues that the contemporary willingness to move beyond the “territorial trap” of modern geopolitics, by emphasizing cities’ agency in global affairs and by calling for the production of globally comparable urban data, induces a process of reframing and rescaling existing understandings of the global. In that sense, the question of urban knowledge production – especially that of urban data creation – is an essentially geopolitical one. However, insights from critical geopolitics have been rarely used in current debates on global urban policy and urban data politics. This work, we posit, can inform current academic and policy discussions, as it invites us to explore three interrelated questions: how is the urban being written into contemporary global politics? What type of ‘urban’ issues are made salient/invisible in that process? Which geopolitical actors are currently dominating the production of urban knowledge globally? This paper offers to start addressing those themes, through the study of 28 global urban databases, digging into the technical as well as human components of those. In doing so, we offer a preliminary assessment of techno-political apparatus that underpins the construction of a global ‘urban gaze’ which in turn shapes - as much as it is maintained by - global urban policy frameworks and hegemonic forms of knowledge production.

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