Qualitative Methods in the Emerging Smart City: Big Data Versus Deep Data

Troy Simpson, The Graduate Center, CUNY

“Smart cities” initiatives are typically characterized in popular media as city-managed technological initiatives intended to increase efficiency, quality of life, and sustainability goals in urban environments. But insofar as they can present opportunities for such advancements, their deployment also signifies potentially drastic changes in other urban forms and processes, particularly in the context of users in public spaces. The very technologies deployed in smart cities public space projects offer innovative new pathways for studying how users relate to such spaces. However, ethnographic field methods, particularly informed by the disciplinary framework of environmental psychology, provide rich opportunities for interrogating individual processes of meaning making in this emerging typology of public space, as well as a rich exploration of this new chapter in the struggle among competing ideological visions of the nature of public spaces. The context of this inquiry is the “Public Square and Gardens,” a newly designed and soon-to-open publicly accessible space associated with the 28-acre the Hudson Yards real estate development on the west side of Manhattan, New York City. The park is framed by developers as a smart park and the vanguard of smart cities technologies. Methods of studying the park and its constituencies are drawn from the Toolkit for the Ethnographic Study of Space.