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Short abstract:

In my conribution I seek to listen to the different signals that are generated as part of urban traffic and administrative information infrastructures and how the resulting data assemble and voice politics in different forms.

Long abstract:

Urban streets are filled with noise: roaring engines, chatting neighbours, bicycle bells, all voicing demands for their space in public place. Unheard and mostly unnoticed by road users, other signals fill the urban public space: inductors embedded in the asphalt of the road generate and transmit signals, indicating the numbers and movement of (some) road users and ultimately form the basis for the planing and monitoring of the city’s traffic. My contribution to the panel seeks to listen to these signals and asks how they participate in the politics of redistributing space for urban traffic. As part of the historically grown traffic and administrative information infrastructures, traffic data are assembled in particular ways. To no surprise, signals counting cars and controlling their flows and stops have been central for the development of traffic data infrastructures. Just as cars dominate the roads, traffic data infrastructures are also primarily populated by car data. However, my interest is less on the quantity of certain data but on the trails and forms that data take and how they assemble and voice political claims in different ways. While car data are meant to flow continuously, data on bicycle traffic are knit together in what I call data patches: context-specific and issue-related data collections that span various sources, times and places, enabling different data stories and politics.