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Paper short abstract

Drawing on a South London public health data programme, this practitioner-researcher paper asks: resilient for whom? It examines how health data systems encode unequal urban futures, reproducing the inequalities they claim to address, and asks what transformative resilience might look like.

Paper long abstract

Integrated data systems have become central infrastructure for urban public health, promising evidence-based, equitable, and resilient cities. Yet the concept of resilience embedded within these systems is rarely interrogated. Drawing on practice-based insights from a local authority data integration programme in Southwark, a London borough where over a third of residents live in England's most deprived areas, Southwark JSNA, 2022), this paper examines what resilience means in practice, and for whom it is being built.

Health data infrastructures are not neutral conduits of evidence but sociotechnical assemblages that encode particular visions of urban life, normative health outcomes, and acceptable risk. Through the selective inclusion of datasets and the design of indicators, these systems function as legibility projects (Scott, 1998): quietly adjudicating which communities are visible to the state, and which disruptions count as problems worth solving. In doing so, they risk reproducing the very inequalities they claim to address- enacting an undesirable resilience that restores hegemonic structures rather than transforming them.

Engaging with data justice scholarship (Taylor, 2017; Eubanks, 2018) and critical public health STS (Hoeyer et al., 2019), this paper asks whether integrated data systems can be redesigned to bounce forward rather than back (Jones et al., 2021): surfacing lived vulnerability, redistributing definitional power, and enabling communities to contest what counts as a resilient future.