The Techno-politics of Crowdsourced Disaster Data in the Smart City

This article interrogates the techno-politics of crowdsourced data in the study of environmental hazards such as floods, storms, wildfires, and cyclones. We highlight some of the main debates around the use of citizen-generated data for assessing, monitoring, and responding to disasters. We then argue that, compared to the number of articles discussing the quality of citizen-generated data, little attention has been dedicated to discussing the social and political implications of this kind of practice. Citizen science is generally understood as the participation of non-scientist citizens in the generation, collection, and even analysis of scientific data through frameworks usually established by scientists (Haklay et al., 2018). Supported by the ubiquitous presence of smartphones and other information and communications technologies (ICTs) that characterize Smart Cities (Townsend, 2014; Karvonen et al., 2019), citizen science projects are one of the approaches most used to collectively gather large amounts of data (crowdsourcing). Several authors have been discussing how crowdsourced data is already transforming how cities are managed (Neirotti et al., 2014; Albino et al., 2015; Joss et al., 2019) but there is little consensus on the political and social implications of mainstreaming this practice for the participating communities. While this article does not intend to present definitive answers, it outlines inevitable challenges and indicates potential directions for future studies on the techno-politics of disaster data-collection. Within a techno-politics approach, we argue for a model of “political participation” that recognizes citizens providing data to shape cities as equal experts in the production of knowledge and decision-making, rather than external contributors collecting data for formal authorities. This political participation approach, we believe, would increase the dependence of formal scientific knowledge on citizens' daily-lived experiences, crea