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«Access to data is becoming less and less and less open»
Open and transparent data has been proven to be valuable for gaining insights and crafting better public policies. It is especially useful for visualizing and addressing the needs of citizens in the most unfavorable situations, enabling public administrations to tackle these challenges and improve cities. However, as mentioned by Mar Santamaría, we have recently observed a setback in terms of its availability.
How can we then keep building spatial justice through data? How can data science include the most vulnerable? In an upcoming episode of our series focusing on the trends shaping today’s urban landscape, we delve into how open data can positively impact urban inclusion with the co-founder and director of 300.000 Km/s – a Barcelona-based urban planning agency aimed at making cities the most livable places on the planet.
It is very important that data remains open. I think in the last 10 years we have been seeing the potential of using data to increase knowledge, to create better public policies. But now the access to data is becoming less and less and less open, and that is a risk because we need data to inform public decisions, we need the processes to be transparent, and we need public administrations to rely on data they can use for making cities better. So it is really important that data remains open, transparent, acknowledgeable, and that public bodies keep it as a kind of sovereignty.
«Access to data is becoming less and less open». Image by Getty Images on Unsplash
Including the most vulnerable parts of society in data can be done by actively engaging them, which is the most difficult part. What I mean with active is to build upskills in people using low tech methodologies, that can somehow make them more active in the planing processes. But also using passive methodologies. At the moment we are able to datify some aspects that take into account these vulnerable parts of the society to include them in the urban agendas and that is very important.
In all the work that we are trying to do related to public policies, spatial justice is a motto. How with data we are able to visualize and put in a territory the urgencies is very important. And that can be done using, in our case, cartography. We have developed a tool called «Open Papers» that actually engages volunteers in large census processes. That has been used for example in the city of Barcelona to count homeless people. They are really at the lowest level and are not datified at all, so we need a lot of people to look for them.
In 10 years I would like cities to be again this mechanism of collective survival. More equal, more equative, greener and more sustainable. ●