“I Think Quality is More Important Than a Lot of Data” in Cities Datafication

Abstract

This article studies how the decision to connect data volumes to value is made by technologists and governance people in smart cities’ datafication process. Its entry point is that datafication promises to use data to make cities liveable domains. Cities on the back of this promise presuppose that more data produce value and therefore fixate on exhaustive datafication. But datafication does not appear self-evident, and knowledge of how technologists and governance people connect data volumes to data value is quite unclear in media and communication literature. Using evidence from interviews (n = 6), datafication policy documents (n = 4), and a diverse dataset of city activities (n = 299) in the open data portal of a situated datafication site, the Stavanger Smart City, Norway, and with the theoretical support of critical data studies, this article responds to the question: How does data volume connect to data value in smart cities datafication? Its findings put data quality as the intermediary that makes this connection.