The Cities lab of the London School of Economics hosted a workshop on Mediating Uncertainties on September 11th, which was attended by Saba Golchehr, TRADERS researcher at the RCA. One of the objectives of the workshop was to ‘examine how advances in technologies of gathering data, communicating, and networking have influenced and shaped the sphere of urban governance and urban political life in cities and with what effects’. And the aim of the discussion was to ‘explore how information relates with uncertainty in the urban sphere’. The workshop was organized and led by Sobia Ahmad Kaker, an interdisciplinary scholar working on issues related to governance and security in the global south. A list of all speakers can be found on the events website.

The topics at the workshop varied from smart cities, and the increasing popularity of ‘city dashboards’ showing real-time information on processes in the city, to the complex political structures and problems in Karachi, Pakistan, which has some negative externalities on, and is simultaneously amplified by, the capitals media channels.

All of the topics were highly relevant to the workshops theme, however within the framework of my research, which focuses on Big Data analytics, two speakers were of ancillary relevance to my work, and are therefore the two talks which I will elaborate on.