Dr. Sarah Barns

If the relative emptiness of the central city feels like a shock, we’d do well to remember how relatively novel is the particular, pre-pandemic form of the city we’re familiar with. Skyscrapers stacked tight in the centres, with radial train networks transporting commuters in and out of dormitory suburbs, represent distinct configurations of home and work, domesticity and commerce, that might be slipping. Has the “age of dispersion” arrived?

The digitisation of urban interactions creates productive data that can be leveraged to support better decision-making and critical transformations in the design of cities. And yet, as attention toward platform business models makes clear, many of today's digital platforms yield not just new data points or information flows that can enhance urban intelligence. They also raise complex new challenges to do with how data are used to capture and govern the informational landscapes of digitally mediated cities, provoking new challenges for urban leaders and decision makers.

Can we imagine a better outdoor media landscape? Storybox is a project that does just that. We promote more inclusive spaces for digital storytelling and creative media outdoors, in partnership with city governments and cultural organisations.

A reflection on coronavirus and Australian cities, commissioned by Inside Story in the opening week of Australia’s lock down and shift to social distancing measures.

I’ve written a new book on Platform Urbanism, published by Palgrave Macmillan December 2019. Read an Introductory excerpt here.

Is the data-rich city taking on a life of its own? And can Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities help us navigate its hazards? My piece for Inside Story, commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of Stretton’s seminal work.

This article for Griffith Review’s Who We Are explored the history of migration in Parramatta, and how this ‘cradle of the colony’ is being re-imagined in an era of rapid social and cultural transformation in the city.

Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation startup owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has announced a partnership with the City of Toronto to develop a new waterfront precinct. Time to ask Google: can you build a city?

More and more of our daily lives – how we work, how we navigate, how we learn and how we entertain ourselves – take place through the interface of glowing rectangular screens. As a consequence there is mounting concern about what smartphones are doing to our attention spans, our capacity for random human interactions and our self-esteem.

It’s now widely recognised that, despite the rhetoric of technology vendors, much of the early investment in smart cities failed to demonstrate significant benefits to cities and their citizens.

Recent reflections from an emerging city indicators type on the downsides to liveability metrics. 

Ultimately, whether or not we want to call our cities ‘smart’, digital disruption is transforming our cities’ infrastructures and services in fundamental ways (ask any taxi driver).

A recent article on the uses of open data by city governments. A recent shift in the rhetorical aspirations of the open data movement away from the values of openness and transparency and towards a more confined focus on value generation raise important critical questions for urban geographers concerned with the nature of urban governance in an age of big data.

While based at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, I've become more and more fascinated by the transformation of Parramatta as one of the epicentres of urban growth currently in Australia. How can open data and digital platforms be better leveraged to capture the scale of the transformation currently underway? 

Reflecting on the impact of public conveyances in the city of Berlin during the first years of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel wrote,

"The interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterised by markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than that of the ears. This can be attributed to the institution of public conveyances. […] Before buses, railroads and trains became fully established during the 19th century, people were never in a position to have to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without ever exchanging a word."

In this piece for The Conversation (March 2014) I examine attempts to put a dollar figure on the value of open data.

Governments have typically signed on to the open data agenda through initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership and the G8 Open Data Charter and made various high-level announcements, but there are many obstacles when, as the report authors remark, “agencies and those within them find ways to delay openness to minimise institutional risk”.

Putting a dollar figure on open data isnecessarily speculative. Where open data has the potential to be a game-changer for many industries, currently the data is not being released in sufficient volumes to realise maximum potential.

Read the full article on The Conversation: Open data and the G20: the value is there to share

It’s hard not to get excited by the promise of a more enriched and open digital ecosystem that makes the way we digitally interact with governments a whole lot better. But as we stand at the cusp of this open data-driven transformation, we should also take a deep breath and consider how “openness” is being used to drive public sector change.