Special session 8:
Data Voids: Understanding Digital Geographies of the Built Environment through Negativity and Refusal

Emerging work in cultural geography has called on researchers to consider the (im)potential of ‘negative’ spaces and affects, asking what can be done with voids, limits and (in)capacities of different kinds (e.g. Bissell et al, 2021). Meanwhile, across media and cultural studies, critical data studies and feminist and political geography there is growing attention to the possibilities of data refusal (e.g. James et al., 2023). Both bodies of work are concerned with gaps, absences, silences and negation, though with varied foci and orientations toward action. 

Our session seeks to bring these literatures into conversation, with a particular focus on digital data and the built environment. 

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The governance of built environments is increasingly informed and narrated through digital data – from ‘evidence-based’ planning, to the modelling of land/housing markets, and uses of ‘proptech’ to facilitate investment or discipline tenants. Yet such data are often characterised by absences, gaps and silences. Such absences prompt initiatives to fix, ‘free’ and/or repurpose the data in order to enhance access and transparency. However, recent work problematises transparency as a universal response to data-driven systems, pointing to refusal and data justice as approaches pursuing a structural shift relative to data harms.

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The session will seek theoretical and empirical contributions pertaining to questions such as: What might an attention to data voids from the perspective of negative geographies and refusal illuminate? How do absences of data shape the built environment? How do acts of refusal in the face of data-driven governance generate meaningful political and spatial alternatives? How do we reckon with refusal alongside the politics of data suppression? How do we register what or who is left absent (unbuilt, unseen or unheard) by/through data in its shaping of built spaces?