Grazia Concilio - The Data Shake: Opportunities and Obstacles for Urban Policy Making

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The book investigates the operative and organizational implications related to the use of the growing amount of available data on policy making processes, highlighting the experimental dimension of policy making that, thanks to data, proves to be more and more exploitable toward more effective and sustainable decisions. According to well-established literature and some empirical evidence, data has shown great potential in supporting the reading and the estimation of fine-grained variations in human practices in cities over time and spaces, depending on the specific sources from which it can be obtained. These features also affect data usability, highlighting how its potential relevance may vary in each different stage of the policy making process. The larger and larger availability of data offers support for (1) strategic activities, by aggregating information on time series that inform and validate public actions; (2) tactical decisions, conceived as the evidence-informed actions that are needed to implement medium-term strategic decisions; (3) operational decisions, giving support to day-by-day decision-making activities in a short-term perspective. The larger the availability of data, the bigger the chance it offers to implement experimental activities feeding the policy design and implementation as well as enabling collective learning processes. Within this changing but promising landscape, the book is structured into two parts.

The first part introduces the key questions highlighted by the PoliVisu project and still representing operational and strategic challenges in the exploitation of data potentials in urban policy making. It includes four chapters.

The chapter titled The Data Shake: An Opportunity for Experiment-Driven Policy Making by Grazia Concilio and Paola Pucci starts from considering that the wider availability of data and the growing technological advancements in data collection, management, and analysis question the very basis of the policy making process toward new interpretative models. By dealing with the operative implications in the use of a growing amount of available data in policy making processes, this chapter starts discussing the chance offered by data in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a planning policy, with a critical review of the evidence-based policy making approaches; then introduces the relevance of data in the policy design experiments and the conditions for its uses.