This talk will be twofold: firstly, drawing on research into open data initiatives in London, it traces a shift from early promises of transparency and civic participation toward their incorporation into platform capitalism and economic growth agendas. In this process, data not only represents urban infrastructure but becomes infrastructural, reshaping how cities are governed and understood. Secondly, I will continue to elaborate on digital urbanism in the context of the climate crisis, bringing together insights from critical data studies and environmental justice.

The talk challenges the separation between technology and nature, emphasizing their material interdependencies, and asks how data-driven urbanism contributes to climate (in)justice within ongoing histories of colonialism and global inequality. Engaging with the concept of planetarity, it considers alternative ethical frameworks for digital urban futures that foreground relationality and difference. It concludes by introducing a new research agenda on “waste” in AI urbanism, expanding the concept to include not only material but also social and computational forms of waste.

All interested participants are welcome to attend.

Güneş Taymen

Dr Güneş Tavmen is Lecturer in Digital Infrastructures in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London (KCL). Her research sits at the intersection of digital urbanism, environmental justice, critical data studies, urban ecology, and app studies. She earned her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, where her work focused on (open) data-driven practices, initiatives, and discourses within the context of smart city planning in London.