Domestic/Data Occupations
Domestic/Data Occupations
With McLain Clutter
This project is about the relationship between “big data” and contemporary urbanization. Using Detroit as a testing site, the project forwards design proposals that hack the conventional characterization of urban space in commercial data models.
GEODEMOGRAPHY: The use of geodemographic data has become ubiquitous in the regulation of urban land use and development. Defined as the study of the geographic distribution of demographic data for use in marketing research, geodemography is increasingly influential in determining the character of the built environment. City planning commissions use geodemography to aid in the implementation of policy, and private corporations reference geodemographic data when purchasing, selling or developing real-estate. Demand for geodemographics has created a vast apparatus of corporations engaged in the collection, collation and amalgamation of geodemographic data.
Among the products of this apparatus are commercial market segmentation data sets, which are complex combinations of census data, consumer-spending statistics, figures scraped from Internet usage, information about income, consumer tastes and more. Market segmentation sets amalgamate these data to describe synthetic consumer identities, and link these identities to their spatial locations in our urbanized areas. These data sets attempt to make the distribution of identity across geographic space scientifically knowable, privileging extant quantitative variation over latent qualitative difference and accept as scientific fact distinctions about race, gender and ethnicity that are merely naturalized.
When market segmentation data is used to influence site selection, the resultant buildings deeply implicate the synthetic identities targeted. The presence of the shopping malls, big-box outlets or fields of coffee houses that result encourages the predicted consumer behavior. These entities become territorial beacons for the collection of a specific combination of consumers. United in space, this combination of consumers – in effect – becomes the synthesized identity described in the operative geodemography. Thus, development guided by market segmentation geodemographics forges a complexly solipsistic relationship between constructed consumer identity, and the construction of the built environment. These practices serve to reify artificial sociocultural divisions based on the categories of data collection and limit potential urban development to the repetition of conventional consumer building formats.