Walking as Method: Infrastructural Inversion in Datafied Cities

Abstract

This article investigates whether citizen perspectives can improve how risks are assessed in datafied cities, and how a walkshop methodology can support such participation. Starting from the rights to privacy and data protection embodied in the GDPR, and other fundamental rights, such as the freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, we examine risks to those rights to ensure that data processing is necessary, proportionate, and accountable. Fundamental rights are very valuable, yet in practice, they often remain theoretical without impacting how people actually experience data infrastructures in their daily environments. Recognizing data as infrastructure, the paper explores how contemporary cities rely on systems that collect, circulate, and operationalize data, shaping everyday life often in opaque ways. Drawing on Susan Leigh Star’s concept of infrastructural inversion, we argue that these infrastructures encode particular priorities, exclusions, and power relations that are rarely surfaced through conventional assessment tools. Our study employs walkshops—guided walks during which participants encounter data-collecting technologies in situ. Acting both as a research tool and as a form of infrastructural inversion, walkshops make hidden systems visible and open to discussion. Insights from thirteen walkshops in Brussels, Ghent, and Leuven reveal concerns about transparency, proportionality, exclusion, and mistrust—issues that standard DPIAs rarely capture. The findings demonstrate that walkshops can help ground risk assessment in the lived realities of urban data governance.