Doing place through data: Proliferation, profiling and the perils of portrayal in local climate action

Building on work which has shown the role of digital technologies in reframing environmental relations, this paper explores ethnographically how environmental data is reconfiguring the concept of place. The paper takes as its focus an action-research project within a UK based, citizen-oriented initiative called Newtown Energy Futures, in which we sought to enfold climate and energy data into a social-justice informed attempt at climate action. By exploring how the project used data as an invitation for citizens to engage with and participate in local infrastructural and environmental dynamics, the paper sheds light on how environmental data came to participate in the making of place and in doing so raised questions about how to rebuild the socio-material relations through which ‘a sense of place’ might be reproduced. As climate and energy data increasingly demand that places become enrolled into environmental projects our findings suggest that data enables place to emerge as a ‘socio-technical potentiality’ an observation that has implications both for both engagement with, and the study of data and place. In practical terms, we suggest that this refiguration of place has the effect of creating hopeful trajectories for change, whilst also posing difficult questions about the limits of participation in a data-infused form of place-based politics.