Description
Under contested urban redevelopment processes, counter-data practices challenge state narratives of decline and deterioration that justify the displacement of marginalized communities and the erasure of the urban fabric the have fostered. This study examines counter-data practices by community organizations, activists, researchers, and artists in the Sewoon District in Seoul, South Korea. The projects emerged to resist a state-sanctioned profit-driven redevelopment plan and protect a predominantly renter, urban manufacturing businesses in the electronics, metal, woodwork, and printing industry. Diverse data projects problematized official surveys using maps, visualizations, business inventory platforms, digital twins, sensors, surveys, point-cloud archives, collections of physical objects, and documentaries between 2016 and 2021. Through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this study sheds light on the exclusionary nature of official data practices elucidated through counter-data, and the opportunities that counter-data practices open for pluralist urban visions in and outside of the official decision-making processes.
