What can urban big data research tell us about cities? While studying cities as complex systems offers a new perspective on urban dynamics, we should dig deeper into the epistemological claims made by these studies and ask what it means to distance the urban researcher from the city. Big data research has the tendency to flatten our perspective: it shows us technology users and their interactions with digital systems but does so often at the expense of the informal and irregular aspects of city life. It also presents us with the city as optimisable system, offering up the chance to engineer it for particular forms of efficiency or productivity. Both optimisation itself, and the process of ordering of the city for optimisation, confer political and economic power and produce a hierarchy of interests. This commentary advocates that researchers connect systems research to questions of structure and power. To do this requires a critical approach to what is missing, what is implied by the choices about which data to collect and how to make them available, and an understanding of the ontologies that shape both the data sets and the urban spaces they describe.

城市大数据研究可以告诉我们关于城市的什么？虽然将城市作为复杂系统进行研究为城市动态提供了一个新视角，但我们应该更深入地挖掘这些研究提出的认识论主张，并询问将城市研究人员与城市保持距离意味着什么。大数据研究倾向于扁平化我们的观点：它向我们展示了技术用户及其与数字系统的互动，但这样做往往以牺牲城市生活的非正式和不规则方面为代价。它还向我们展示了作为可优化系统的城市，提供了针对特定形式的效率或生产力对其进行设计的机会。优化本身以及优化城市的排序过程都会赋予政治和经济权力并产生利益等级。该评论主张研究人员将系统研究与结构和权力问题联系起来。要做到这一点，需要对缺失的内容、选择收集哪些数据以及如何提供这些数据所隐含的内容，以及对塑造数据集和它们所描述的城市空间的本体的理解。