This book explores what counts as data in contemporary urban life, arguing that cities cannot be understood through measurement and optimization alone. Through a series of artistic and psychogeographic experiments, it develops a framework for “speculative data” that captures the qualitative, affective, historical, and imaginative dimensions of urban experience often excluded from conventional data systems.
The book offers new ways of thinking about data, mapping, and urban intelligence beyond the dominant paradigms of the smart city. Drawing together contemporary art, psychogeography, qualitative geovisualization, and critical data studies, this book introduces a taxonomy of speculative data forms, including waiting, augmented, happy, imaginary, haunted, playful, and aspirational data. Each chapter is grounded in a public experiment, participatory mapping project, or artistic intervention that demonstrates how alternative forms of data can be generated, visualized, and interpreted. Together, these projects provide both a conceptual framework and a practical toolkit for understanding cities as spaces shaped by memory, emotion, imagination, history, and participation.
Heads in the Cloud will appeal to scholars and students in geography, urban studies, media studies, digital humanities, critical data studies, and contemporary art, as well as artists, designers, planners, and researchers interested in participatory methods, mapping, and the future of urban life.