Whose Data Builds the City? Critical Data Practices for Socio-Environmentally Just Urbanization

Data-driven systems, such as satellite imagery, often dictate urban planning; however, they frequently neglect local, situated, and embodied knowledges. This paper examines the epistemic, political, and socio-ecological frictions that surface when city data (e.g., aerial imagery and administrative records) is brought into dialogue with community data (e.g., lived experiences and shared epistemologies) to guide more equitable urban planning. We employ Research through Design, complemented by ethnographic inquiry and auto-ethnographic reflection, to create a speculative probe that helps foreground the frictions embedded in urban data infrastructures in Bangalore, India. Our analysis reveals the limitations of dominant top-down urban data systems, which routinely obscure socio-ecological dependencies and selectively define what constitutes legitimate urban knowledge. We employ environmental justice as an analytical lens to analyze our findings, highlighting how urban data infrastructures can reproduce or contest inequalities and identify opportunities to foreground care, accountability, and equity, particularly in postcolonial contexts, toward cultivating socially just and climate-resilient urban futures.