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Respondents: Alexandra Crivat and (tbc)

Tracing the Boundaries of Governmental Decision: Computational Techniques of Classification and the Global Human Settlement Layer

My research interrogates how the relationship between technologies of visibility, rationalities and practices of planning and governance, has been impacted by the advent of the digital. How did the proliferation of digital technologies of inscription and computation transform the way the world is seen and acted upon?

To answer to this question, I investigate visual/pragmatic procedures of construction of discrete boundaries in digital information. More specifically, I focus on computational techniques of classification, and how they spatially organise decisional boundaries.

In my presentation, I will show how computational methods of classification can travel across scales, and be indiscriminately applied on populations, geographical information, and remotely sensed imagery. To do so, I will focus on the experience of the Global Human Settlement Layer: a technology developed at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, to classify, automatically detect and map human presence on earth over time. By unpacking the classificational tools employed in the GHSL, I will show how they inform the setting and execution of governmental decisions, while their parameters bear the imprint of the political and pragmatic contexts in which they were devised.