Creative conversations Big Data and Cities – Towards Data-driven Governance According to the political scientist James C. Scott, one of the central problems of statecraft is to make a society legible – in order to govern, one has to know where things and people are. Since cell-phone services, credit cards, and other socio-technical systems are so closely connected to our daily lives, their “digital exhaust” becomes an increasingly valuable resource for observing the processes and interactions of society. In many ways, the repositories associated with the term ‘Big Data’ are like an unlined landfill – filled with the residues and byproducts of unrelated processes, attracting scavengers, and often afflicted by leachate. But there is also a need for citizens to make sense of what is going on around them. The classic democratic obligation to rigorously inform oneself in order to participate in public affairs has become almost impossible to fulfill. The session will focus on the role of visualization in urban governance, using examples of controversies around waste infrastructures. Accountability technologies encompass citizen-driven practices of distributed data collection, the collective analysis through visualization of these data, and finally, their strategic use in the public discourse, in the legal system or political processes. 24 InnovationSpace: The Lab