The Data Shake: An Opportunity for Experiment-Driven Policy Making

Abstract

The wider availability of data and the growing technological advancements in data collection, management, and analysis introduce unprecedented opportunities, as well as complexity in policy making. This condition questions the very basis of the policy making process towards new interpretative models. Growing data availability, in fact, increasingly affects the way we analyse urban problems and make decisions for cities: data are a promising resource for more effective decisions, as well as for better interacting with the context where decisions are implemented. By dealing with the operative implications in the use of a growing amount of available data in policy making processes, this contribution starts discussing the chance offered by data in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a planning policy, with a critical review of the evidence-based policy making approaches; then it introduces the relevance of data in the policy design experiments and the conditions for its uses.