Author Archives: Liam Heaphy

Lessons for smart cities from the Programmable City project – Videos and Slides

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We held our dissemination event “Lessons for smart cities from the Programmable City project” on the 9th May 2018, in the Oak Room of Mansion House in Dublin.

We would like to thank all of our participants who attended and everyone else as well for your interest in our project.

snapshot

You can now find all the presentations on our Videos page. or using the links below as per the running order. [sorry about the lighting quality, the room was poorly lit – maybe best listened to as podcasts]

Session 1: 10.30-11.30

Session 2: 11.30-12.15

Session 3: 12.15-13.00

 

New paper: Interfaces and divisions in the Dublin Docklands ‘Smart District’

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Liam Heaphy has published a new Progcity working paper (37) – Interfaces and divisions in the Dublin Docklands ‘Smart District’.

Abstract

The study of physical and social divisions in divided societies has long been an area of study, such as the continued usage of ‘peace walls’ in Belfast, hostile architecture to prevent anti-social behaviour and rough sleeping, and the securitisation of private spaces. In the context of a new drive to create a smart district, this paper looks at the relationship between smart urbanism and planning, and at the spatial and social divisions between a new ‘gentrifying’ and well-educated community in the Dublin Docklands and established communities in the area. The Dublin Docklands redevelopment marks a significant break from a pattern of suburbanisation and inner-city decline and repurposes part of the former port area as a city centre extension. The paper accounts for the reshaping of the Dublin Docklands as a ‘smart district’ in collaboration with the city authorities, based on over thirty semi-structured interviews and participant-observation at consultation events. It argues that reductive definitions of smart cities as networking technologies be reworked into broader considerations on urban technologies and the future of cities, with greater emphasis on the relationship between technologies branded as ‘smart’ and the material and digital manifestation of boundaries in urban form.

Keywords: smart urbanism, smart cities, ports, planning, technology, urban design, interfaces, boundaries

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Seminar 2 (video): Gillian Rose – Tweeting the Smart City

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We are delighted to share the video of our second seminar in our 2017/18 series, entitled Tweeting the Smart City: The Affective Enactments of the Smart City on Social Media given by Professor Gillian Rose from Oxford University on the 26th October 2017 and co-hosted with the Geography Department at Maynooth University.

Abstract
Digital technologies of various kinds are now the means through which many cities are made visible and their spatialities negotiated. From casual snaps shared on Instagram to elaborate photo-realistic visualisations, digital technologies for making, distributing and viewing cities are more and more pervasive. This talk will explore some of the implications of that digital mediation of urban spaces. What forms of urban life are being made visible in these digitally mediated cities, and how? Through what configurations of temporality, spatiality and embodiment? And how should that picturing be theorised? Drawing on recent work on the visualisation of so-called ‘smart cities’ on social media, the lecture will suggest the scale and pervasiveness of digital imagery now means that notions of ‘representation’ have to be rethought. Cities and their inhabitants are increasingly mediated through a febrile cloud of streaming image files; as well as representing cities, this cloud also operationalises particular, affective ways of being urban. The lecture will explore some of the implications of this shift for both theory and method as well as critique.

Seminar 5: Antoine Picon – “Smart Cities: A Design Perspective”

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For our next event in the seminar series, we have invited Professor Antoine Picon from Harvard University to give a historical and design perspective on the smart city. He is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Research at the Graduate School of Design in Harvard.

Antoine Picon has written extensively on the history of urban technologies, ranging from the impact of the Enlightenment through to the digital and computational revolution in architecture. We hope that this event will appeal to a broad audience of urban geographers, architects and planners, historians, and all with an interest in the history of design and technology.

We are looking forward to welcoming you on Wednesday 17th May from 3pm to 5pm for this talk in Room 2.31, Iontas Building, at Maynooth University.

Abstract
Smart Cities have been envisaged in recent years from a technological standpoint or from a social sciences perspective. In order to understand better what is at stake with their rise, this lecture will propose two additional approaches. The first will be historical. What can we learn about smart cities by placing their emergence within the broader framework of the evolution of the relations between cities, technologies and societies since the dawn of the industrial revolution?
Smart cities could very well represent a new “paradigm”, to use Thomas Kuhn’s concept, which is about to replace the networked city inherited from the 19th century. A second approach will be in terms of design, for smart cities raise all kinds of challenges for engineers and architects in charge of the conception of infrastructures and buildings. There again, what is taking place looks like a drastic departure from an established conception of projects.

antoinepicon_seminar

A special thanks to Gareth Young for his input into this poster. All queries can be directed to liam.heaphy@nuim.ie or mussi@nuim.ie.

Workshop paper with LERO / School of Business: Perception of Value in Public-Private Ecosystems: Transforming Dublin Docklands through Smart Technologies

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On December 9th 2016, Lero organised a workshop called “IoT & Smart City Challenges and Applications” (ICSA 2016), prior to the 2016 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2016), held in Dublin, Ireland from December 11-14. The event features 12 presentations across three themes, along with panel discussions.

Among these was the following paper on the Dublin Docklands, drawing from our early findings on partnership models for a smart district:

Perception of Value in Public-Private Ecosystems: Transforming Dublin Docklands through Smart Technologies
Olga Ryazanova, Reka Petercsak, Liam Heaphy, Niall Connolly and Brian Donnellan

or just Dublin Docklands?

Abstract:
Our study explores the potential for developing a hybrid business model for public-private ecosystem that emerged around the smart cities project in Dublin Docklands Strategic Development Zone. We focus on stakeholders’ expectations in relation to value creation and value capture, trying to understand to what extent the interests of stakeholder groups are diverse, and whether it is possible to create consensus that delivers economic, social, and environmental value for participants. The findings of this study seek to advance the literature on the business models of hybrid organisations and to test some assumptions of the research on the governance of public-private partnerships.

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Seminar video: Andrés Luque-Ayala

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On February 8th of this year, we had the pleasure of having Dr Andrés Luque-Ayala in Maynooth University to give a seminar on “Digital Territories: Location Awareness and the Re-making of Political Space in Rio’s Favelas”.

This presentation was based on research conducted with Flávia Maia (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Urban Planning Dept.) on the digital mapping of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the context of the city’s ICT drive to become a leading ‘smart city’.