Author Archives: Rob Kitchin

Smart spaces and smart citizens?

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I attended the Smart Cities and Regions Summit in Croke Park, Dublin, today and took part in the ‘smart spaces and smart citizens?’ panel. We were asked to produce a short opening statement and thought I’d share it here.

I’m going to discuss smart citizens by considering Dublin as a smart city. To start, I want to ask you a set of questions which I’d like you to respond to by raising a hand. Don’t be shy; this requires participation.

How many of you have a good idea as to what Smart Dublin is and what it does?

How many of you feel you have a good sense of smart city developments taking place in Dublin?

Would you be able to tell me much about the 100+ smart city projects that are taking place in the city in conjunction with Smart Dublin and it four local authority partners?

Would you be able to tell me much about the extent to which these projects engage with citizens?

Or how the technologies used impact citizens, either in direct or implicit ways?

Or whether Smart Dublin and the four local authorities have a guiding set of principles or a programme for citizen engagement or smart citizens?

You’re all people interested in smart cities. You’re here because it relates to your work in some way. You have a vested interest in knowing about smart cities.

Do you think that citizens in Dublin know about these projects, which might be taking place in their locality?

Do you think that they have sufficient knowledge to be able judge, in an informed way, a project’s merits?

Do you think they have an active voice in these projects’ conception, their deployment, the work that they do? In how any data generated are processed, analysed, shared, stored, and value extracted, etc.?

Do local politicians – citizen representatives – know about them? And do they have an active voice in smart city development in Dublin?

This panel is titled ‘Smart spaces and smart citizens’.

What is difficult to see in most smart city initiatives is the ‘smart citizen’ element. It seems that what is implied by ‘smart citizen’ is simply being a person living in a city where smart city technology is deployed, or being a person that uses networked digital technology as part of everyday life.

To create a smart citizen, all a state body or company apparently needs to do is say people should be at the heart of things, or enact a form of stewardship (deliver a service on behalf of citizens) and civic paternalism (decide what’s best for citizens), rather than citizens being meaningfully involved in the vision and development of the smart city.

In our own research concerning networked urbanism and smart cities from a social sciences perspective we have been interested in exploring these kinds of questions, and how the citizen fits into the smart city. It’s a central concern in our latest book published next month, ‘The Right to the Smart City’, which explores the smart city in relation to notions of citizenship and social justice.

What our research shows is that citizens can be varyingly positioned, and perform very different roles, in the smart city depending on the type of initiative.

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It is perhaps no surprise then that citizens in numerous jurisdictions have started to push back against the more technocratic, top-down, marketised versions of the smart city – the on-going protests in Toronto over the Sidewalk Labs waterfront development being a prominent example. Instead, they demand more inclusive, empowering and democratic visions, with Barcelona’s notion of technological sovereignty often providing inspiration (see my recent piece comparing Toronto and Barcelona and links to articles and organisation websites).

It is difficult to argue that we are enabling ‘smart citizens’ if they are not informed, consulted or involved in the development and roll-out of smart city initiatives. As such, if we are truly interested in creating smart citizens then we need to make a meaningful move beyond the dominant tropes of stewardship and civic paternalism to approach smart cities in a smarter way.

For a fuller discussion see the opening and closing chapters of The Right to the Smart City, which are available as open access versions.

Kitchin, R., Cardullo, P. and di Feliciantonio, C. (2018) Citizenship, Social Justice and the Right to the Smart City. Pre-print Chapter 1 in The Right to the Smart City edited by Cardullo, P., di Feliciantonio, C. and Kitchin, R. Emerald, Bingley.

Kitchin, R. (2018) Towards a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. Pre-print Chapter 14  in The Right to the Smart City edited by Cardullo, P., di Feliciantonio, C. and Kitchin, R. Emerald, Bingley.

Rob Kitchin

Ethics washing and smart cities

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Rob Kitchin has published a new article on RTE Brainstorm, The ethics of smart cities. The piece argues that the use of big data and artificial intelligence in managing cities creates many ethical issues, but initiatives to address them can enact ethics-washing in order to avoid regulation and more fundamental questions. The argument is illustrated with reference to initiatives in Toronto and Barcelona.

ethics smart cities 2

New Paper: Anticipating digital futures

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Sung-Yueh Perng has a new paper published in the journal Mobilites, titled: Anticipating digital futures: ruins, entanglements and the possibilities of shared technology making, doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1594867

Abstract

Contrary to the corporate production of digital cities, shared technology making explores ways of innovation that are open to all, informed by diverse knowledges, and led by citizens. However, this exploration faces corporate translation of ethical and societal values for capital accumulation and concerns around the right to participate. Building on Tsing’s concept of ‘ruins’, this paper considers the anticipation of digital futures while the neoliberal ruination of shared technology making is in full swing. The paper examines the entanglements in hackathon rationalities and practices and demonstrates that the possibilities of shared technology making emerge from disrupting technocratic visions and repurposing corporate innovation resources and techniques. Drawing on the analysis, the paper argues that these entanglements are crucial to digital futures. They disclose in concrete ways how neoliberal co-optation can be disturbed and transformed. Equally importantly, they urge continuous explorations to assemble diverse practices and values for building momentum towards sustained processes of shaping desirable futures.

New paper: The timescape of smart cities

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Rob Kitchin has a new paper published online first in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The timescape of smart cities. doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1497475

Abstract

To date, critical examinations of smart cities have largely ignored their temporality. In this article, I consider smart cities from a spatiotemporal perspective, arguing that they produce a new timescape and constitute space–time machines. The first half of the article examines spatiotemporal relations and rhythms, exploring how smart cities are the products of and contribute to space–time compression, create new urban polyrhythms, alter the practices of scheduling, and change the pace and tempos of everyday activities. The second half of the article details how smart cities shape the nature of temporal modalities, considering how they reframe and utilize the relationship among the past, present, and future. The analysis draws from a set of forty-three interviews conducted in Dublin, Ireland, and highlights that much of the power of smart urbanism is derived from how it produces a new timescape, rather than simply reconfiguring spatial relations.

New book: Creating Smart Cities

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csc coverCreating Smart Cities, edited by Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy, Rob Kitchin, has been published by Routledge in their Regional Studies Association ‘Region and Cities’ series. It contains a selection of chapters originating from our third Progcity workshop.

Description
In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While “smart city” advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms and vulnerability to cyberattack.

This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils.

Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, the Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These chapters discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity.

Contents

1. Creating smart cities – Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans and Liam Heaphy

PART I The political economy of smart cities

2. A Digital Deal for the smart city: Participation, protection, progress – Jathan Sadowski

3. Politicising smart city standards – James Merricks White

4. Urban revitalization through automated policing and “smart” surveillance in Camden, New Jersey – Alan Wiig

5. Can urban “miracles” be engineered in laboratories? Turning Medellín into a model city for the Global South – Félix Talvard

6. Building smart city partnerships in the “Silicon Docks” – Liam Heaphy and Réka Pétercsák

7. Towards a study of city experiments – Brice Laurent and David Pontille

8. University campuses as testbeds of smart urban innovation – Andrew Karvonen, Chris Martin and James Evans

PART II Smart cities, citizenship and ethics

9. Who are the end-use(r)s of smart cities? A synthesis of conversations in Amsterdam – Christine Richter, Linnet Taylor, Shazade Jameson and Carmen Pérez del Pulgar

10. ‘Cityzens become netizens’: Hashtag citizenships in the making of India’s 100 smart cities – Ayona Datta

11. From smart cities to smart citizens? Searching for the ‘actually existing smart citizen’ in Atlanta, Georgia – Taylor Shelton and Thomas Lodato

12. Promises, practices and problems of collaborative infrastructuring: The case of Dublin City Council (DCC) Beta and Code for Ireland – Sung-Yueh Perng

13. Smart for a reason: Sustainability and social inclusion in the sharing city – Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman

14. Pseudonymisation and the smart city: Considering the General Data Protection Regulation – Maria Helen Murphy

15. The privacy parenthesis: Private and public spheres, smart cities and big data – Leighton Evans

16. The challenges of cybersecurity for smart cities – Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin

PART III Conclusion

17. Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities – Rob Kitchin

New book: Digital Geographies

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digital geographies book coverDigital Geographies, edited by James Ash, Rob Kitchin and Agnieszka Leszczynski, has been published by Sage.  The book provides an overview of how digital technologies have become part of everyday life, mediating tasks such as work, travel, consumption, production, and leisure, and are having increasingly profound effects on phenomena that are of immediate concern to geographers. These include: the production of space, spatiality and mobilities; the processes, practices, and forms of mapping; the contours of spatial knowledge and imaginaries; and, the formation and enactment of spatial knowledge politics  Similarly, there are distinct geographies of digital media such as those of the internet, games, and social media that have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach. The book is divided into five sections.

Table of contents

Chapter 1 Introducing Digital Geographies – James Ash, Rob Kitchin and Agnieszka Leszczynski

PART 1 Digital Spaces
Chapter 2 Spatialities – Agnieszka Leszczynski
Chapter 3 Urban – Andres Luque-Ayala
Chapter 4 Rural – Martin Dodge
Chapter 5 Mapping – Matthew W Wilson
Chapter 6 Mobilities – Tim Schwanen

PART 2 Digital Methods
Chapter 7 Epistemologies – Jim Thatcher
Chapter 8 Data and Data Infrastructures – Rob Kitchin and Tracey Lauriault
Chapter 9 Qualitative Methods and Geohumanities – Meghan Cope
Chapter 10 Participatory Methods and Citizen Science – Hilary Geoghegan
Chapter 11 Cartography and Geographic Information Systems – David O’Sullivan
Chapter 12 Statistics, Modelling and Data Science – Daniel Arribas-Bel

PART 3 Digital Cultures
Chapter 13 Media and Popular Culture – James Ash
Chapter 14 Subject/ivities – Sam Kinsley
Chapter 15 Representation and Mediation – Gillian Rose

PART 4 Digtial Economies
Chapter 16 Labour – Mark Graham and Mohammad Anwar
Chapter 17 Industries – Matt Zook
Chapter 18 Sharing Economy – Lizzie Richardson
Chapter 19 Traditional Industries – Bruno Moriset

PART 5 Digital Politics
Chapter 20 Development – Dorothea Kleine
Chapter 21 Governance – Rob Kitchin
Chapter 22 Civics – Taylor Shelton
Chapter 23 Ethics – Linnet Taylor
Chapter 24 Knowledge Politics – Jason C Young
Chapter 25 Geopolitics – Jeremy Crampton