ERC Advanced Investigator on the Programmable City project, Professor Rob Kitchin, was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal last month, and now we have video footage of the event from the Royal Irish Academy in which the contributions of the gold medalists to not only research communities but also Irish society were highlighted.
For the full video, please visit http://vimeo.com/89718695.
Welcome back!
After the Launch event earlier this week, we are really happy to have Dr Andy Hudson-Smith to discussion Citizens, Data, Virtual Reality and the Internet of Things! Please see the details of our next seminar below.
Time: 16:00 – 18:00, Wednesday, 2 April, 2014
Venue: Room 2.31, 2nd Floor Iontas Building, North Campus NUI Maynooth (Map)
Abstract
Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few (IBM, 2103). This data can, compared to traditional data sources, be defined as ‘big’. Cities and urban environments are the main sources for big data, every minute 100,000 tweets are sent globally, Google receives 2,000,000 search requests and users share 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook (Mashable, 2012). An increasingly amount of this data stream is geolocated, from Check-ins via Foursquare through to Tweets and searches via Google Now, the data cities and individuals emit can be collected and viewed to make the data city visible, aiding our understanding of now only how urban systems operate but opening up the possibility of a real-time view of the city at large (Hudson-Smith, 2013). The talk explores systems such as The City Dashboard (http://www.citydashboard.org) and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) in terms of data collection, visualization and analysis. Joining these up creates a move towards the Smart City and via innovations in IoT a look towards augmented reality pointing towards the the creation of a ‘Smart Citizen’, ‘the Quantified Self’ and ultimately a Smart City.
IBM (2103), Big Data at the Speed of Business, http://www-01.ibm.
Mashable (2012), How Much Data is Created Every Minute, http://mashable.com/
Hudson-Smith (2013) – Tagging and Tracking, Architectural Design, 01, 2014, High Definition, Zero Tolerance in Design and Production.
Speaker bio
Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith is Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at The Bartlett, University College London. Andy is a Reader in Digital Urban Systems and Editor-in-Chief of Future Internet Journal, he is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Greater London Authority Smart London Board and Course Founder of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation and MSc in Smart Cities at University College London.
Yesterday the Programmable City project was officially launched by the Minister for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock, TD. The event was a great success, with some very interesting papers from our guest speakers, Siobhan Clarke, Martin Dodge, Adam Greenfield, Peter Finnegan, Tim Reardon, and Matt Wilson (program here). We hope to put up videos of the talks shortly, along with slides. We were very fortunate to have an engaged audience, who asked some interesting questions and thanks to everyone that attended. The event received some media attention.
RTE News site, including Morning Ireland radio clip
Morning Edition (TV clip – 31.08 minutes in)
Irish Times article (clipping below).
Rob Kitchin presented a Bellwether Lecture at the Oxford Institute Institute on February 28th entitled ‘The Real Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism’. OII have just uploaded the webcast of the full lecture. The written version of the paper was recently published in Geojournal (visit GeoJournal website or Download). Kitchin, R. (2014) The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal 79(1): 1-14.
We have 3 great launch events coming up and you are invited! See below.
2. On March 24th, 7-9 PM, in the eveing we are supporting a Public Event: Rethinking the Smart City: A Primer, organised by Provisional University & Dublin Art & Technology Association. Adam Greenfield will be speaking, Rob Kitchin will provide introductions and Aphra Kerr (NUIM), Jim Merricks White (NUIM) Rachel O’Dwyer (TCD). Come to , Corner of Fenian Street 7 Westland Row, Dublin 2. Read more details here! Space is limited so please .
3. Also, in the afternoon of March 24th, between 2-4PM, we have a Reading Seminar Mapping, Data & Urban space – w/Matthew Wilson at NUIM, Room 2.31, 2nd Floor, Iontas Building, North Campus, NUI Maynooth (Map). Read details here. 
Parking information can be found at http://progcity.maynoothuniversity.ie/about/nui-maynooth/.
The Programmable City project is excited to be supporting an upcoming public discussion with Adam Greenfield around the concept of the smart city.
When: March 24th 7pm – 9pm
Where: Dunlop Oriel House, Corner of Fenian Street 7 Westland Row, Dublin 2
Map: Speakers: Adam Greenfield, with an introduction by Rob Kitchin
Respondents: Aphra Kerr (NUIM), Jim Merricks White (NUIM) Rachel O’Dwyer (TCD)
The event is organised by Provisional University & Dublin Art & Technology Association.
Admission is free but places are limited. To book go to .
It’s generally understood that a smart city refers to integrated information and communication technologies, embedded sensor networks and smart girds rapidly becoming part of the infrastructural fabric of our cities, and contributing to its overall function and management. But the smart city is not just an informational overlay. It extends to a broader rationality for resource management (water, energy, transport, air), for governance and agency administration, and for economic stimulation.
While this is significant, various factors seem to have prevented extended public discussion about smart cities. This might be because planning for the smart city is still limited to academic research institutions and government initiatives. It might also be the case that the disciplinary approach to the smart city means it doesn’t always join up with other relevant discussions about urban planning and policy, resource management and the right to the city currently taking place, even though we share and articulate many of the same concerns. We therefore see this event as a primer for more ongoing discussion on the smart city, as it relates to these broader issues and particularly as it relates to Dublin City.
What are we talking about when we talk about the smart city? What limitations are there to the way that the smart city is currently articulated? What alternatives might exist?
Biographies:
Adam Greenfield is a writer, urbanist and founding director of New York City-based design practice Urbanscale. His work focuses on the intersection of design, technology and culture, with a strong interest in urban form and metropolitan experience. Greenfield is the author of Everyware: the Dawning age of Ubiquitous Computing (New Riders, 2006) and Against the Smart City (The city is here for you to use) alongside Nurri Kim (Do Projects, 2013). Adam is also Senior Urban Fellow at LSE Cities.
Rob Kitchin is a professor and ERC Advanced Investigator in the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. His book ‘Code/Space’ (with Martin Dodge) won the Association of American Geographers ‘Meridian Book Award’ for the outstanding book in the discipline in 2011. He is currently a PI on the Programmable City project, the Digital Repository of Ireland, and the All-Island Research Observatory.