I am looking forward to participating in the Silcon Republic panel about putting data to work at the Irish Data Forum on Friday morning with:
Rob Kitchin is presenting an invited talk today at the 3rd National Smart Cities Summit in Croke Park. His talk is entitled ‘Smart cities, big data and their consequences’. It is an updated version of his paper ‘The Real Time City: Big Data and Smart Urbanism‘, with two new sections (the politics of big urban data’ and ‘buggy, brittle and hackable cities’). A full written version of the paper can be found here. And here are the slides:
The following paper has been accepted for presentation at the AAG 2014 Data-based living: peopling and placing ‘big data session organised by Matt Finn (Durham University, UK), in Florida.
A genealogy of data assemblages: tracing the geospatial open access and open data movements in Canada
Authors: Tracey P. Lauriault and Rob Kitchin, NIRSA, NUI Maynooth
The field of geomatics has for decades concerned ‘big data’ about people and places, and the monitoring and managing of population, resources and territory.To better carry out this function global, regional, national and sub-national spatial data infrastructures have been built. SDIs are defined as the institutions, policies, technologies, processes and standards that direct the who, how, what and why geospatial data are collected, stored, manipulated, analyzed, transformed and shared.They are also inter-sectoral, cross-domain, inter-departmental, distributed and interoperable authoritative large biopolitical systems. As part of these projects a loose coalition of highly skilled actors have sought to open such geospatial data from state bodies for wider use.Some of these actors have been joined by a nascent open data movement.To date, however, the complex unfolding of the geospatial open access to/data movement has not been charted.In this paper we provide such a genealogical analysis, tracing the open access/data movement in Canada over the past three decades, unpacking the various overlapping, co-evolving and oppositional data assemblages.We conceive a data assemblage as a complex socio-technical system consisting of a number of inter-related elements — systemsof thought; forms of knowledge; finance; political economy; governmentalities; materialities and infrastructures; practices; organisations and institutions; subjectivities and communities; places; and marketplaces — that work together to frame how data are produced, managed, analyzed, shared and used. We suggest that such a conception and approach has utility in understanding and contextualizing the wider changing data landscape.
The first published output of the Programmable City project was a working paper by Rob Kitchin, presented at the ‘Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn’ workshop at the University of Durham, 20-21 June 2013, and published on the Social Science Research Network.
Abstract
‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of cities. The paper details a number of projects that seek to produce a real-time analysis of the city and provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism.