On May 17th of this year, we had the pleasure of having Prof. Antoine Picon in Maynooth University to give a seminar on “Smart Cities: A Design Perspective”.
This presentation combines historical and design approaches to the study of Smart Cities in order to understand better what is at stake with their rise.
A new open access piece has been published in IEEE Pervasive Computing, an in-depth interview of Rob Kitchin by Katja Schechtner (MIT). The interview discusses how different groups (mainly architects and planners and electronic engineers and computer scientists) have different understandings of cities, and why cities are sometimes reluctant to adopt smart city solutions and how that adoption gap might be closed.
We are delighted to announce that ProgCity postdoc researchers Claudio Coletta, Liam Heaphy and Sung-Yueh Perng have been awarded the IRC Ulysses Grant 2016 to start a new research collaboration between the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (i3-CSI) at the École des Mines in Paris, and the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) in Maynooth University.
The collaborative project, entitled “Reshaping cities through data and experiments”, includes workshops and a series of coordinated publications that will advance our understanding of the contemporary city in relation to urban data and experimentation. The first workshop will take place in Maynooth University (29-31 May 2017) and the second one in the École des Mines, in October 2017.
The overall questions that the collaboration seeks to address are:
1. What data are generated by cities in the context of smart cities and core services such as transport? For whom are these data created and on what infrastructure are they dependent?
2. How are the experiments and demonstrations for urban change organised and accounted? Which actors are involved and how do they engage?
3. How experiments and demonstration through data affect the everyday life of cities, their management and governance practices?
The scientific exchange will explore the following three intertwined aspects that are critical to urban management, governance and everyday life in cities: civic engagement, mobility and automated management.
With respect to civic engagement, the two groups will reflect upon specific ways in which civic initiatives seek to obtain, repurpose and act on urban data for improving quality of life. With respect to mobility, the two groups will discuss the convergence of organisational, technological, political and economic dimensions in initiatives dedicated to innovative mobility practices and demonstrations. They will investigate (1) how such global phenomena are related to wider public or private development strategies (2) how “best practices”, business plans or technical systems circulate from one place to another. With respect to automated management, the two groups will explore the testing of new urban services where the urban environment is used as a living laboratory, such as IoT (Internet of Things) technologies for measuring air pollution and traffic monitoring. Thus conceived the project has two main projected outcomes: to produce scientific and transferable knowledge on the shaping of contemporary cities and to create awareness on the implications of experimental and data-driven urbanism.
Claudio, Liam and Sung-Yueh are honoured and grateful to the IRC for this great opportunity to advance their research on smart cities and build new international collaborations.
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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’.
Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy and Darach MacDonncha have published a new working paper: ‘Smart cities, urban technocrats, epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions‘ on on SocArXiv. It has been prepared for the ‘A New Technocracy’ workshop,University of Amsterdam, March 20-21 2017.
Abstract
In this paper, we argue that the ideas, ideals and the rapid proliferation of smart city rhetoric and initiatives globally have been facilitated and promoted by three inter-related communities. A new set of ‘urban technocrats’ – chief innovation/technology/data officers, project managers, consultants, designers, engineers, change-management civil servants, and academics – many of which have become embedded in city administrations. A smart cities ‘epistemic community’; that is, a network of knowledge and policy experts that share a worldview and a common set of normative beliefs, values and practices with respect to addressing urban issues, and work to help decision-makers identify and deploy technological solutions to solve city problems. A wider ‘advocacy coalition’ of smart city stakeholders and vested interests who collaborate to promote the uptake and embedding of a smart city approach to urban management and governance. We examine the roles of new urban technocrats and the multiscale formation and operation of a smart cities epistemic community and advocacy coalitions, detailing a number of institutional networks at global, supra-national, national, and local scales. In the final section, we consider the translation of the ideas and practices of the smart city into the policies and work of city administrations. In particular, we consider what might be termed the ‘last mile problem’ and the reasons why, despite a vast and active set of technocrats and epistemic community and advocacy coalition, smart city initiatives are yet to become fully mainstreamed and the smart city mission successfully realized in cities across the globe. We illustrate this last mile problem through a discussion of plans to introduce smart lighting in Dublin.
Key words: smart cities, epistemic community, advocacy coalition, technocrats, urban governance, city administration, smart lighting
The paper can be downloaded here
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge have published a new Programmable City working paper (No. 24), ‘The (in)security of smart cities: vulnerabilities, risks, mitigation and prevention‘ on SocArXiv.
Abstract: In this paper we examine the current state of play with regards to the security of smart city initiatives. Smart city technologies are promoted as an effective way to counter and manage uncertainty and urban risks through the effective and efficient delivery of services, yet paradoxically they create new vulnerabilities and threats, including making city infrastructure and services insecure, brittle, and open to extended forms of criminal activity. This paradox has largely been ignored or underestimated by commercial and governmental interests or tackled through a technically-mediated mitigation approach. We identify five forms of vulnerabilities with respect to smart city technologies, detail the present extent of cyberattacks on networked infrastructure and services, and present a number of illustrative examples. We then adopt a normative approach to explore existing mitigation strategies, suggesting a wider set of systemic interventions (including security-by-design, remedial security patching and replacement, formation of core security and computer emergency response teams, a change in procurement procedures, and continuing professional development). We discuss how this approach might be enacted and enforced through market-led and regulation/management measures, and examine a more radical preventative approach to security.
Keywords: crime, cyberattacks, mitigation, risk, security, smart cities, urban resilience
Download here