In the paper, we look at the integration of the digital and the resurgent interest in crafting artefacts. We do this by focusing on the work, relationships and spaces occupied by Pyladies Dublin – a coding group intended for women to learn and ‘craft’ code in the programming language of Python. Pyladies offers an interesting and fruitful case study as it intersects gender, relations of making and places of making, nested firmly within the digital world. The relations of making within the Pyladies group provides salient insight into the production of code, gender and space. Pyladies is predominantly attended by women with the focus to encourage women to become more active members and leaders of the Python community. By producing code in a friendly space, the group also actively works towards producing coding subjectivities and hybrid, mobile spatiality, seeking to produce coding and technology culture that is diverse and gender equitable. We base our ethnographic study to suggest ways in which Pyladies Dublin is consistently engaging in crafting code and crafting coding subjectivity and spatiality.
We thank the generosity of PyLadies Dublin for accommodating us and engaging in very productive conversation in the process.
On May 18th Dr. Gianluca Miscione, lecturer at University College Dublin, delivered a Programmable City seminar on the topics of planning and distributed systems of authentication.
The talk was very well-received and attended. This video of the event offers an account of automation of authentication, blockchain and the novel forms of ‘sociation’ smart contracts
entangle with.
From April 2nd to 30th five of the Programmable City team travelled to Boston (or rather as we quickly learned the Metro-Boston area, which is a conglomerate of 101 municipalities) to undertake fieldwork, staying in Cambridge. Over the course of a busy month the team:
conducted 75 interviews/focus groups;
had 25 informal meetings;
undertook participant observation at 3 civic hacks;
were given 4 tours of facilities and 2 of the city;
presented 7 invited talks (at MIT (3), Harvard, Northeastern, UMass Boston and Analog Devices);
attended 8 other workshops/conferences (Bits and Bricks at MIT; Using Technology to Engage Constituents and Improve Governance at Northeastern; Civic Media meetup at MIT; Urban Mobility in Green Cities at Boston Univ; Microsoft Civic Innovation; Climate Change Policy after Paris at Boston Univ; Digital GeoHumanities at Harvard; City Mart at NY Civic Hall).
The interviews were conducted with a range of different stakeholders including municipal, regional and state-level government officials, various agencies, university researchers, and companies. The research focused on mapping out the smart city landscape in general terms, with a particular in-depth focus on various data-driven initiatives in the metro area, transportation solutions, civic hacking, the development of civic tech, procurement of smart city technologies, and emergency management response.
Along with the 29 interviews conducted on previous visits, we now have a rich dataset of over 100 interviews to analyse in order to make sense of the Boston Metro area’s use of smart city technologies and to compare with Dublin (for which we have a couple of hundred interviews). That said, we’ve not quite finished with the fieldwork and a couple of team members will be back at some point to extend their work. We’ll also be returning for the Association of American Geographers conference which is being held in Boston in 2017 to present some of our findings.
We would like to thank everyone who agreed to take part in our research and for generously sharing their knowledge, insights and time, and also for helping to introduce us to other potential interviewees and generally steer us in the right direction. We very much appreciate the excellent hospitality we received during our visit. The next task is to get all the interviews transcribed and to start the coding work. No small task!
We are delighted to have Dr. Gianluca Miscione as a guest speaker on Wednesday 18th May at 3pm, Iontas Building, room 2.31 for the fourth of our Programmable City seminars this year.
Gianluca Miscione joined the group of Management Information Systems at the School of Business of University College Dublin in June 2012. Previously, he worked as Assistant Professor in Geo-Information and Organization at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Information Systems and Organization from the Sociology Department of the University of Trento, in collaboration with the Sociology Department of Binghamton University New York and the School of International Service of American University in Washington DC. While at the Department of Informatics of the University of Oslo, he broadened his research on information infrastructures on the global scale. Gianluca conducted and contributed to research in Europe, Latin America, India, East Africa, and on the Internet. The focus remained on the interplay between technologies and organizing processes with a specific interest on innovation, development, organizational change and trust.
Gianluca will be talking about organizing processes related to automation of authentication in “smart contracts” exploring what novel forms of ‘sociation’ smart contracts entangle with.
Last Thursday saw the launch of the ‘Getting Smarter about Smart Cities: Improving Data Privacy and Data Security‘ report by Rob Kitchin and published by the Department of the Taoiseach. The report was submitted a few days before the publication of a similar report by Lilian Edwards titled ‘Privacy, Security and Data Protection in Smart Cities: a Critical EU Law Perspective‘ and therefore has no reference to it. Whereas my report takes a more governance and policy focused approach, Lilian’s is more legally focused. If taken as a pair I think they provide a pretty comprehensive overview of the various privacy and security issues raised by smart city technologies and possible solutions.
As part of ‘EU Data Protection Day’ a new report – “Getting smarter about smart cities: Improving data privacy and data security” – was launched today by Dara Murphy T.D., Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection. The report, commissioned by the Data Protection Unit, Department of the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) and written by Rob Kitchin (of The Programmable City project), is the first publication by the new Government Data Forum, a panel of experts drawn from across industry, civil society, academia and the public sector. The Forum advises Government on the opportunities and challenges for society and the economy arising from continued growth in the generation and use of personal data. The report is available from the Department of the Taoiseach website or click here.
Executive Summary
Many cities around the world are seeking to become a smart city, using networked, digital technologies and urban big data to tackle a range of issues, such as improving governance and service delivery, creating more resilient critical infrastructure, growing the local economy, becoming more sustainable, producing better mobility, gaining transparency and accountability, enhancing quality of life, and increasing safety and security. In short, the desire is to use digital technology to improve the lives of citizens, finesse city management, and create economic development.
In this context, a wide range of smart city technologies are being deployed within urban environments, including city operating systems, centralised control rooms, urban dashboards, intelligent transport systems, integrated travel ticketing, bike share schemes, real-time passenger information displays, logistics management systems, smart energy grids, controllable lighting, smart meters, sensor networks, building management systems, and an array of smartphone apps and sharing economy platforms. All of these technologies generate huge quantities of data, much of them in real-time and at a highly granular scale.
These data about cities and their citizens can be put to many good uses and, if shared, for uses beyond the system and purposes for which they were generated. Collectively, these data create the evidence base to run cities more efficiently, productively, sustainably, transparently and fairly. However, generating, processing, analysing, sharing and storing large amounts of actionable data also raise a number of concerns and challenges.
Key amongst these are the data privacy, data protection, and data security issues that arise from the creation of smart cities. Many smart city technologies capture personally identifiable information (PII) and household level data about citizens – their characteristics, their location and movements, and their activities – link these data together to produce new derived data, and use them to create profiles of people and places and to make decisions about them. As such, there are concerns about what a smart city means for people’s privacy and what privacy harms might arise from the sharing, analysis and misuse of urban big data. In addition, there are questions as to how secure smart city technologies and the data they generate are from hacking and theft and what the implications of a data breach are for citizens. While successful cyberattacks on cities are still relatively rare, it is clear that smart city technologies raise a number of cybersecurity concerns that require attention.
To date, the approach to these issues has been haphazard and uncoordinated due to the ad-hoc manner in which they were developed. However, given the potential harms to citizens and the associated costs that can arise, and the potential benefits at stake, this approach should not be allowed to continue. The challenge is to rollout smart city solutions and gain the benefits of their deployment while maintaining infrastructure and system security and systematically minimising any pernicious effects and harms. This is no easy task, given the many stakeholders and vested interests involved and their differing aims and ambitions, and the diverse set of technologies and their complex arrangement.
This report details the development of smart cities and urban big data, highlights the various privacy and security concerns and harms related to the deployment and use of smart city technologies and initiatives, and makes a number of suggestions for addressing trepidations about and ills arising from data privacy, protection and security issues.
It argues that there is no single solution for ensuring that the benefits of creating smart cities are realised and any negative effects are neutralised. Rather, it advocates a multi-pronged approach that uses a suite of solutions, some of which are market driven, some more technical in nature (privacy enhancement technologies), others more policy, regulatory and legally focused (revised fair information practice principles, privacy by design, security by design, education and training), and some more governance and management orientated (at three levels: vision and strategy – smart city advisory board and smart city strategy; oversight of delivery and compliance – smart city governance, ethics and security oversight committee; and day-to-day delivery – core privacy/security team, smart city privacy/security assessments, and computer emergency response team).
These solutions provide a balanced, pragmatic approach that enable the rollout of smart city technologies and initiatives, but in a way that is not prejudicial to people’s privacy, actively work to minimise privacy harms, curtail data breaches, and tackle cybersecurity issues. They also work across the entire life-cycle (from procurement to decommissioning) and span the whole system ecology (all its stakeholders and components). Collectively they promote fairness and equity, protect citizens and cities from harms, and enable improved governance and economic development. Moreover, they do so using an approach that is not heavy handed in nature and is relatively inexpensive to implement. They are by no means definitive, but build on and extend work to date, advance the debate, and detail a practical route forward.
The report concludes that a core requirement for creating smart cities is the adoption of an ethical, principle-led approach designed to best serve the interests of citizens. In other words, being smart about how we plan and run cities consists of much more than deploying data-driven, networked technologies; it requires a smart approach.
