Tag Archives: smart city

Dublin as a smart city?

The soft launch of Smart Dublin, a website showcasing the city’s foray into becoming a smart city, was launched in October. It has been accompanied by the four local authorities actively collaborating on a Smart Dublin strategy and the coordination of various smart city initiatives.

The Smart Dublin vision consists of a mix of data-driven, networked infrastructure, fostering economic growth and entrepreneurship, and citizen-centric initiatives, with a particular focus on creating more efficient city services, improving transportation flows, tackling flooding, attracting inward investment and encouraging indigenous start-ups and SMEs, and opening data and encouraging civic engagement. Initiatives concerning security and policing, which are more prominent in UK and US cities where terrorism is seen as more of a threat, are less of a priority.

Beyond the ambition and rhetoric of Smart Dublin, to what extent is Dublin already a smart city? An audit of the four Dublin local authorities (Dublin City Council, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, South Dublin County Council, Fingal County Council) reveals a relatively large number of mainstreamed smart city initiatives (see Table 1).

Table 1: Smart Dublin

Smart economy	Dublinked	Provides access to city datasets, including some real-time data feeds
	Digital Hub	Cluster of digital content and technology enterprises; provides space, infrastructure and support services for digital tech companies
	Startup commissioner	Advocates for tech start-ups; organises events and support schemes
	NDRC	Provides support and capital investment for start-ups; runs/sponsors hackathons
	Greenway	Cleantech cluster supporting and developing the green economy
Smart government	Fix-your-street	A website and app for reporting issues (e.g. vandalism, dumping, potholes) to local authorities
	Public realm operations map	An interactive map that reports scheduled public works
	CRM workflow	Customer relations management system used to interface with the public and undertake workflow planning
	Library digital services	A suite of library apps for various services
Smart mobility	Intelligent transport system	A suite of different technologies including SCATS (transduction loops at junctions), CCTV, ANPR (automatic number plate recognition cameras), detection of breaking red lights at Luas (tram) lines, feeding into a centralised traffic control room
	Eflow road tolling	Automated roll tolling/billing using transponders
	Fleet management	GPS tracking of local authority fleets and route optimisation
	Leapcard	Smart card access/payment for trains, buses and trams.
	Real-time Passenger Information	Digital displays at bus and tram stops and train stations providing information on the arrival/departure time of services
	Smart parking	Transponder payment system; park-by-text; display around city; API feed
	Information display signs	Traffic (crash/delay) alerts; speeding display signs
	Bliptracker displays	Bike counters; car parking spaces counters; airport queue counters
	Dublin Bikes	Public hire bike scheme
Smart environment	Sensor flood monitoring	Use of sensor network to monitor river levels by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and local authorities
	Air pollution monitoring	EPA network of pollution sensors
	Public building energy use	Real-time monitoring of energy use in local authority buildings; publicly displayed on screens
	Big Belly Bins	Networked compactor bins that use sensors to monitor levels; waste collection route optimisation
Smart living	Street CCTV	Network of digital interactive CCTV cameras (alter direction/zoom)
	Community CCTV	Network of CCTV in public places (e.g. parks); provides SMS alerts; can communicate through speakers in lampposts
	Sonitus sound sensing	Network of sound sensors monitoring noise levels
	Monitored sheltered housing	Remote monitoring of movement sensors and panic buttons in sheltered homes
	Smart Stadium	Sensor network monitoring different facets of stadium use
Smart people	Dublin Dashboard	Comprehensive set of interactive graphs and maps of city data, including real-time data, as well location-based services
	Fingal Open Data	Local authority open data sets
	Map Alerter	Real-time alerts for weather and flooding
	CIVIQ	Consultation and deliberation tool for planning and development
	Citizenspace	Consultation and deliberation tool for planning and development
	Tog	Civic hacking meetups
	Code for Ireland	Civic hacking coding meetups

This table only includes operational, rolled-out initiatives procured or co-developed with local authorities, plus selected citizen initiatives.

Unlike other places, where smart cities are being built from the ground up, the Smart Dublin initiatives in Table 1 are building on top of legacy infrastructure and many decades of social and economic programmes. As such, smart city initiatives and technologies have to be layered on top of long-standing systems and schemes, and be accommodated within or replace existing organisational structures.

Beyond the initiatives in Table 1, there is a whole raft of smart city apps available; some provided/commissioned by local authorities (e.g. Art Trax, Heritage Walks, Mindmindr), others developed by citizens and commercial enterprises (e.g. Hit the Road, Parkya, Walk Dublin). Moreover, there are a range of ongoing research and pilot projects that have yet to be mainstreamed, and others that ran for a handful of years before terminating. Further, beyond the economic development organisations listed in Table 1, there is a fairly well developed ecosystem of ‘university-industry-local government’ smart city research centres and collaborations (including ‘The Programmable City’ (implications of creating smart cities), ‘Innovation Value Institute’ (business models for smart city technologies), ‘Insight’ (data analytics for smart cities), ‘CONNECT’ (networking and comms for smart cities), ‘Future Cities’ (sensor, communication and analytical technological solutions for sustainability), ‘Dublin Energy Lab’ (smart grids and meters) and some industry centres (e.g. IBM’s smart city global research team) and test-beds (especially relating to the Internet of Things). Organisations such as Codema and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) undertake smart energy/grid projects and provide advice and guidance.

In short, Dublin can lay claim to being a nascent smart city, rather than simply trying to become one. However, it is very much at the start of realising the ambition of the Smart Dublin strategy and the form of smart city it will become is still very much open to influence.

Claudio Coletta, Liam Heaphy, Rob Kitchin

New paper: The Praxis and Politics of Building Urban Dashboards

Leave a reply

A new working paper by Rob Kitchin, Sophia Maalsen and Gavin McArdle – The Praxis and Politics of Building Urban Dashboards – has been published on SSRN as Programmable City Working Paper 11. The abstract runs thus:

This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard — a website that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information — from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence, to unpack the building of the Dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.

Download t he paper

New paper: Solutions, Strategies and Frictions in Civic Hacking

1 Reply

A new paper by Sung-Yueh Perng and Rob Kitchin – Solutions, Strategies and Frictions in Civic Hacking – has been published on SSRN as Programmable City Working Paper 10. The abstract runs thus:

Through the development and adoption of technical solutions to address city issues the smart city seeks to create effortless and friction-free environments and systems. Yet, the design and implementation of such technical solutions are friction-rich endeavours which produce unanticipated consequences and generate turbulence that foreclose the creation of friction-free city solutions. In this paper we argue that a focus on frictions is important for understanding civic hacking and the role of social smart citizens, providing an account of frictions in the development of a smart city app. The empirical study adopted an ethnographically informed mobile methods approach to follow how frictions emerge and linger in the design and production of a queuing app developed through civic hacking. In so doing, the paper charts how solutions have to be worked up and strategies re-negotiated when a shared motivation meets differing skills, perspectives, codes or designs; how solutions are contingently stabilised in technological, motivational, spatiotemporal and organisational specificities rather than unfolding in a smooth, linear, progressive trajectory.

Download the PDF

Two 3 year postdoc posts on The Programmable City project

Leave a reply

We’re recruiting! We are seeking two postdoctoral researchers to work on the Programmable City project to (1) unpack data assemblages, and (2) examine big data industry and smart cities.
These posts will complement the existing research team.

Post 1: Unpacking a data assemblage, including the associated technological stack
Adopting a critical data studies approach, this researcher will examine in depth, and compare and contrast, two data assemblages, mostly likely operating in the public sector. The aim is to gain a detailed conceptual and empirical understanding from a social sciences perspective of how data infrastructures are on the one hand technically assembled (through a technical stack composed of hardware, networks, software, algorithms, data, interfaces) and operated using a set of technical and social practices, and how their production and operation is socially, politically, legally and economically framed. The empirical research will consist primarily of ethnographic work within organisations, along with in-depth interviews with key actors and stakeholders.

Post 2: Big data industry and smart cities
This researcher will, on the one hand, examine in depth the development of big data industries in Dublin and Boston, examining the big data ecosystem (including big data analytics and data brokers) and its associated discursive regime, and on the other, examine how big data are being mobilised and deployed within smart city initiatives as part of big data assemblages. The aim is to gain a detailed conceptual and empirical understanding of the development and use of big data and big data analytics within the private and public sector to complement existing project work on open data, and how big data are being deployed in practice in cities and any associated consequences. The empirical research will consist primarily of in-depth interviews with key actors and stakeholders and one and two case studies of urban big data initiatives.

There will be some latitude to re-jig these projects in negotiation with the principal investigator in order to fit the interests, expertise and experience of the appointed researchers.

Full details can be found on the Maynooth University vacancies page (labelled
Post Doctoral Researcher x 2 – NIRSA).

Ayona Datta, 'Fast Cities: New Utopias of Smart Urbanism in India'

1 Reply

A few weeks ago Ayona Datta, a senior lecturer in “Citizenship and Belonging” at the University of Leeds, spoke to an audience in Maynooth about the emergence of smart urbanism in India and the proliferation of the smart city discourse in the country. Titled ‘Fast Cities: New Utopias of Smart Urbanism in India’, Dr. Datta’s talk was the second seminar of this academic year from the ongoing Programmable City Project. Focusing mainly on the development of fast/smart cities in her native country, the talk also complimented a number of additional critiques of smart city initiatives that have gained resonance such as: associated technological solutionism; the depoliticalisation of the concept; the development of a project solely for an emerging tech-savvy, middle class; and the strategic framing of the concept in the near distant future amongst other notable issues. Continue reading →

Job: Three year postdoc on the Programmable City project

Leave a reply

We’re pleased to announce the advertisement of a three year postdoc position on the Programmable City project. Full details of the project can be found on the Maynooth University HR page, but essentially the post will study algorithms and code used in smart city initiatives (broadly conceived) from a software studies perspective. As such, the project will critically examine how software developers translate rules, procedures and policies into a complex architecture of interlinked algorithms that manage and govern how people traverse or interact with urban systems. It will thus provide an in-depth analysis of how software and data are being produced to aid the regulation of city life in an age of software and ‘big data’. The primary methods will be a selection from those set out in the paper ‘Thinking critically about and researching algorithms’.

We are seeking applications from researchers with an interest in software studies, critical data studies, urban studies, and smart cities to work in an interdisciplinary team. Applicants will:

have a keen interest in understanding software from a social science perspective;
be a proficient programmer and able to comprehend other developer’s code;
have a good, broad range of qualitative data creation and analysis skills;
be interested in theory building;
have an aptitude to work well in an interdisciplinary team;
be prepared to undertake overseas fieldwork;
have a commitment to publishing and presenting their work;
have a willingness to communicate through new social media;
be prepared to archive their data for future re-use by others;
be prepared to help organise and attend workshops and conferences.

The closing data is 5th December. See the full job description here for more details.

We would encourage any interested candidates to apply for the post and for readers of the blog to bring the post to the attention of those who you think might be interested, or circulate in your networks/social media.