Tag Archives: smart city

New paper: From a Single Line of Code to an Entire City

A new paper by Rob Kitchin has been posted as open access on SSRN. From a Single Line of Code to an Entire City: Reframing Thinking on Code and the City is The Programmable City Working Paper 4.

Abstract:
Cities are rapidly becoming composed of digitally-mediated components and infrastructures, their systems augmented and mediated by software, with widespread consequences for how they are managed, governed and experienced. This transformation has been accompanied by critical scholarship that has sought to understand the relationship between code and the city. Whilst this work has produced many useful insights, in this paper I argue that it also has a number of shortcomings. Principal amongst these is that the literatures concerning code and the city have remained quite divided. Studies that focus on code are often narrow in remit, fading out the city, and tend to fetishize and potentially decontextualises code at the expense of the wider socio-technical assemblage within which it is embedded. Studies that focus on the city tend to examine the effects of code, but rarely unpack the constitution and mechanics of the code producing those effects. To provide a more holistic account of the relationship between code and the city I forward two interlinked conceptual frameworks. The first places code within a wider socio-technical assemblage. The second conceives the city as being composed of millions of such assemblages. In so doing, the latter seeks to provide a means of productively building a conceptual and empirical understanding of programmable urbanism that scales from individual lines of code to the complexity of an entire urban system.

Keywords: code, city, software, programmable urbanism, software studies, smart city, urban studies, assemblages

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Nathaniel Tkacz – Dashboards and Data Signals

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On Wednesday 8th October 2014, Nathaniel Tkacz visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on “Dashboards and Data Signals”. Nathaniel is Assistant Professor in CIM at The University of Warwick. He is currently Principal Investigator for the ESRC-funded project ‘Interrogating the Dashboard’. He is author or editor of Wikipedia and The Politics of Openness, The MoneyLab Reader (forthcoming 2015), Digital Light (forthcoming 2014) and Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader.

On dashboards and data signals, Nathaniel summarised his discussion as: Screen interfaces that aggregate and visualise flows of data, namely, dashboards, are greatly increasing in number and function. They coincide with the heightened interest in information visualisation and massive claims about the transformative power of big data. David Cameron has a bespoke dashboard, as does US Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen. For the rest of us, there are a range of dashboard apps available from Apple or Google’s respective markets. The control screens one would expect to see in a Bloomberg Terminal, flight control tower or security operation – that is, in strategic and logistical spaces – is today becoming generalised and individualised. As is true of all interfaces, a dashboard is a relation. It is a relation of control, to be sure, and one that equally reflects a desire for control among the ‘data deluge’ as much as it does its achievement. But a closer look at the dashboard reveals much more than the proliferation of control. It can tell us, for example, about the changing nature of indicators, the everyday experience of data-driven life, and emerging forms of rationality, and it is these things that I will explore in this presentation.

Seminar – Fast Cities: New Utopias of Smart Urbanism in India

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We are delighted to welcome Ayona Datta to Maynooth on Monday 3rd November for the second of our Programmable City seminars this semester. Ayona Datta is Senior Lecturer in Citizenship and Belonging at the University of Leeds. Ayona’s research and writing focuses on the gendered processes of citizenship and the gendered politics of urban renewal and urbanization across the global north and south. Ayona is the author of The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement (2012) and is editor of Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections (2011).

The seminar will focus on the development of smart cities in India. In 2014, the newly elected Indian government announced an ambitious programme of building 100 new smart cities across India. These cities are presented as the answer to the challenges of rural-urban migration, rapid urbanisation, and sustainable development in India. Ayona’s seminar will examine these claims by focussing on two Indian ‘smart cities’ being built from scratch.

Seminar 4 Video: Andrew Hudson-Smith – Citizens, Data, Virtual Reality and the Internet of Things: Revisiting the City

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These seminar videos explore systems such as The City Dashboard 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.

Bio: Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith is Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at The Bartlett, University College London, 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.

Public Event – Rethinking the Smart City: A Primer

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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.

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

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An extended version of a Programmable City working paper, with two new sections, has been 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.

‘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, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.