Over the past decade the concept and development of smart cities has unfolded rapidly with many city administrations implementing smart city initiatives and strategies and a diverse ecology of companies and researchers producing and deploying smart city technologies. In contrast to those that seek to realise the benefits of a smart city vision, a number of critics have highlighted a number of shortcomings, challenges and risks with such endeavours. This talk outlines a third path, one that aims to realise the benefits of smart city initiatives while recasting the thinking and ethos underpinning them and addressing their deficiencies and limitations. I argue that smart city thinking and initiatives need to be reframed, reimagined and remade in six ways. Three of these concern normative and conceptual thinking with regards to goals, cities and epistemology, and three concern more practical and political thinking and praxes with regards to management/governance, ethics and security, and stakeholders and working relationships. The talk does not seek to be definitive or comprehensive, but rather to provide conceptual and practical suggestions and stimulate debate about how to productively recast smart urbanism and the creation of smart cities.
Rob Kitchin is a professor and European Research Council Advanced Investigator at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He is currently a PI on the Programmable City project, the Digitial Repository of Ireland, the All-Island Research Observatory, and the Dublin Dashboard.
He has published widely across the social sciences, including 24 written or edited academic books and over 140 articles and book chapters. He is an editor of the international journal Dialogues in Human Geography, and is a past editor of Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geography. He was the editor-in-chief of the 12 volume, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, and edits two book series, Irish Society and Key Concepts in Geography.
His book ‘Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life’ (with Martin Dodge) won the Association of American Geographers ‘Meridian Book Award’ for the outstanding book in the discipline in 2011 and a ‘CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2011’ award from the American Library Association. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.
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