This talk details the promises and perils of smart cities and suggests ways to deliver on the potential benefits while minimizing the harms.

1. Smart Cities
Realising the promises whilst minimizing the
perils
Prof. Rob Kitchin
Maynooth University

2. Smart cities
• Lots of definitions of smart cities. Generally encompass three
dynamics:
• Instrumentation and regulation
• Cities composed of ‘everyware’: ICT infrastructure, devices,
sensors, software, big data
• Cities become knowable and controllable in new, dynamic,
reactive ways
• More efficient, competitive and productive service delivery
• Policy and economic development
• Advances in ICT reconfiguring human capital, creativity,
innovation, education, sustainability, governance
• Cities as competitive, entrepreneurial, knowledge-driven
systems
• Social innovation, civic engagement and hactivism
• ICT provides means for transparent and accountable
governance, new forms of civic participation, better informed
citizens

3. Smart city technologies
Domain Example technologies
Government
E-government systems; online transactions; city operating
systems; performance management systems; urban
dashboards
Security and emergency
services
Centralised control rooms; digital surveillance; predictive
policing; coordinated emergency response
Transport
Intelligent transport systems; integrated ticketing; smart
travel cards; bikeshare; real-time passenger information;
smart parking; logistics management; transport apps
Energy Smart grids; smart meters; energy usage apps; smart
lighting
Waste Compactor bins and dynamic routing/collection
Environment Sensor networks (e.g., pollution, noise, weather; land
movement; flood management)
Buildings Building management systems; sensor networks
Homes Smart meters; app controlled smart appliances
Civic Various apps; open data; volunteered data/hacks

4. Urban big data
• Directed
o Surveillance: CCTV,
drones/satellite
o Scaled public admin records
• Automated
o Automated surveillance
o Digital devices
o Sensors, actuators,
transponders, meters (IoT)
o Interactions and transactions
• Volunteered
o Social media
o Sousveillance/wearables
o Crowdsourcing/neogeography
o Citizen science

5. Urban big data
• Diverse range of public and private
generation of fine-scale (uniquely
indexical) data about citizens and places in
real-time:
• utilities
• transport providers, logistics systems
• environmental agencies
• mobile phone operators
• app developers
• social media sites
• travel and accommodation websites
• home appliances and entertainment
systems
• financial institutions and retail chains
• private surveillance and security firms
• remote sensing, aerial surveying
• emergency services
• Producing a data deluge that can be
combined, analyzed, acted upon

6. Single systems

7. Integrated, city & sector wide

8. Data-driven urbanism

9. www.dublindashboard.ie

10. Data-driven urbanism
• Cities are becoming:
• ever more instrumented and networked, their systems
interlinked and integrated
• knowable and controllable in new dynamic ways
• Urban operational governance and city services are
becoming highly responsive to a form of networked
urbanism in which big data systems are:
• prefiguring and setting the urban agenda
• producing a deluge of contextual and actionable data
• influencing and controlling how city systems respond and
perform in real-time
• transforming practices of city governance

11. Smart
Cities
Smart government
e-gov, open data,
transparency, accountability,
evidence-informed decision
making, better service
delivery
Smart living
quality of life,
safety, security,
manage risk
Smart mobility
intelligent transport
systems, multi-modal inter-
op, efficiency
Smart
environment
green energy,
sustainability,
resilience
Smart people
more informed, creativity, inclusivity,
empowerment, participation
Smart economy
entrepreneurship,
innovation,
productivity,
competiveness
Promise of smart cities

12. Eight critiques of smart cities

13. 1. City as a knowable, rational,
steerable machine
• Cities are understood to consist of a set
of knowable and manageable systems
that act in largely rational, mechanical,
linear and hierarchical ways and can be
steered and controlled
• Operational governance performed using
a set of mechanistic data levers
underpinned by an instrumental
rationality in the form of KPIs and
analytics
• Includes forms of automated
management (automatic, autonomous,
automated)
• Driving new forms of new managerialism
• Cities are fluid, open, complex, multi-
level, contingent and relational systems

14. 2. Objective, neutral, non-
ideological approach
• Smart city solutions are technical,
objective and non-ideological
• Presents an image of being politically
benign and commonsensical
• However, systems do not exist
independently of the ideas, techniques,
technologies, people and contexts that
conceive, produce, process, manage,
analyze and store them
• They are situated, contingent, relational,
and framed and used contextually to try
and achieve certain aims and goals
• They also possess a number of technical
and managerial issues concerning design,
measurement, processing – e.g., with
respect to data sampling, handling,
veracity (accuracy, fidelity), uncertainty,
error, bias, reliability, calibration,
lineage

15. 3. Technocratic governance and
solutionism
• All aspects of a city can be treated as
technical problems and solved through
technical approaches
• Practices ‘solutionism’: complex open
systems can be disassembled into neatly
defined problems that can be fixed or
optimized through computation
• All that is required is sufficient data and
suitable algorithms
• Undermines/replaces other forms of
knowing cities, plus phronesis (knowledge
derived from practice and deliberation)
and metis (knowledge based on
experience)
• Marginalizes other forms of governance
and solutions

16. 4. Neoliberal political economy &
corporatisation of governance
• Overly driven by
corporations interested
capturing government
functions as new market
opportunities
• Promoting the marketisation
of public services and the
hollowing out of the state
• City functions are
administered for profit
• Potentially creates
technological lock-ins or
corporate path dependencies

17. 5. Ahistorical, aspatial,
homogenizing and bounded
• One size fits all approach
• Treats cities as a generic market
• Treats cities as if bounded entities
• Often idealised imaginary of green
field development, rather than
complexities of established
communities, competing interests
and legacy infrastructure
• Fails to recognize history, culture,
context, local sense of place,
politics, governance, diversity, etc.
• Fails to recognize
interdependencies across space

18. 6. Reinforce power geometries &
inequalities
• Smart cities/solutions are the
vision of certain vested
interests
• They serve the interests of
certain constituencies
• They control/regulate
populations
• Actively marginalize/dispossess
some

19. 7. Profound social, political,
ethical effects
• Surveillance and erosion
privacy (in its diverse
forms)
• Ownership, control,
data markets
• Social sorting
• Anticipatory governance
• Nudge
• Dynamic pricing
• Data security
• Control creep

20. Location/movement tracking
• Controllable digital CCTV cameras + ANPR + facial
recognition
• Smart phones: cell masts, GPS, wifi
• Sensor networks: capture and track phone identifiers
such as MAC addresses
• Wifi mesh: capture & track phones with wifi turned on
• Smart card tracking: barcodes/RFID chips (buildings &
public transport)
• Vehicle tracking: unique ID transponders for automated
road tolls & car parking
• Other staging points: ATMs, credit card use, metadata
tagging
• Electronic tagging; shared calenders

21. 8. Buggy, brittle, hackable
• Intertwines two open, highly
complex and contingent systems -
cities and digital systems
• Creates environments which are
inherently buggy and brittle; prone
to viruses, glitches, crashes, and
security hacks
• Producing stable, robust and
secure devices and infrastructures
becomes more of a challenge
• New systems lead to the
discontinuation of analogue
alternatives — no alternatives until
the system is fixed/rebooted

22. Getter smarter about smart cities
Realising promises while minimizing harms

23. Re-imagining smart cities
• Rather than abandon the notion of smart
cities, need to re-imagine and reframe them
and address shortcomings:
• Reframing goals
• Reframing cities
• Reframing management/governance
• Reframing epistemology
• Addressing ethical/security concerns

24. Reframing goals
• Normative questions
• Who and what are smart cities for?
• New markets & profit?
• State control and regulation?
• Citizens and quality of life?
• What kind of cities do we want to
create and live in?
• Set thinking within a social
justice/citizenship framework, not
simply management, governance or
economy

25. Reframing cities
• Cities are not simply technical
systems that can be solved with
technical solutions
• Nor can they simply be steered and
controlled
• Cities are complex, ever-evolving,
inter-dependent contingent systems
• They are full of culture, politics,
competing interests and wicked
problems and often unfold in
unpredictable ways
• Smart city tech/discourse need to
shift to recognize and accommodate
a more nuanced, relational
understanding of cities

26. Reframing management and
governance
• Contextual use in management
• Co-creation, co-production,
citizen-engaged
• Used in conjunction with
deliberative democracy, policy
changes, social/political
interventions, other investments,
etc.
• Flexible and bespoke solutions;
layer onto legacy systems
• Open platforms;
standards/interoperability
• Smart city vision: smart city
advisory board; smart city strategy

27. Reframing epistemology
• How we come to know and predict the city
• Urban science, urban informatics
• Reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing,
essentialist, deterministic, producing a
limited and limiting understanding of cities
• But not one without use or value
• Reframe the realist epistemology and
instrumental rationality to acknowledge
situatedness, positionality, contingencies,
assumptions, shortcomings; to avow grand
claims to truth, or God’s eye view
• Also to forego asserting value over other
forms of knowledge such as phronesis and
metis, but to be used in combination with
them

28. Addressing ethical/security concerns
• Market:
• Industry standards and self-regulation
• Privacy/security as competitive advantage
• Technological
• End-to-end strong encryption, access controls, security controls,
audit trails, backups, up-to-date patching, etc.
• Privacy enhancement tools
• Policy and regulation
• FIPPs
• Privacy by design;
• security by design
• Governance
• Oversight of delivery and compliance: smart city governance, ethics
and security oversight committee;
• Day-to-day delivery: core privacy/security team; smart city
privacy/security assessments; and computer emergency response
team

29. Conclusion
• Entering an era of embedded and mobile computation
• Vast quantities of real-time data, cities are responsive to
these data, and enable new kinds of monitoring, regulation
and control
• Cities are becoming data-driven and are enacting new
forms of algorithmic governance
• Whilst smart city technologies undoubtedly provide a set of
solutions for urban problems they also raise a number of
fundamental, normative and ethical questions
• The challenge is to realise the benefits whilst minimizing
pernicious effects

30. Background
http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/progcity
@progcity
Rob.Kitchin@nuim.ie
@robkitchin
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/rob-kitchin