Rob Kitchin

With Martin Dodge he coined «code/space» to name places that stop working if the software fails: an airport without a check-in system is not a slow airport, it is a useless building. The city now depends on code that almost nobody audits and that belongs to private companies.

On the smart city his critique is precise: indicators are not neutral. Measuring traffic and not pollution, or efficiency and not equity, does not describe the city — it decides what counts as a problem. And whoever chooses the indicators is usually whoever sells the sensors.

An Irish geographer, professor at Maynooth University, Kitchin moved from the geography of disability and cartography to become the reference analyst of the digital city. Code/Space (2011, with Martin Dodge) showed that many urban spaces, from the airport to the supermarket, no longer work without software, and The Data Revolution (2014, second edition 2022) fixed the vocabulary for thinking about big data, open data and their infrastructures.

With the Programmable City project, funded by the European Research Council, and the Dublin Dashboard, he studied from the inside how a city is governed through dashboards, and from there came his critiques of the corporate smart city: data are never raw, rankings are opinions with decimals and smart citizenship is usually a scaffold without power. The Right to the Smart City (2019), Slow Computing (2020) and Data Lives (2021) propose alternatives. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.