Rob Kitchin
1970
Irish geographer who takes the smart city apart: he asks who defines the problem before celebrating the solution.
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.
On Rob Kitchin in this archive
- Urban ecology
Smart for whom? The other side of smart city rankings
There's a promise that gets repeated at every conference, in every municipal brochure, in every press release: this…
Shoshana Zuboff 3 min read - Urban AI
Transforming Cities: Technopolitics and Urban Governance
Technopolitics and urban governance are two concepts that are becoming increasingly interconnected
Rob Kitchin 2 min read - Urban AI
The Right to the Smart City: Who Benefits from Digital Cities?
The book The Right to the Smart City (2019), by Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, and Rob Kitchin
Henri Lefebvre 2 min read
