Robert Bradshaw, Smart Bikeshare
Dr Sophia Maalsen, How are discourses and practices of city governance translated into code?
Jim Merricks White, Towards a Digital Urban Commons:Developing a situated computing praxis for a more direct democracy
Alan Moore, The Role of Dublin in the Global Innovation Network of Cloud Computing
Dr Leighton Evans, How does software alter the forms and nature of work?
Darach Mac Donncha,‘How software is discursively produced and legitimised by vested interests’
Dr Sung-Yueh Perng, Programming Urban Lives
Dr Gavin McArdle, NCG, NIRSA, NUIM, Dublin Dashboard Performance Indicators & Metrics
3. Smart Bikeshare
• Now a global phenomenon.
• Heavily reliant on ICT
• Typically implemented by government
agencies through PPPs
4. Next Generation Bikeshare
• Improved information integration with
Public Transportation
• Use of GPS rather than RFID technology to
enable active tracking
• Increased use of crowdsourced data to
support operations and management
functions
• Using collaborative platforms to support
dialogue and innovation
5. Research Objectives
• What forces coalesce to legitimise the
adoption of certain designs and resist
others?
• What are the impacts of these choices on
citizen empowerment and social innovation?
• How might systems which have limited social
value be enhanced and augmented?
6. How are discourses and practices of city
governance translated into code?
Sophia Maalsen
The Programmable City
7. Focus
• Cities are governed in multiple ways through
complex circuits of power and politics
• Software-enabled technologies are one set of tools
for operationalising forms of management and
regulation
• In order to do this successfully, systems of
governance have to be translated into data,
metadata, standards, algorithms and routines.
• Adopting a software studies approach this sub-
project will examine how developers (as individuals,
teams, firms) translate rules, procedures and policies
into complex architectures of interlinked algorithms
that manage and govern how people traverse or
interact with urban systems
8. Approach
• The primary methods will be:
• ethnographies of projects and specifically programming
teams in different contexts
• interviews with core staff and key stakeholders
• a new method of algorithm archaeology which seeks to
excavate how ideas are translated into code and
construct biographies of code
• acknowledge how the software shapes the programmer’s
actions and therefore shapes the city too
• Will draw on my doctoral research on object agency,
biographies and genealogies of music reuse and
reinterpretation
• Case studies have yet to be determined
9. Towards a Digital Urban Commons:Developing a
situated computing praxis for a more direct
democracy
Jim Merricks White
10. • question: ‘How is software used to regulate and govern city life?’
• the smart city == the entrepreneurial city in an age of austerity
• but what does it mean for a city to be smart?
• what are the reasons we might want to have a smart city?
• how should the smart city be implemented?
Code tranduces city management
11. • philosophical approach: poststructural & postmarxist
• methodology:
• multi-case study (Dublin & Boston)
• participatory action research vs. participant observation
• interviews with elites
• purpose of research: to contribute to a radical computing praxis
• contribution to literature:
• struggles over the vision of ICT’s role in the city
• diagonalism in the production of ubiquitous & pervasive
computing
• ways in which commons are assembled, accumulated by capital
& then escape a rigid exchange value classification
Approach to research question
12. The Role of Dublin in the Global Innovation Network
of Cloud Computing
Alan Moore
13. The Programmable City
This research is part of the Working
in the City theme: “How is the
geography and political economy of
software production organised?”
Situated within Economic Geography,
the research will look at the
geography of the innovation of Cloud
Computing, especially its software.
Specifically, I am trying to understand
Dublin’s role in the evolution of this
maturing assemblage of independent
yet integrated technologies. Are we
contributors or just adopters?
14. The Theoretical Positioning
Supervised by Chris Van Egeraat and Rob
Kitchin, the research will build on the recent
Global Innovation Network approach (Cooke,
2012)
Building on from Global Production Theory this
approach tries to account for innovation:
- having become increasingly more
complex
- being carried out through ever evolving
networks of actors
- occurring in globally distributed locations
- yet reliant on local social and physical
attributes
- no longer relying solely on production
chains
15. The Focus of the Research
This research is interested in exploring the evolutionary role that Dublin has
played (is playing) in the innovation of Cloud Computing especially in terms of
the core enabling software.
It will also seek to identify what are the key localised attributes of Dublin in
comparison to other software hubs and how these influence the city’s role in
software production.
Given Dublin’s actual role in the Global Innovation Network, current national
policy in terms of investment and resource development will be explored.
16. How does software alter the forms and nature of
work?
Leighton Evans
17. Software at work…
• The Logistics Industry
• Manifests, manual mapping, route knowledge
• GPS, optimised routing, QR codes/barcodes
• A simple job transduced by code…
18. Workplaces and methods
• Transduction of the
workplace by code
• The experience of
‘being-in’ work
experientially altered
by code
• Genealogies
• Interviews
• Ethnographic research
• The case studies:
• The office space
• The farm
• The shop/supermarket
• The construction
industry
19. Key Questions
• What are the ways in which software has structured work
practices, functions and processes?
• How has the workplace been transduced by code?
• How have the socio-spatial practices and organization of
team and individual work in workplaces been
reconfigured and rescaled by software?
• How has software altered the tasks, forms, spaces and
scales of work?
• How has the change to a software-mediated workplace
been managed and realised by organisations?
• What have been the effects on workers of the shift to a
software-mediated workplace, both in their doing of
work and in their perception of their roles and workplace
lives?
20. ‘How software is discursively produced and
legitimised by vested interests’
Darach Mac Donncha
21. Engagement with wider project
• Programmable City Project
• Contribute to a wider evaluation of the use of
software-enabled technologies and services
• Review how software-enabled technologies augment
our understanding of contemporary urbanism
• My research
• Socio-Techno Politics of software with respect to
‘Living in the City’
• Focus on specific aspect of the emerging
programmable city with respect to the translation of
code
• How software is discursively produced and
legitimised by vested interests
22. Research project
• Objective: A critical examination of the political
economic underpinnings of the ‘smart city’ concept
• A city whose economy and governance are driven
by entrepreneurship
• Review different visions of what a ‘smart city’ is
• Role of PPPs (Public-Private Partnerships) in the
promotion of the ‘smart city’
23. Research project
• Not all about the profit line?
• Useful tool in analysing data, leading to better
decision making and increased incidents of
efficiency?
• Examine the accompanying discourses of the
‘smart city’, i.e. ‘efficient’, ‘safe’, ‘technological
advanced’, and ‘green’
• Differentiate between two research sites, i.e.
Dublin and Boston
• Different city, different degree of ‘smartness’?
25. Orchestrating Travel
• Receiving and reproducing locational
updates
• Incorporating updates in everyday life
• Travel as produced by information, emotion
and imagination
26. Coding care
• Hackathons and app competitions
• Programmer meet-ups
• Code as socially and collaboratively
produced
