1. Smart Cities, Big Data
and Their Consequences
Rob Kitchin
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Dublin, 20 November 2013
2. Smart urbanism
• Two schools of ideas:
– Instrumentation and regulation
• Cities composed of „everyware‟: ICT, infrastructure, devices,
sensors, software, big data
• Cities become knowable and controllable in new, dynamic,
reactive ways
– Policy, development and governance
• Cities as competitive, entrepreneurial, knowledge-driven systems
• human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability,
governance undergirded and driven by advances in ICT
• Both underpinned by ICT
• Going to focus on first view
3. Instrumented view
• The city is composed of “constellations of
instruments across many scales that are
connected through multiple networks which
provide continuous data regarding the
movements of people and materials”
(Batty et al., 2012: 482)
• “The modern city exists as a haze of software
instructions. Nearly every urban practice is
becoming mediated by code.”
(Thrift and Amin 2002)
4. Instrumented view
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Extensive ICT networks
everyware: ubiquitous/pervasive/mobile computing;
computation available everywhere, built into everything
social and locative media
distributed and forever storage
sophisticated data analytics
software-enabled automated management
(automatic, automated, autonomous modes of
regulation)
Smart city
5. Big data
• A key ingredient in this smart city vision is the production
and analysis of „big data‟
– huge in volume, consisting of terabytes or petabytes of
data;
– high in velocity, being created in or near real-time;
– diverse in variety, being structured and unstructured in
nature, and often temporally and spatially referenced;
– exhaustive in scope, striving to capture entire populations
or systems (n=all), or at least much larger sample sizes
than would be employed in traditional, small data studies;
– Fine-grained in resolution, aiming to be as detailed as
possible, and uniquely indexical in identification;
– relational in nature, containing common fields that enable
the conjoining of different data sets;
– flexible, holding the traits of extensionality (can add new
fields easily) and scaleability (can expand in size rapidly).
6. Sources of big urban data
• Directed surveillance
• Automated data generation
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Capture systems
Digital devices
Transactional and interactional data
Clickstream data
Sensed data
IoT (Internet of things) and M2M (machine to machine) data
• Volunteered data generation
– Social media
– Crowdsourcing
– Citizen science
7. The data revolution
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Global data stored
– 2000: 800,000 petabytes (250 bytes)
– 2011: 1.8 zettabytes (270 bytes)
2012 Facebook processing 2.5 billion pieces of content (links, stores,
photos, news, etc) and 500+ terabytes of data, 2.7 billion „Like‟
actions and 300 million photo uploads per day
2012: Wal-Mart generating >2.5 PB of data relating to more than 1
million customer transactions every hour (“equivalent to 167 times
the information contained in all the books in the Library of Congress”)
2013 EU commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, stated that
1.7 million billion bytes of data per minute were being generated
globally (1.7 terrabytes - 240 bytes)
Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, estimates that more data are
being produced every two days than in all of history prior to 2003
2020: 35 zettabytes stored?
8. Real-time city analytics
• Instrumented city, plus volunteered data offers
the promise of real-time analytics underpinned by
massive, dynamic, varied, detailed, inter-related,
flexible, low cost data that can be interlinked to
provide highly detailed views
• The city can be known and managed in real-time
and can be sentient to some degree
10. Integrating systems
• Centro De Operacoes
Prefeitura Do Rio
• 30 real-time systems +
crowdsourced data + public
administration data
• Surveillance + dataveillance
11. The promise of big data for cities
• Real-time information and services for citizens
• More transparency and accountability of government
and services
• Enhanced participation in city life
• Better models and simulations for future
development; enhanced understanding of cities
• More efficient, competitive and productive service
delivery; better run cities
• Able to tackle particular issues more effectively;
enhanced quality of life
• Stimulate creativity, innovation and economic growth
13. The politics of big urban data
• Data within smart city initiatives are portrayed as being
natural, essential, neutral and objective measures.
• Sensors, cameras, algorithms have no politics or agenda;
they reflect and produce truths about the world
• Such a framing enables smart city projects to present as
being politically benign and commonsensical
• However, data do not exist independently of the ideas,
techniques, technologies, people and contexts that
conceive, produce, process, manage, analyze and store
them; “raw data is an oxymoron”
• Big data are representations and samples, inflected by
social privilege and social values
• They are generated within systems designed to enact a
particular political and policy vision
14. Technocratic governance
• Promotes an evidence-based, algorithmic approach to city
governance
• Presumes that all aspects of a city can be monitored,
measured and treated as technical problems which can be
addressed through technical solutions (instrumental
rationality or „solutionalism‟)
• Highly narrow in scope and reductionist and functionalist in
approach
• Fails to take account of the wider effects of culture, politics,
policy, governance and capital that shape city life and how it
unfolds
• Technological solutions are not going to solve deep rooted
structural problems of cities; they tackle the manifestations
of a problem not its causes
15. Corporatisation of governance
• Governance is being overly shaped and captured by
large corporate interests
• The concern around such a move is three-fold
• First, that it actively promotes a neoliberal political
economy and the marketisation of public services
• Second, that it creates a technological lock-in that
beholden cities to particular technological
platforms/corporate solutions
• Third, that it leads to „one size fits all smart city in a box‟
solutions that takes little account of local diversity and
uniqueness and encourages the city to adapt to the
software and not vice versa
16. Buggy, brittle and hackable cities
• Creating city services and spaces that are dependent on
software to function – code/spaces
• Yet software is an unusual product because it is
inherently partial, provisional, porous and open to failure
• Leaves city systems vulnerable to viruses, glitches,
crashes, and security hacks -- risks of critical failures,
„normal accidents‟, criminality and security breaches
• And as systems become ever more complex,
interconnected and dependent on software, the challenge
of producing stable, robust and secure devices and
infrastructures magnifies
• Whilst smart cities solve some problems, to what extent
to they create others?
17. The panoptic city?
• Big urban data radically increases surveillance
and dataveillance
• Now possible to track and trace individuals and
their actions, interactions and transactions in
minute detail across a number of domains
• Integration binds data streams together to move
from oligopticons to panopticon
• Enables fine-grained profiling, social sorting, and
anticipatory governance
• Significant threat to privacy, confidentiality,
freedom of expression
18. Conclusion
• Instrumentation and big data are key components of smart
city developments
• Offers the promises highly granular, real-time analysis of
city life that can be used to enhance understanding,
governance, quality of life, efficiency, effectiveness,
competitiveness, productivity, etc.
• They also raise questions concerning the politics of big
urban data, the roll out of technocratic and corporatized
governance, vulnerabilities and the creation of buggy,
brittle and hackable cities, and widespread
surveillance/dataveillance
• As well as creating technological solutions underpinned by
rather simple pro-discourses, we need to focus critical
attention on the nature and implications of the smart cities
we are envisaging and building to ensure we make the
kinds of cities citizens want rather than those that best suit
states or corporations
19. Full written version of paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2289141
Rob.Kitchin@nuim.ie
@robkitchin
http://www.scoop.it/t/the-programmable-city
