Gastvortrag Prof. Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University, Ireland): "The Right to the Smart City"
The aspiration of a smart city has been promoted as a means to improve urban management and governance, and address issues of safety and sustainability. It has also been critiqued for being overly top-down and technocratic in orientation, serving the interests of states, companies and wealthy populations. This talk will critically reflect on the idea and ideals of the smart city, considering a number of political and normative questions relating to ethics, participation, citizenship, and social justice, and how these are conceived and operationalized within smart cities. The final part of the talk will explore the notion of ‘the right to the smart city’ and how this might be used to recast the smart city for citizens in emancipatory and empowering ways.
Rob Kitchin is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. His research examines the production of digital geographies and his present ERC-funded project (2022-27) is ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories About and With Planning and Property Data’. His previous ERC project, ‘The Programmable City’, examined smart city developments. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 36 academic books and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters, and he has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography, and Social and Cultural Geography, and co-editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He is a recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.