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GeoJournal (2014) 79:114DOI 10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8
The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism
Rob Kitchin
Published online: 29 November 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract Smart cities is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce big data. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efcient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The nal section of the paper provides a critical reection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining ve emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.
Keywords Big data Smart cities Urbanism
Real-time analysis Data analytics Ubiquitous
computing Governance
Introduction
For the past two decades, urban analysts and theorists have been charting the evolution of cities during an era where information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been exerting a growing and pervasive inuence on the nature, structure and enactment of urban infrastructure, management, economic activity and everyday life. Cities which have embraced ICT as a development strategy, being pioneers in embedding digital infrastructure and systems into their urban fabric and utilising them for entrepreneurial and regulatory effect, have been variously labelled as wired cities (Dutton et al. 1987), cyber cities (Graham and Marvin 1999), digital cities (Ishida and Isbister 2000), intelligent cities (Komninos 2002), smart cities (Hollands 2008) or sentient cities (Shepard 2011). Whilst each of these terms is used in a particular way to conceptualise the relationship between ICT and contemporary urbanism, they share a focus on the effects of ICT on urban form, processes and modes of living, and in recent years have been largely subsumed within the label smart cities, a term which has gained traction in...