"The Real Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism" - Rob Kitchin (2014)

The following is a review/summary of Rob Kitchin's text entitled "The Real Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism"

Kitchin begins by describing and breaking down 'smart cities'. He states - 'smart cities are increasingly composed of and monitored by persuasive and ubiquitous computing and whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship enacted by smart people". He then goes onto say that smart cities are urban places composed of 'everyware' - any digitally instrumented device which is built into the very fabric of urban environments.

Kitchin identifies 5 key characteristics of smart cities:

1. Widespread embedding of ICT
2. business-dominated environment with a neo-liberal government
3. Focus on spatial and human dimensions of the city from a creative city perspective
4. Adoption of smarter cities agenda
5. Focus on social and environmental sustainability

"Smart cities prioritise data capture and analysis as a means for underpinning evidence informed policy development, enacting technocratic governance, empowering citizen and stimulating economic innovation and growth."

Big Data and Cities

• Big data is: huge in volume, velocity, has diverse variance, exhaustive in scope, fine-grained in resolution, relational in nature and is flexible
• There's huge amount of data in the world (estimated 7 exabytes of data in the world in 2010). This accounts for a 40% growth rate, this is primarily due to increasing driving technology, infrastructure, techniques and processes

Three sources of big data:

1. Directed - surveillance (e.g. CCTV)
2. Automated - inherent, automatic function (e.g. tills in shops to manage performance)
3. Volunteered - gifted by the user (e.g. social media)

Automated forms of big data are the most important in providing continuous data to smart cities (e.g. Intelligent Transport System and the automatic number plate recognition system). This data would enable any planner or problem solver to enforce relevant and accurate change in cities

The Real Time City

• Cities use real-time analysis to manage aspects of how city functions are regulated - e.g. vehicle movement, crime, environmental conditions
• This real time analysis has been attempted to be brought into single hubs around the world (e.g. Centro De Operacoes Prefeitora Do Rio in Rio de Janeiro) or in single public-accessible areas (e.g. SmartSantander app - Santander and CASA' London City Dashboard)
• "This use of big data provides the basis for a more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent city"

Five Concerns About a Real Time City

1. The Politics of Big Urban Data

• Data is not totally objective and pre-analytic - it is shaped by a system of thought, technical know-how, public and political opinion, ethics and regulatory features
• Big data generally captures things openly expressed or their by-products (e.g. things that are physically said, done or committed). Big data does not consider the "complex contingent and rational inner life-worlds of people and places"
• Data are generated in systems designed to enact a particular political and policy vision. Results are infected by social privilege and values.   

2. Technocratic Governance and City Development

• This is the redirecting of big data as an automated solution - this allows governments to have the excuse - "its not us, its the data!"
• This technocratic governance is narrow in scope and fails to account for wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital

3, The Corporisation of City Governance and a Technical Lock-In

• Technical corporate interests are embedded into cities - there are 3 concerns of this:

1. It promotes neo-liberal economy and marketisation of the public sector
2. Technocratic lock-in - the corporate path dependency cannot be be easily diverted (e.g. US car manufacturers during the mid 1900s)
3. 'One size fits all smart city in a box' - takes little account for the uniqueness of places, people and culture

4, Buggy, Brittle and Hackable Cities

• The creation of code/spaces through projects leaves smart cities vulnerable to viruses, crashes, glitches and hacks
• Cities are ever reliant and more technology is layered on top of already brittle foundations of ICT, this just superimposes the original issue.

5. The Panoptic City?

With automated, real-time data and other forms being introduced regularly, issues of privacy, confidentiality and freedom of expression