The Programmable City PhD/Postdoc projects

The Programmable City Team

25/03/2014

The Programmable City Project

NIRSA, NUIM

The Programmable City

Understanding Technology and Social Innovation:

An Investigation of Smart Bikeshare

Robert Bradshaw

Smart Bikeshare

• Now a global phenomenon.

• Heavily reliant on ICT

• Typically implemented by government

agencies through PPPs

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

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?

How are discourses and practices of city

governance translated into code?

Sophia Maalsen

The Programmable City

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

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

Towards a Digital Urban Commons:Developing a

situated computing praxis for a more direct

democracy

Jim Merricks White

• 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

• 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

The Role of Dublin in the Global Innovation Network

of Cloud Computing

Alan Moore

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?

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

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.

How does software alter the forms and nature of

work?

Leighton Evans

Software at work…

• The Logistics Industry

• Manifests, manual mapping, route knowledge

• GPS, optimised routing, QR codes/barcodes

• A simple job transduced by code…

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

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?

‘How software is discursively produced and

legitimised by vested interests’

Darach Mac Donncha

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

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’

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’?

Programming Urban Lives

Sung-Yueh Perng

Orchestrating Travel

• Receiving and reproducing locational

updates

• Incorporating updates in everyday life

• Travel as produced by information, emotion

and imagination

Coding care

• Hackathons and app competitions

• Programmer meet-ups

• Code as socially and collaboratively

produced

Dublin Dashboard

Performance Indicators & Metrics

Gavin McArdle

NCG, NIRSA, NUIM

The Programmable City Launch

Dublin Dashboard

DEMO

http://www.nuim.ie/progcity/

@ProgCity

Thank You!