The Right to the Smart City
Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University, Ireland
Cities, Intelligent Energy Networks and the Decarbonisation of Built Environments: Do These Climate Change Adaptations Keep 1.5 Alive?
Mark Deakin, Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom
Autonomous Vehicles: Wireless Networking for Cooperative Maneuvering
Alexey Vinel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany
The Right to the Smart City
Rob Kitchin
Maynooth University
Ireland
Brief Bio
Rob Kitchin is a professor in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. He was a European Research Council Advanced Investigator on the Programmable City project (2013-2018) and a principal investigator on the Building City Dashboards project (2016-2020). He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 31 academic books and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters. He has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geography, and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.
Abstract
This talk provides a critical reflection on the idea and ideals of the smart city. It considers a number of political and normative questions relating to ethics, governmentality, citizenship, sovereignty and social justice, and how these are conceived and operationalized within smart cities, illuminated through a number of empirical cases. The final part of the talk explores 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.
Cities, Intelligent Energy Networks and the Decarbonisation of Built Environments: Do These Climate Change Adaptations Keep 1.5 Alive?
Mark Deakin
Edinburgh Napier University
United Kingdom
![]()
Brief Bio
As a member of the ECs Smart Cities and Communities Stakeholder Group, Mark has conducted research for the European Investment Bank.This sought to analyse the triple helix of smart cities as a transnational process of regional innovation. The success of this research allowed him to become a member of the Scottish Smart Cities and Sustainable Island Regional Accelerator Project. This wanted to accelerate the transition of Scotland into a series of world class Smart Cities and Sustainable Islands.The success of this accelerator project has led to Mark’s involvement in the quadruple helix of Europe’s RIS3 (Smart Specialisation Strategy). His current research into the helicies of smart specialisation strategies is eco-centric and focusses on the potential of mass retrofit programmes to deliver the UKs Climate Change targets. This research sets the social baseline for and environmental profile of an energy efficient-low carbon zone. Covering approximately 2,500 residences, shops, offices and factories, this technique of analysis allows socio-demographic (household, income, employment and health) data and environmental (energy consumption and carbon emission) information to be deployed as a platform for assessing the social and environmental sustainability (ecological-integrity and equity) of such large-scale development proposals. Large-scale development proposals whose innovations in turn pave the way for post-carbon economies claiming to be climate neutral.
Abstract
This talk shall reflect on the plan-led experiments cities are conducting to assemble intelligent energy networks. Exploring the planning of these networks, it shall review: (1) how cities are deploying such intelligence to transition away from carbon-based energy and towards renewables: (2) the smart grids that are laid down as infrastructures to support the management of this decarbonisation strategy and: (3) net zero status of the built environments which they provide a platform for. In going on to interrogate the status of these platforms, the talk shall examine whether the built environments emerging from this adaptation to climate change do keep “1.5 alive”.
Autonomous Vehicles: Wireless Networking for Cooperative Maneuvering
Alexey Vinel
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Germany
Brief Bio
Alexey Vinel (1983) is a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. Previously he was a professor at the University of Passau, Germany. Since 2015, he has been a professor at Halmstad University, Sweden. He received the Ph.D. degree from the Tampere University of Technology, Finland in 2013. He has been the Senior Member of the IEEE since 2012. His areas of interests include wireless communications, vehicular networking, and cooperative autonomous driving.
Abstract
Last year Elon Musk posted in his Twitter that he had realized that self-driving cars are a "hard problem". We believe that enabling communication between the vehicles is an essential necessary step for cracking this problem in context of fully autonomous urban driving. We will share some of our recent research results on autonomous vehicles with a focus on inter-vehicular networking and respective cooperative driving functionalities. Platooning, i.e. an automatic following of wirelessly connected vehicles closely behind each other, will be presented slightly deeper. We will explain the approach of assessing the safety of the platooning functionality by coupling the quality of radio communications to the likelihood of a rear-end collision. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KKS) in the framework of ”Safety of Connected Intelligent Vehicles in Smart Cities – SafeSmart” project (2019–2023), the Swedish Innovation Agency (VINNOVA) in the framework of ”Emergency Vehicle Traffic Light Preemption in Cities – EPIC” project (2020–2022) and the ELLIIT Strategic Research Network.