Fast and Slow Urbanism - Rob Kitchin

Transforming infrastructures lecture

Lecture Fast and Slow Urbanism by Rob Kitchin from Maynooth University

Abstract: To date, critical examinations of smart cities have largely ignored their temporality. The talk will consider smart cities from a spatiotemporal perspective, arguing that they produce a new timescape and constitute space–time machines. The first third will consider the effects of smart city technologies on temporal relations and practices, and how they reframe and utilize the relationship between past, present, and future. The middle part will focus more specifically on urban development and the speculative futures of fast urbanism, in which cities rapidly expand, and their corollary of deceleration. The final part will consider the temporal politics and tactics of slowness as a means to challenge the temporal density of everyday life and the forces of fast urbanism.

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 is a recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

Transforming infrastructures lecture series: In this lecture series the research hub Transforming cities invites international lecturers to share their view on urban sustainability transformations and the role of infrastructures.

One of the key mediators of urban transitions are technical infrastructures, like energy, water, mobility, waste, and communication services. However, those systems are interlaced with the built environments of cities. Since infrastructure choices shape urban futures for many decades, they impose exceptionally high requirements in terms of transformative knowledge on how to introduce change and address vested interests, how to anticipate future risks and opportunities, and how to envision pragmatic pathways to more desirable urban futures.

Other lectures in this series are:

• Thursday 1 April, 15h30: Matti Siemiatycki (University of Toronto), City Building Through Partnership: In Search of a Collaborative Advantage
• Thursday 24 June, 16h00: Karin Pfeffer (University of Twente), Urban infrastructuring: the role of geo-spatial data and tools in the planning and management of urban infrastructure
• Thursday 15 July, 16h30: Stephanie Pincetl (UCLA), Distributed Energy Resources as new Infrastructure, versus Incumbent Utilities