Kitchin, Rob
(2018)
The Realtimeness of Smart Cities.
TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 8 (2).
pp. 19-42.
ISSN 2038-3460
Abstract
This essay considers the notion of a ‘real-time city’ from a temporal
perspective. The essay is divided into three sections. The first section examines
how smart city technologies seek to utilise real-time computation to
transform urban management and governance and the pace, tempo and scheduling
of everyday life. The second section considers how ICTs are transforming
the nature of time with respect to smart cities. It sets out a set of related
notions of real-time temporalities (network time, chronoscopic time, instantaneous
time, timeless time, machine time, code/spacetime) and unpacks the
nature of ‘realtimeness’ and the relational, contingent, and heterogeneous nature
of real-times operating across smart city platforms and systems. The third
section discusses the politics of adopting real-time technologies in urban management
and the conduct of everyday life and sets out arguments for the
maintenance of asynchronous cities and the adoption of an ethics of temporal
dissonance. The conclusion argues that there is a need for philosophical, theoretical
and empirical work to understand the realtimeness of smart cities and
sets out a number of questions that might guide such research.
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