Kitchin, Rob and Cardullo, Paolo (2017) Living Labs, vacancy, and gentrification: The Programmable City Working Paper 28. Working Paper. The Programmable City Working Paper.

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Abstract

This paper evaluates smart city (SC) initiatives in the context of re-using vacant property. More specifically, we focus on living labs (LL) and vacancy in general, as well as on their potential role in fostering creative economy-fuelled gentrification. LL utilise Lo-Fi technologies to foster local digital innovation and support community-focused civic hacking, running various kinds of workshops and engaging with local citizens to co-create digital interventions and apps aimed at ‘solving’ local issues. Five approaches to LL are outlined and discussed in relation to vacancy and gentrification: pop-up initiatives, university-led activities, community organised venues/activities, citizen sensing and crowdsourcing, and tech-led regeneration initiatives. Notwithstanding the potential for generating temporary and independent spaces for transferring and fostering digital competences and increasing citizens’ participation in the SC, we argue that LL largely foster a form of participation framed within a model of civic stewardship for ‘smart citizens’. While presented as horizontal, open, and participative, LL and civic hacking are often rooted in pragmatic and paternalistic discourses and practices related to the production of a creative economy and a specific version of SC. As such, by encouraging a particular kind of re-use of vacant space, LL potentially contributes to gentrification pressures within locales by attracting the creative classes and new investment. We discuss these approaches and issues generally and with respect to examples in Dublin, Ireland.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Additional Information:	Published as an open access pre-print on SocArXiv: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/waq2e. Published under a CC0 1.0 Universal License. This paper was prepared for the workshop, ‘The New Urban Ruins: Vacancy and the Post-Crisis City’, 1-3 March 2017, Trinity College Dublin. The research funding for the paper was provided by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, ‘The Programmable City’ (ERC-2012-AdG-323636).
Keywords:	vacancy; property; gentrification; living labs; civic hacking; creative class; regeneration;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > National Institute for Regional and Spatial analysis, NIRSA
Item ID:	9234
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WAQ2E
Depositing User:	Prof. Rob Kitchin
Date Deposited:	09 Feb 2018 15:16
Publisher:	The Programmable City Working Paper
Funders:	European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award
URI:	http://progcity.maynoothuniversity.ie/
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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