Rob Kitchin
Biographic Data
| ID | 201606 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rob Kitchin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rob |
| FAMILY NAME | Kitchin |
| SIGNATURE | KITCHIN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Ireland, Maynooth |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4458-7299 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 127 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3467 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 125 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 29 |
Calculating housing vacancy
The digital turn in planning and the production of ‘good enough’ planning systems
The digitalization of planning has taken place in a context where planning work is on-going and cannot be halted, and in which there are embedded institutional and technical systems and practices, as well as a number of technical, regulatory and socio-cultural data frictions. This context has led to a sub-optimizing approach to digitalization. In this paper, we examine the digital mediation of planning through an in-depth case study of a multi-sc…
Data debates in urban development
Data relating to urban development are often accepted and used at face value, treated as impartial, objective, incontrovertible facts. However, the validity and veracity of official datasets can be challenged, with a data debate forming between actors, which might include the provision of alternative datasets and counter-facts. Such data debates can be significant as they undermine confidence and trust in datasets, which in turn can have knowledg…
Assemblage theory, data systems and data ecosystems
The work of the state has been transformed by digitalisation and datafication, with paper systems increasingly complemented and replaced by digital data systems. While much research has been undertaken on the effects of these data systems on e-government and e-governance, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the ontological nature of the data systems themselves, how they come into being, operate, iterate, and work in conjunction …
Genealogy of a data ecosystem
In this paper, we document how a data ecosystem emerges and evolves as a socio-technical assemblage over a 25 year period charting its digitalisation as it transfers from a paper-based endeavour to one that is digitally mediated. Our case study is the development and control function (the management of the planning and construction pipeline from planning application, to appeals process, to building control) of the Irish planning system. We propos…
Provincialising platform citizenship
Commercial digital platforms possess a universal design and interface regardless of cities or particular political-cultural traditions. This is also the case for corporately owned platforms designed to facilitate citizen engagement in civic issues. In contrast, civic platforms rooted in a FOSS approach are configurable and can be adapted in context to produce tailored interactions. In this paper, we examine what this adaptability means for citize…
Urban digital twins
Originating in the field of manufacturing, the Digital Twin (DT) concept is now being applied across a range of application domains, from personal healthcare to whole Earth observation. Despite enthusiasm for DTs, uncertainties have arisen concerning their lack of definition and technical specificity. This paper reassesses the concept with particular consideration for its application to cities in the form of Urban Digital Twins (UDTs). Rather tha…
Data mobilities
International audience
Distant time and the spatio-temporalities of statecraft
The value in Ayona Datta's notion of distant time is that the spatialisation of temporal power and its resistance is made explicit. As she demonstrates, the temporal tactics and techniques of statecraft are expressed in the landscape; in the case of Shimla, literally contoured onto the hillside, reproducing spatio-temporal divides. In this commentary, I tease out the contoured temporal relations of the smart and subaltern city and argue that Datt…
Temporal challenges in researching digital timescapes
Finance, Mapping, Data
Digital twins and deep maps
Mapping is now thoroughly digital at all stages of production and maps are widely used in digital form. This digital turn has transformed the nature of mapping and maps. Maps need no longer be static representations, but rather constitute spatial media, providing an interactive, dynamic means for creating, discussing, and sharing spatial information and mediating spatial practices. This has included the development of 3D mapping, including nascen…
Rethinking Maps
The authors argue that cartography is profitably conceived as a processual, rather than representational, science. Building on recent analysis concerning the philosophical underpinnings of cartography they question the ontological security of maps, contending that it is productive to rethink cartography as ontogenetic in nature; that is maps emerge through practices and have no secure ontological status. Drawing on the concepts of transduction an…
Conceptualising smart cities
The central premise of Soe et al’s paper, ‘Institutionalising Smart City Research and Innovation’, is that the notion of a smart city remains unclear, with several definitions existing within the literature, and that one way to determine the parameters of smart cities is to examine the foci and approach of research groups globally who study and contribute to the smart city agenda. However, in charting the work of 50 or so institutes and centres, …
Dashboards and Public Health
Planning and 3D Spatial Media
For three decades the case has been made for the development and adoption of digital tools that better support spatial decision-making in planning using 3D information. Here we report on a study that interviewed planners from local authorities in Ireland concerning their knowledge and experience of 3D spatial media. We consider the potential uses of these tools in planning, and the prospects for their adoption within local government planning dep…
For or Against ‘The Business of Benchmarking’
This short response does two things. First, it argues that urban benchmarks have specific and structural limits not identified in the principal essay in this intervention, which curtail the kinds of constructive and critical work such benchmarks might be expected to perform. ISO 37120 is discussed as an example. Second, it proposes a pluralistic approach to engagement and offers six suggestions for how academics might take urban benchmarks and th…
Charting the design and implementation of the smart city
Previous scholarship on the smart city has expressed concern at the top-down, technocratic nature of smart technologies and the lack of meaningful citizen participation in their development. In this paper, we utilize instrumentalization theory to trace the initiation, design and deployment of a specific smart city initiative: bikeshare in Hamilton, Ontario. Smart bikeshare is increasingly seen as complicit in processes of social stratification, s…
Creating design guidelines for building city dashboards from a user's perspectives
City dashboards are increasingly becoming a tool of urban management and governance, used by administrations to monitor key urban metrics and the performance of services and policy. To date, however, there has been little research done from a users perspective of what constitutes a good or bad city dashboard and to establish essential user-centered design principles. In this foundational study, we examine four city dashboards with respect to thei…
Building City Dashboards for Different Types of Users
City dashboard websites are a common modality for bringing open-government philosophies into the public domain. Yet, there has been little research concerning the optimum design for city dashboards that takes account of users’ expectations and skills. Indeed, there has been minimal exploration of user-centered design (UCD) to improve the usability and utility of smart city technologies in general. This study sought to conduct a user evaluation an…
Progress and prospects for data-driven coordinated management and emergency response
Internationally, there is a drive to make coordinated management and emergency response (CMER) more data-driven and centralized through shared data infrastructures and control centres. While there are a few well-known case examples of data-driven CMER, in general it has been partially implemented. In this paper, we highlight the importance of historical institutional and spatial context and path dependencies in shaping the development of CMERs wi…
Geographies of the Covid-19 pandemic
The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in the most devastating global public health crisis in over a century. At present, over 10 million people from around the world have contracted the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to more than 500,000 deaths globally. The global health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic has been compounded by political, economic, and social crises that have exacerbated existing ineq…
Reflections on the first decade of Dialogues in Human Geography and the road ahead
Civil liberties or public health, or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of Covid-19
To help tackle the spread of COVID-19 a range of surveillance technologies – smartphone apps, facial recognition and thermal cameras, biometric wearables, smart helmets, drones, and predictive analytics – have been rapidly developed and deployed. Used for contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, travel permission, social distancing/movement monitoring, and symptom tracking, their rushed rollout has been justified by the argument that they are vit…
Digital Lives in the Global City
"Digital Lives in the Global City: Contesting Infrastructures." The AAG Review of Books, 10(4), pp. 4–5
Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts
This article examines how the availability of Big Data, coupled with new data analytics, challenges established epistemologies across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and assesses the extent to which they are engendering paradigm shifts across multiple disciplines. In particular, it critically explores new forms of empiricism that declare 'the end of theory', the creation of data-driven rather than knowledge-driven science, and the d…
The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism
Digital turn, digital geographies
Geography is in the midst of a digital turn. This turn is reflected in both geographic scholarship and praxis across sub-disciplines. We advance a threefold categorization of the intensifying relationship between geography and the digital, documenting geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital. Instead of promoting a single theoretical framework for making sense of the digital or proclaiming the advent of a separate field of ‘d…
Thinking critically about and researching algorithms
More and more aspects of our everyday lives are being mediated, augmented, produced and regulated by software-enabled technologies. Software is fundamentally composed of algorithms: sets of defined steps structured to process instructions/data to produce an output. This paper synthesises and extends emerging critical thinking about algorithms and considers how best to research them in practice. Four main arguments are developed. First, there is a…
Rethinking maps
In this paper we argue that cartography is profitably conceived as a processual, rather than representational, science. Building on recent analysis concerning the philosophical underpinnings of cartography we question the ontological security of maps, contending that it is productive to rethink cartography as ontogenetic in nature; that is maps emerge through practices and have no secure ontological status. Drawing on the concepts of transduction…
Knowing and governing cities through urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards
Since the mid-1990s a plethora of indicator projects have been developed and adopted by cities seeking to measure and monitor various aspects of urban systems. These have been accompanied by city benchmarking endeavours that seek to compare intra- and inter-urban performance. More recently, the data underpinning such projects have started to become more open to citizens, more real-time in nature generated through sensors and locative/social media…
Out of Place', 'Knowing One's Place
A BSTR AC T Disabled people are m arginalised and excluded from `m ainstream ' society. In general, our understanding of the processes of exclusion is grounded in time and history. In this paper, it is argued that space, as well as tim e, is instrumental in reproducing and sustaining disablist practices. Disability has distinct spatialities that work to exclude and oppress disabled people. Spaces are currently organised to keep disabled people `i…
Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city
Making sense of smart cities
This commentary characterises and critiques research on smart cities. I argue that much of the writing and rhetoric about smart cities seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical and pragmatic. More critically orientated scholarship, while making vital conceptual and political interventions, presently has four shortcomings that inhibit making sense of and refashioning the smart city agenda: the lack of detailed genealogies of the concept and …
Code and the Transduction of Space
The effects of software (code) on the spatial formation of everyday life are best understood through a theoretical framework that utilizes the concepts of technicity (the productive power of technology to make things happen) and transduction (the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices). Examples from the lives of three Londoners illustrate that code makes a difference to everyday life because its technicity a…
Codes of Life
In this paper we present a detailed examination of identification codes, their embeddedness in everyday life, and how recent trends are qualitatively altering their nature and power. Developing a Foucaultian analysis we argue that identification codes are key components of governmentality and capitalism. They provide a means of representing, collating, sorting, categorising, matching, profiling, regulating, of generating information, knowledge, a…
The Researched Opinions on Research
Thirty-five disabled people with a range of physical, sensory and mental \nimpairments were interviewed about (1) their experiences of research; (2) their general \nopinions concerning research; (3) whether they thought research had served/was serving \ndisabled people well; (4) how research on disability should be conducted; (5) who should \nconduct research on disability; and, finally, (6) what they would like to be researched. In \nthis paper,…
Big data and human geography
We are entering an era of big data – data sets that are characterised by high volume, velocity, variety, exhaustivity, resolution and indexicality, relationality and flexibility. Much of these data are spatially and temporally referenced and offer many possibilities for enhancing geographical understanding, including for post-positivist scholars. Big data also, however, poses a number of challenges and risks to geographic scholarship and raises a…
Cognitive maps
Towards geographies of cyberspace
This article uses two cyberspatial technologies, namely, the Internet (the global network of connected computers), and its close cousins, intranets (closed, private corporate telematic networks), to illustrate the ways in which geographers have engaged, and could engage, with studies of cyberspace. Virtual reality technologies are not discussed explicitly as, in the main, they are still at an exploratory and experimental stage. The article has th…
Unfolding mapping practices
In recent years there has been a turn within cartographic theory from a representational to a processual understanding of mapping. Maps have been re‐conceptualised as mappings that ceaselessly unfold through contingent, citational, habitual, negotiated, reflexive and playful practices, embedded within relational contexts. In this paper, we explore what this rethinking means for cartographic epistemology, contending that attention needs to be focu…
Flying through Code/Space
Commercial air travel is a key global industry facilitating the complex daily movements of planes, people, goods, and services across the world. In this paper we analyse contemporary air travel through the conceptualisation of a culture of real virtuality. We contend that air travel now consists of passage through 'code/space'. Such code/space includes travel websites, check-in, security checkpoints, flight decks, air-traffic control, immigration…
Commentary
This commentary considers the perceived hegemonic status of Anglo-American Geography and the role of the English language as the lingua franca of academia. The first half of the paper outlines in brief the hegemonic status of Anglo-American Geography, the structures and practices of the global knowledge economy and Anglo-American Geography itself that help sustain and reproduce its hegemony, and the disciplining effects of this hegemonic status o…
Geographies of the Covid-19 pandemic
The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in the most devastating global public health crisis in over a century. At present, over 10 million people from around the world have contracted the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to more than 500,000 deaths globally. The global health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic has been compounded by political, economic, and social crises that have exacerbated existing ineq…
Algorhythmic governance
To date, research examining the socio-spatial effects of smart city technologies have charted how they are reconfiguring the production of space, spatiality and mobility, and how urban space is governed, but have paid little attention to how the temporality of cities is being reshaped by systems and infrastructure that capture, process and act on real-time data. In this article, we map out the ways in which city-scale Internet of Things infrastru…
Civil liberties or public health, or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of Covid-19
To help tackle the spread of COVID-19 a range of surveillance technologies – smartphone apps, facial recognition and thermal cameras, biometric wearables, smart helmets, drones, and predictive analytics – have been rapidly developed and deployed. Used for contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, travel permission, social distancing/movement monitoring, and symptom tracking, their rushed rollout has been justified by the argument that they are vit…
Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium
In this article, we examine the imaginative geographies of the new millennium through a critical reading of cyberfiction. This fiction, we argue, through its use of estrangement and defamiliarization, and its destabilization of the foundational assumptions of modernism, provides a cognitive space in which to contemplate future spatialities given the present postmodern condition–a cognitive space which is already providing an imaginal sphere in wh…
Placing Neoliberalism
In this paper we provide an account of the property-led boom and bust which has brought Ireland to the point of bankruptcy. Our account details the pivotal role which neoliberal policy played in guiding the course of the country's recent history, but also heightens awareness of the how the Irish case might, in turn, instruct and illuminate mappings and explanations of neoliberalism's concrete histories and geographies. To this end, we begin by sc…
Producing ‘decent girls
In this article we examine the mode of governmentality constructed in Ireland with regard to the regulation and disciplining of sexuality in the post-independence era up to the writing of the Constitution (1922–1937). Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault, we document how Ireland became an intense site of applied, national bio-politics with a panoply of government commissions and legislation, accompanied by new sites of reform (Magdalene Asy…
The automatic management of drivers and driving spaces
Cognitive maps
Lncreasing the Integrity of Cognitive Mapping Research
This article examines the development of conceptual schemata of environment-behaviour interaction since behavioural geography’s inception in the late 1960s. Although these schemata have developed since then, they have remained naive and in many cases conceptually weak, lacking psychological ’depth’. It is argued that this is one of the prime reasons why behavioural geography failed to achieve academic ’take-off. Ways to increase the integrity of …
Are There Sex Differences in Geographic Knowledge and Understanding
Research by both geographers and psychologists suggests that there are differences in females' and males' everyday geographic and spatial knowledge. These differences in knowledge have been attributed to variances in biology and hormonal levels; differences in social status, culture and education; and differences in the ability to answer questions and think about geographic space. This paper examines these theories and explores the everyday geogr…
Understanding spatial concepts at the geographic scale without the use of vision
In this article we review the literature that has sought to determine the spatial understanding of people with visual impairments or blindness. In particular, we examine the arguments surrounding whether people with visual impairments or blindness can understand geographic relationships such as distance, configuration and hierarchy. At present, the conclusions of researchers can be divided into three camps. One group suggests that vision is the s…
On the Margins
Traditionally, studies of disabled people’s access to the labour market have \nbeen largely restricted to labour market 'censuses' , often conducted by government agencies, \nand econometric studies. This paper explores disabled people’s access to and experiences of \nemployment in Donegal, West Ireland, using a qualitative approach. Twelve disabled \npeople and four non-disabled helpers, divided into two focus groups, were interviewed using \nan…
Out of Place', 'Knowing One's Place
A BSTR AC T Disabled people are m arginalised and excluded from `m ainstream ' society. In general, our understanding of the processes of exclusion is grounded in time and history. In this paper, it is argued that space, as well as tim e, is instrumental in reproducing and sustaining disablist practices. Disability has distinct spatialities that work to exclude and oppress disabled people. Spaces are currently organised to keep disabled people `i…
Towards geographies of cyberspace
This article uses two cyberspatial technologies, namely, the Internet (the global network of connected computers), and its close cousins, intranets (closed, private corporate telematic networks), to illustrate the ways in which geographers have engaged, and could engage, with studies of cyberspace. Virtual reality technologies are not discussed explicitly as, in the main, they are still at an exploratory and experimental stage. The article has th…
The Effects of Spatial and Locational Cueing on the Analysis of Aggregate Cognitive Mapping Data
The authors explore the effects of spatial and locational cueing upon the aggregated results of cognitive mapping data. Using four experimental data sets they demonstrate that locational cueing introduces random error into the analysis and that spatial cueing increases the relative and absolute accuracy of spatial products (external representations of spatial knowledge). These effects are consistent regardless of whether individual or place cogni…
Research, action and ‘critical’ geographies
In the 199Os, the notion of ‘doing’ critical geographies \nhas become one of the central themes infusing \nhuman geographic study. Eschewing the strictures \nof radical Marxist approaches (which principally \nfocused on the forms of oppression and inequality \nwrought by capitalist process), critical geography \nhas consequently sought to examine the diverse \nsociospatial processes that regulate and reproduce \nsocial exclusion. The lens of crit…
Mapping Cyberspace
From the Publisher: Space is central to our lives. Because of this, much attention is directed at understanding and explaining the geographic world. Cyberspace is a book, which extends this analysis to provide a geographic exploration and critical reading of cyberspace and information and communication technologies. Cyberspace: provides an understanding of what cyberspace looks like and the social interactions that take place there; explores the …
Short Communications
Disability, Geography and Ethics
In recent years geographers have started to re-engage with issues of exclusion, social \njustice and moral philosophy, first explored by radical geographers in the 1970s. This \nre-engagement parallels the rapid growth in the 1990s of feminist and critical geographies. \nGeographers within these traditions have focused their attention on the \nintersection of issues such as identity, difference and space, and the ways in which \nsocio-spatial pro…
The Researched Opinions on Research
Thirty-five disabled people with a range of physical, sensory and mental \nimpairments were interviewed about (1) their experiences of research; (2) their general \nopinions concerning research; (3) whether they thought research had served/was serving \ndisabled people well; (4) how research on disability should be conducted; (5) who should \nconduct research on disability; and, finally, (6) what they would like to be researched. In \nthis paper,…
Disability, space and sexuality
Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium
In this article, we examine the imaginative geographies of the new millennium through a critical reading of cyberfiction. This fiction, we argue, through its use of estrangement and defamiliarization, and its destabilization of the foundational assumptions of modernism, provides a cognitive space in which to contemplate future spatialities given the present postmodern condition–a cognitive space which is already providing an imaginal sphere in wh…
The Socio-spatial Construction of (In)accessible Public Toilets
This paper examines the rights of disabled people to access public spaces in Western societies through an analysis of the provision of accessible public toilets in Ireland. Providing a critical analysis around the themes of social justice and citizenship, the investigation is based on an examination of present-day planning legislation, interviews conducted with 35 disabled people-19 in the Republic of Ireland and 16 in Northern Ireland—and a case…
Lost in Space
"Science fiction - one of the most popular literary, cinematic and television genres - has received increasing academic attention in recent years. For philosophers, critical theorists and others it opens up a space in which the here-and-now can be made strange or remade; where virtual reality and cyborg are no longer gimmicks or predictions, but new spaces and subjects. Lost in Space brings together an international collection of authors to explo…
Sexing the city
In this paper, Rob Kitchin develops a Foucaultian analysis of the sexual production of no-nheterosexual \nspace, tracing out the contingent and contested nature of socio-sexual relations \nin three cities: Belfast, Manchester and San Francisco. For each city, a basic historical and \ngeographical analysis is produced, charting how discursive and material processes enacted \nby state and citizens and operating at different scales (region, nation) …
Disability activism and the politics of scale
In this paper, we examine the role of spatial scale in mediating and shaping political struggles between disabled people and the state. Specifically, we draw on recent theoretical developments concerning the social construction of spatial scale to interpret two case studies of disability activism within Canada and Ireland. In particular, we provide an analysis of how successful the disability movement in each locale has been at ‘jumping scale’ an…
Making the ‘black box’ transparent
Mapping Cyberspace
Heterosexism and the Geographies of Everyday Life in Belfast, Northern Ireland
In this paper we seek to extend work on the relationship between sexuality, space, and society by providing a nuanced geographical reading of the sexual production of space in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Utilising queer theory, we draw from interviews with thirty gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals to illustrate how the discursive and material practices that shape the regulation, self-regulation, and resistance of heterosexism are …
Eclectic and pragmatic
Sexual citizenship in Belfast, Northern Ireland
In this article we examine the contours and construction of sexual citizenship in Belfast, Northern Ireland through in‐depth interviews with 30 members of the GLBT community and a discursive analysis of discourses of religion and nationalism. In the first half of the article we outline how sexual citizenship was constructed in the Irish context from the mid‐nineteenth century onwards, arguing that a moral conservatism developed as a result of rel…
Flying through Code/Space
Commercial air travel is a key global industry facilitating the complex daily movements of planes, people, goods, and services across the world. In this paper we analyse contemporary air travel through the conceptualisation of a culture of real virtuality. We contend that air travel now consists of passage through 'code/space'. Such code/space includes travel websites, check-in, security checkpoints, flight decks, air-traffic control, immigration…
Sociology (75 works) · Computer Science (67 works) · Political science (58 works) · Geography (39 works) · Law (37 works) · Politics (35 works) · Geographic Information Systems Studies (32 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis (24 works)