Rob Kitchin to Lecture on the Increasing Reliance Cities Have on Software
The Department of Geography will be hosting Professor Rob Kitchin from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Kitchin will be giving a lecture titled "Soft Cities: Software and the Remaking of the City," that will take place Friday, October 16, 3:30 p.m., in Room 304 of the Classroom Building. The event is free and open to the public.
Abstract: The first half of this talk examines how cities and city life have become increasingly reliant on software to function, with code to varying degrees conditioning everyday life. Using a number of examples,it is demonstrated how software is evermore embedded into objects and controls systems with respect to spatial arenas such as the home and workplace, and spatial systems such as transportation networks. The second half of the paper theorizes the difference that software makes to the world, arguing that a key effect is to beckon new spatial formations into existence. Software transduces space leading to the conditions of code/space and coded space - spaces that are reliant on software for their evolving nature. In so doing, an ontogenetic conception of space is forwarded.
Rob Kitchin is Director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; and Chair of the Management Board of the Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP) that brings together academics from 19 disciplines in nine institutions into shared research and graduate education programs. He has successfully tendered for over 24 million euros (US$35 million) of research funding and undertaken a range of research for government departments, semi-state agencies, local authorities and community and voluntary groups. To date he has published 17 books, edited the 12 volume International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, and written over 100 articles and book chapters. Until recently he was the managing editor of Social and Cultural Geography, and from 2010 will be an editor of Progress in Human Geography. He's recently published his first novel, "The Rule Book," a crime story set in and around Dublin.