Conference title Beyond Smart Cities Today
When? 18 and 19 September, 2019
Where? Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Hosts Centre for BOLD Cities
Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge
Knowledge Lab Urban Big Data
Erasmus Initiative Vital Cities and Citizens.
Keynotes
Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University)
Ayona Datta (University College London)
Alberto Vanolo (University of Turin)
Maria Kaika (University of Amsterdam)
Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Bianca Wylie (Tech Reset Canada & #BlockSidewalk)
Michiel de Lange (Utrecht University)
Carina Listerborn (University of Malmö)
Linda Kool (Rathenau Institute)
Liesbet van Zoonen (Erasmus University, LDE Centre for BOLD Cities)
About Beyond Smart Cities Today
The last decade has seen crucial critical sociologies, geographies, histories and ethnographies of “the actually existing smart city” and so-called paradigmatic smart cities (Shelton, Zook & Wiig, 2015). As a consequence of these efforts, critical urban scholars across the social sciences and humanities can now apply established theoretical notions and normative concepts in unearthing the neoliberal premises and implications of smart cities.
However, are these crucial scholarly exposés and (re-)politicizations of current smart city practices “enough” to imagine and enact radically different smart cities? What have these analyses enabled, where do they fall short, who do they exclude, and is it not time to move beyond them? Moreover, how do smart city critiques and activist scholars relate to civil society campaigns and political movements that claim the right to the (future) smart city? What are the affordances and constraints of academic analyses? Is it at all possible to radically re-imagine future smart cities within the current (post-) political economies of smart city thinking and academia today?
This two-day expert symposium aims to provide the time and space to reflect and act upon these kinds of questions.
Programme
The symposium programme (in PDF) can be found at the bottom of this page.
Workshop for civil servants
The programme includes a workshop for civil servants who work for the municipality of Rotterdam. This workshop is organised and led by Dorien Zandbergen and Tessel Renzenbrink of GR1P Foundation.
Registration for this event has closed.