Rob Kitchin

The Epistemology, Praxes, and Politics of Urban Science and City Dashboards

Lecture by Rob Kitchin, Professor, Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography, Maynooth University

The lecture will critically examine the conceptual underpinnings and practices of urban science – a specific form of computational social science – and its application to the creation of city dashboards. It will first detail the approach adopted by urban science drawing comparison with urban studies more generally. It will then consider city dashboards, focusing on six key issues: epistemology, scope and access, veracity and validity, usability and literacy, use and utility, and ethics. The analysis will be informed by the building of the Dublin and Cork Dashboards. The final part of the lecture will make the case for a more critical framing and application of urban science that aligns with approaches adopted in critical GIS, radical statistics and feminist data science.

Rob Kitchin is a professor in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. He was a European Research Council Advanced Investigator on the Programmable City project (2013–2018) and a principal investigator for the Building City Dashboards project (2016–2020) and the Digital Repository of Ireland (2009–2017). He is the (co-)author or (co-)editor of 31 academic books, and (co-)author of over 200 articles and book chapters. He has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geography, and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

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