10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17370
This essay considers the notion of a "real-time city" from a temporal perspective. The essay is divided into three sections. The first section examines how smart city technologies seek to utilise real-time computation to transform urban management and governance and the pace, tempo and scheduling of everyday life. The second section considers how ICTs are transforming the nature of time with respect to smart cities. It sets out a set of related notions of real-time temporalities (network time, chronoscopic time, instantaneous time, timeless time, machine time, code/spacetime) and unpacks the nature of "realtimeness" and the relational, contingent, and heterogeneous nature of real-times operating across smart city platforms and systems. The third section discusses the politics of adopting real-time technologies in urban management and the conduct of everyday life and sets out arguments for the maintenance of asynchronous cities and the adoption of an ethics of temporal dissonance. The conclusion argues that there is a need for philosophical, theoretical and empirical work to understand the realtimeness of smart cities and sets out a number of questions that might guide such research.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17370
2
en
Rob Kitchin
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
temporal dissonance
The Realtimeness of Smart Cities
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Lectures
2018-01-29
2023-06-24
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
19-41
TS
Rob Kitchin
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17370
19
Maynooth University
2038-3460
2
temporal dissonance
en
41
The Realtimeness of Smart Cities
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17370/16226
8
                                                                           Lecture

The Realtimeness of Smart Cities
Rob Kitchin
Maynooth University (IE)



   Abstract: This essay considers the notion of a ‘real-time city’ from a temporal
   perspective. The essay is divided into three sections. The first section exam-
   ines how smart city technologies seek to utilise real-time computation to
   transform urban management and governance and the pace, tempo and sched-
   uling of everyday life. The second section considers how ICTs are transforming
   the nature of time with respect to smart cities. It sets out a set of related
   notions of real-time temporalities (network time, chronoscopic time, instan-
   taneous time, timeless time, machine time, code/spacetime) and unpacks the
   nature of ‘realtimeness’ and the relational, contingent, and heterogeneous na-
   ture of real-times operating across smart city platforms and systems. The third
   section discusses the politics of adopting real-time technologies in urban man-
   agement and the conduct of everyday life and sets out arguments for the
   maintenance of asynchronous cities and the adoption of an ethics of temporal
   dissonance. The conclusion argues that there is a need for philosophical, the-
   oretical and empirical work to understand the realtimeness of smart cities and
   sets out a number of questions that might guide such research.

   Submitted: September 20, 2017 – Accepted: November 15, 2017

   Keywords: smart cities; temporality; network time; ethics; temporal
   dissonance.

   Corresponding author: Rob Kitchin, MUSSI, Iontas Building, Maynooth
   University, Maynooth W23 F2H6, Ireland. Email: rob.kitchin@mu.ie




1. Introduction

    Starting in the 1950s with the nascent shift from electro-magnetic to
computational systems, digital technologies have been used to understand
and manage city services and infrastructures, with processing and reaction
becoming progressively more timely. In the late 1960s, the promise of di-
gital developments dovetailed with cybernetic thinking, in which the city



 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
 8 (2) pp. 19-41- ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                              2017
20                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

was envisioned as a system of systems that could be computationally man-
aged (Forrester 1969). Each system, it was argued, could be broken into its
constituent parts and processes, be modelled and simulated to capture its
essence and to plan and operate its functions. In practice, cybernetic efforts
to reform city planning and administration largely failed to materialize, in
part because how cities work is more complex, contingent and socio-polit-
ical than the models permitted (Flood 2011; Townsend 2013). Nonethe-
less, throughout the 1980s and 90s computation progressively continued
to be embedded into the working practices used to plot and manage cities
and into the infrastructure used to deliver essential services – such as the
use of SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) to monitor and
control utilities and GIS (geographical information systems) to document
and analyse land use and the spatial constitution of city assets, population
and economy.
    With the extensive roll-out of the internet in the 1990s, more-and-more
city systems became networked and reliant on computation and house-
holds started to become digitally connected. By the mid-to-late 1990s, ur-
ban theorists started to detail the nature of an emerging networked urban-
ism, wherein ICTs became increasingly critical to how cities and the activ-
ities within them functioned and were having profound effects on urban-
regional restructuring by enabling pronounced space-time compression
and the tempo-spatial reorganization of businesses and institutions (Cas-
tells 1996; Mitchell 1996; Graham and Marvin 2001). In the 2000s compu-
tation became ever more mobile with the rise of smartphones and other
portable digital devices, and urban computation started to become perva-
sive, ubiquitous and instantaneous (that is, embedded into everything,
available everywhere, and responsive in real-time) with increasing scales of
economy in digital products, networking, and storage, and the rollout of
the internet of things. At this point, many urban spaces were being pro-
duced as “code/spaces”; that is, the production of space was reliant on
code to be produced as intended (Dodge and Kitchin 2005). By the late
2000s, the concept of ‘smart cities’ – cities that combine forms of entrepre-
neurial and networked urbanism – started to gain traction across city ad-
ministrations, corporations and academic disciplines. Reconnecting with
cybernetic thinking and aligning with the project of neoliberalism, smart
urbanism envisages a thoroughly digital city in which city services, infra-
structures and populations are managed in real-time using ICTs, yet at the
same time digital technologies, such as smart phones, enable individual au-
tonomy and consumption choice within a framework of constraints that
prioritizes market-led solutions to urban issues (see Luque-Ayala and
Marvin 2016; Cardullo and Kitchin 2017).
    Over the past decade, accompanying the drive to create and deploy
smart city technologies and visions, has been critical analyses of the tenets,
workings and effects of smart urbanism. Building on critical scholarship
concerning networked urbanism (e.g., Graham and Marvin 2002), such
work has focused on mapping out the political economy of smart cities,
Kitchin                                                                   21
how smart city technologies reconfigure urban spatiality, governance and
development, and the ethical and moral implications of the production and
use of urban big data (e.g., Greenfield 2013; Kitchin 2014; Vanolo 2014;
Datta 2015; Shelton et al. 2015). To date, however, there has been little
analysis of the temporal imperatives and effects of smart city technologies
(though see de Waal 2013; de Lange in press; Leszczynski 2015; Coletta
2017; Coletta and Kitchin 2017; Datta 2017).
    Smart city technologies produce a new timescape; that is, a set of asso-
ciated temporal relations (time frames, temporality, pace, tempo, timings,
sequencing, and time past, present and future) that work together to pro-
duce a particularized temporal landscape (Adam 2004). Smart city tech-
nologies and initiatives reconfigure the space-times and temporal rhythms
and relations of cities, and re-imagine and utilise the past, present and fu-
ture to drive smart urbanism. While smart city technologies have effects
with respect to all four temporal modalities identified by Adam and Grove
(2007) – ‘past present’, ‘present present’, ‘future present’ and ‘present fu-
ture’ – the most critical to the logics and operations of smart urbanism, I
propose, concerns ‘present present’ and the ability to be able to monitor,
analyse and react in real-time. Indeed, the appeal and promise of smart
cities is that they constitute ‘real-time cities’, composed of systems that
work 24/7 and are reactive to unfolding events in order to optimize perfor-
mance and gain efficiencies (Kitchin 2014). It is this temporal condition
that the progressive development of smart urbanism outlined above has
been striving to achieve through each iteration of innovation – the instan-
taneous control of space and spatial relations in real-time.
    In this essay, I want to consider in some depth the notion of the ‘real-
time city’. The first section examines how smart city technologies seek to
utilise real-time computation to transform urban management and govern-
ance and the pace, tempo and scheduling of everyday life. The second sec-
tion considers the related temporalities of the real-time city (instantaneous
time, timeless time, network time, machine time, chronoscopic time,
code/spacetime) and unpacks the nature of “realtimeness” (Weltevrede et
al. 2014) in the smart city, contending that ontologically and epistemolog-
ically real-time is relational, contingent and heterogeneous, with a diffuse
set of realtimeness operating across systems, infrastructures and spatial me-
dia. The third section critically reflects on the implications of producing a
real-time city and presents the case for asynchronous cities and an ethics of
temporal dissonance. In sum, the essay seeks to strongly foreground time
and temporality as a key lens through which to make sense of the impact
of ICTs on urban life and encourage additional empirical and theoretical
work.
22                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

2. The Real-time City

           “Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space seems com-
            pletely malleable […] Where distance equals a microsecond in lapsed
            connection time. […] Almost all technology today is focused on com-
             pressing to zero the amount of time it takes to acquire and use infor-
        mation, to learn, to make decisions, to initiate action, to deploy resources,
          to innovate. When action and response are simultaneous, we are in real
                                                                               time”
                                                              (McKenna 1997, 3-4).

             “[A smart city] is a city where you almost know in real-time what is
       happening. You can identify problems or bottlenecks in real-time and you
       can manage them and communicate back to citizens or various stakehold-
                ers the right information that helps them make better decisions”
                                                     (City administrator, Dublin).


    Heim (1993, 49) defines real-time as “simultaneity in the occurrence
and registering of an event”, with little to no latency in temporal duration.
Increasingly we live in a world in which we expect real-time connection
and response (see Figure 1). Indeed, people seem to have become fixated
on knowing and taking part in the present – checking for new emails and
responding, seeking out current news or weather, discovering when the
next bus/train is due or avoiding congestion, browsing the newest posts on
social media and commenting, being able to instantly connect with other
people while on the move and to schedule meetings on-the-fly, being able
to discover details about places close-by including opening times and re-
views, and performing consumption on demand. Companies expect to be
able to do business 24/7, to be able to access real-time data on their per-
formance across different metrics, and to implement just-in-time produc-
tion and delivery. And city administrations and utilities expect to be able
to manage city services and infrastructures as they unfold, reacting to pre-
sent conditions in order to optimize performance. For example, an intelli-
gent transport system uses real-time data from cameras and sensors located
across a road system, which are communicated back via telecommunica-
tions networks to a central hub for processing to regulate traffic light se-
quences in order to keep traffic flowing and minimize congestion. In many
cases, the aim is not to simply be reactive but anticipatory, using present
and past data to predict what will happen in the short-term (micro-seconds
to a few months) and adapt system performance accordingly to head-off
potentially negative outcomes. Such practices are known as nowcasting
(Bańbura et al. 2010) and as well as being used in the management of in-
frastructures are central to activities such as predictive policing. Here, I
want to consider in more detail how real-time technologies are transform-
ing management and governance of city systems and the pace, tempo and
scheduling of everyday life.
Kitchin                                                                   23




                              Fig. 1 – Real-time city

2.1 Management and Governance

    For city administrations and utility infrastructure providers, smart city
technologies offer the possibility of dynamically managing urban systems
in real-time taking account of present conditions (Bleecker and Nova 2009;
Kitchin 2014; de Lange in press; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2016). Such sys-
tems seek to manage road, rail and water traffic, energy supply, telecom-
munication connections, safety and security, as well as monitor environ-
mental conditions relating to the weather, noise and pollution. They work
by continuously generating data about the performance of a system via net-
worked sensors, actuators, transponders and cameras (the internet of
things) that are fed back to a control room for human oversight or pro-
cessing by an automated management system which can instantaneously
handle and analyse data and respond as required. Such systems seek to
monitor and maintain everyday “normal conditions” in order to create
more efficient and optimized operations, but also to respond to exceptional
circumstances providing instantaneous corrective actions before problems
grow and multiply (de Lange in press; Kitchin et al. 2015). In all cases,
there is an operational emphasis on maximizing the speed of monitoring
and responding to events, and to managing in the present (Virilio 1997).
    Real-time control rooms utilising SCADA have been in operation from
the mid-twentieth century, but they have multiplied in number in the last
couple of decades and have also changed in terms of how they operate.
24                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

Early control rooms were used to monitor and manage the performance of
a closed system such as an electricity grid. More recently, their remit has
been expanded to include more open and unbounded systems such as pub-
lic spaces (CCTV, emergency management response) and transportation
with multiple types of users/interactions (car, public transit, cyclists, pe-
destrians) (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2016). In addition, the siloed nature
of control rooms – that they generally concern the functions of a single
domain such as electricity, water, security – has started to be broken down
with the creation of more integrated, interoperable, and interagency con-
trol apparatus that provides a more holistic view of city operations. For
example, the Centro De Operacoes Prefeitura Do Rio in Rio de Janeiro is
an integrative city operations and coordinated, emergency management
centre that draws together into a single location real-time data streams from
thirty two agencies and twelve private concessions (e.g., bus and electricity
companies), including traffic and public transport, municipal and utility
services, emergency and security services, weather feeds, information gen-
erated by employees and the public via social media, as well as administra-
tive and statistical data (Kitchin 2014; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2016). In-
creasingly, rather than being reliant on human decision-making, control
rooms are becoming automated, with either humans-in-the-loop, wherein
decision-making is automated but overseen by a human controller who can
actively intervene, or humans-off-the-loop in which the system works in an
entirely automated fashion (Docherty 2012). In the latter case, computation
is used to monitor and regulate systems in wholly automated, automatic
and autonomous ways (Dodge and Kitchin 2007). Such automation ena-
bles massive volumes of data from thousands of devices scattered across a
city to be tracked and controlled in real-time that far exceeds the capacity
of human attention. In other words, the control room enacts a form of al-
gorithmic governance; what Dodge and Kitchin (2007) term “automated
management”. While the work of control rooms is largely hidden from di-
rect public view, some of the data they process is being shared via publicly-
facing dashboards, APIs, open data repositories, on-street dynamic signs,
and radio bulletins, and plugged into mobile apps (Kitchin et al. 2015).
    The power of control rooms is to actively manage the temporal rhythms
of the city in the present and to enact new forms of governmentality. As
Lefebvre (1992/2004) noted, cities consist of multiple intersecting rhythms
and beats – traffic flow, timetables, work shifts, rush hours, night and day,
and so on (see also Edensor 2010). These rhythms can be eurhythmic (har-
monious and stable), isorhythmic (equal and in sync), and arrhythmic (out
of sync and disruptive) (Conlon 2010). Urban life thus pulsates rhythmi-
cally, but not always harmoniously. Control rooms work to augment and
regulate the rhythms of cities; “to limit arrhythmia and produce eurhyth-
mic systems that maintain a refrain” (Coletta and Kitchin 2017, 3). In other
words, the algorithms at the heart of the control room operations act as
“algorhythms”, seeking to produce consistent and desired rhythmic pat-
terns (Miyazaki 2012). A traffic control room that processes real-time data
Kitchin                                                                    25
generated by a dense network of sensors and cameras to sequence traffic
lights works to algorhythmically synchronize the flow of vehicles (Coletta
and Kitchin 2017). In such a system, the nature of governmentality (the
logics, rationalities and techniques that render societies governable and en-
able government and other agencies to enact governance; Foucault 1991)
shifts from a disciplinary form (in which people self-regulate behaviour
based on the fear of surveillance and sanction) towards control (wherein
people are corralled and compelled to act in certain ways) (Deleuze 1992).
Control systems work by constantly modulating behaviour to act in a cer-
tain way within prescribed comportments; to be nudged and directed ra-
ther than self-disciplined (Braun 2014). In the case of the traffic system,
the control room modulates the flow of vehicles across the network. This
is not to say that such control is not negotiated, resisted and subverted, but
that it is the govermentality logic at work.

2.2 Everyday Time-geographies

    While real-time control rooms work to modulate and control behav-
iour, real-time mobile and locative media such as location-based social net-
working (e.g., Foursquare) and journey planner smartphone apps seek to
provide flexibility and serendipity in individual time-geographies (Sutko
and de Souza e Silva 2010; Evans 2015; Kitchin et al., 2017). Indeed, ICTs
in general are having a number of temporal effects on the spatial practices
and time geographies of everyday life (in a Hägerstrand (1970) sense of
movement through time and space).
    First, ICTs are facilitating an acceleration in the pace of activities and
service delivery by enabling tasks to be undertaken more quickly, effi-
ciently, and at a distance (obviating travel time and bypassing physical
queues) (Virilio 1997; Rosa 2003). Undertaking activities in real-time,
which previously would have taken time to respond, is illustrative of such
acceleration. Second, the always-on nature of networked technologies and
the availability of mobile access enables the “time shifting of activities to
formerly unavailable time slots” (Crang 2007, 71). Time outside of work
can be colonized by work-related activities and so-called “dead time” or
“wasted time” endured during various forms of commute can be trans-
formed into “productive time” (such as phoning, texting, emailing, search-
ing information, sending files, and copyediting academic papers) (Lyons
and Urry 2005; Wajcman 2008). Increasingly people then are becoming
“always-everywhere available” (Green 2002), though they have also devel-
oped practices to manage such hyper-connectivity and changing patterns
of activity (Lyons and Urry 2005). Third, ICTs increase the ability to mul-
titask and to interleave activities so that several tasks can be performed
simultaneously rather than sequentially (Crang 2007; Wajcman 2008).
While ICTs facilitate such multitasking, nonetheless new practices and
26                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

competencies have been developed to manage simultaneous and/or com-
peting tasks and technologies (e.g. pagers and mobile phones) that can be
used to interrupt and summon users (Licoppe 2010). In some cases, auto-
mation might take a task away all-together, freeing up time to undertake
other activities.
    Fourth, the temporal organization of activities is becoming more flexi-
ble and de-coupled from clock-time. Instant and mobile communication
and the sharing of location information is altering coordination in space by
enabling “perpetual contact” and on-the-fly scheduling of meetings (Katz
and Aakhus 2002), and serendipitous encounters with nearby friends
(Sutko and de Souza e Silva 2010). The scheduling and planning of activi-
ties and events thus shifts from planned actions at specific times and places
to continual recalibration and reaction for any time, any place (Crang
2007). Spatial media have also enabled access to information about the
real-time conditions of transportation networks, facilitating dynamic route
planning; spatial search and location based services provide information
on nearby businesses permitting contextual choice- and decision-making
rather than advanced search and planning. Importantly, these tasks can be
undertaken in situ, on-the-move and in real-time (Leszczyski 2015; Kitchin
et al. 2017).
    Fifth, instantaneous networked connections enable significant time-
space distanciation, wherein activities are disembedded from local contexts
and re-organized across large time-space distances (Giddens 1990). For ex-
ample, labour might be organized across several global sites, with decisions
made in one location, that may be in one time zone, affecting outcomes in
another. Similarly places across the globe can experience shared moments
(e.g., simultaneously watching a global sporting event or media story).
Places are thus interdependent through dispersed sociotechnical systems
that enable real-time interconnectivity.
    Collectively, these shifts are producing ‘faster’ and more temporally
flexible subjects, with urban life in the smart city becoming more frenetic,
fragmented and lived in-the-moment (Adam 2004; Crang 2007; Hassan
and Purser 2007). Indeed, the temporal organization of the city is increas-
ingly being disconnected from the natural, social and clock time that oper-
ated in the late twentieth century. In addition, as Wajcman (2008) notes,
smart city technologies do not simply speed-up or fragment time, but in-
troduce new material, temporal and cultural practices. In other words, peo-
ple are not simply “doing the same things, but at a faster pace”, but are
performing new kinds of tasks and producing new socio-spatial-temporal
relations. As such, the temporal shifts occurring alter how we understand,
relate to, move through, coordinate and communicate in, interact with, and
build attachments to space/place (Kitchin et al. 2017). The real-time city
then is not simply a faster city, but one whose spatiality, temporality and
sociality have been fundamentally reconfigured.
Kitchin                                                                   27
3. Real-time Temporalities and Realtimeness

    For philosophers of time, such as and Hassan (2003; also see Hassan
and Purser 2007) and Virilio (1997), the changes to management, govern-
ance and the time-geographies of everyday life result from ICTs producing
a new temporal modality. This modality is characterised by instantaneity
and fragmentation and has been variously termed and described. For ex-
ample, Hassan (2003) argues that ICTs produce what he terms “network
time” – time fragmented and made simultaneous across globally connected
digital networks. Network time is “globally networked rather than globally
zoned. It is instantaneous rather than durational or causal. It is simultane-
ous rather than sequential” (Adam 2007, 1). People across the globe can
share temporal alignments in play (online games) and work (online confer-
encing), organizing themselves temporally around their interactions rather
than local clock-time. Hassan contends that just as the clock changed the
meaning and experience of time by shifting the temporal organization of
society from natural (e.g., seasons; diurnal cycles; body clocks) and social
(e.g., religious events) registers, networked technologies are undermining
the dominance of clock-time. Fixed meal times, pre-arranged meetings, so-
cial calendars, conventional working times (9am-5pm; weekdays/week-
ends) are being replaced by temporal flexibility and time shifting. For Urry
(2000, 126-30) ICTs are producing what he calls “instantaneous time” –
real-time, on-demand, at-a-distance, synchronous connection and response
– which is having profound, complex and non-universalising spatiotem-
poral effects on social and economic life. Similarly, Castells (1996) argues
that ICTs produce what he terms “timeless time”, wherein localised clock-
time is erased, suspended and transformed – “all expressions are either in-
stantaneous or without predicable sequencing” (Castells 1998, 350) with
networked systems being “simultaneously present” across time zones.
    Likewise, Virilio (1997) contends that chronological time is being re-
placed with what he terms “chronoscopic time”. Considering the ability to
perceive and respond to distant events in real-time, such as 24/7 global
media coverage of news and sports or communicating with co-workers lo-
cated in different time-zones, he argues that audiences and workers have
become accustomed to narrative time imploding (Purser 2002). Rather
than unfolding successionally as before, during and after, or events being
documented after the fact, people have become used to time being “per-
ceived more in terms of abrupt and discontinuous irruptions of varying
intensities”; to be focused on the real-time instant (Purser 2002, 162). 24/7
media coverage creates an eternal unfolding present of spatially and socio-
politically disconnected snapshots, with instant rather than reflective anal-
ysis. Likewise, real-time control rooms and spatial media produce chrono-
scopic time in which cities and personal time-geographies are managed in
the perpetual present, responding to emerging irruptions and serendipity.
    Critical to this new temporality is the seeming annihilation of time and
space by ICTs. Places can be instantly connected and actions can occur
28                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

simultaneously across space (e.g., stock markets working in concert be-
tween time zones; networks of traffic lights concurrently being controlled
based on present conditions; consumers buying goods or downloading
online content). Urban life – shopping, communicating, banking, play,
travelling, etc. – increasingly operates in a distributed “perpetual present”
(de Lange, in press). This is the appeal and power of the real-time city –
instant, always, and everywhere. Yet, what is the ontological nature of real-
time?
    What becomes clear when one examines real-time systems closely is
that they are never quite in real-time, they always include latencies. This is
apparent if one records a real-time stream of data, wherein it is clear that
the data are sampled with a small latency between discrete data points
(Mackenzie 1997). Moreover, this latency varies across systems rendering
them asynchronous: “there exists instead an open-ended continuum within
the network (…) measured in picoseconds upwards” (Hassan 2007, 50). In
their comparison of different streaming social media and news platforms,
Weltevrede et al. (2014) noted that each platform had variances in back-
end processing and delivery of content, producing variances in their tem-
poralities. When myself and Gavin McArdle examined the velocity of 26
types of urban big data it became clear that these data were temporally
differentiated in two ways: how they were generated and how they were
analysed, acted upon and shared (Kitchin and McArdle 2016). With re-
spect to data generation, we categorized data as either “real-time constant”
to denote data that are endlessly generated (e.g., a weather sensor that con-
tinuously records measurements), or “real-time sporadic” to denote data
that are generated only at the point of use (e.g., clickstream data that is
continually measured but only whilst a user is clicking through websites).
In both cases, there is latency in data recording, with data being sampled
every few milliseconds, or every ten seconds, or every five minutes, or what-
ever temporal rate the system had been programmed to perform. Similarly,
with respect to data analysis and sharing in some cases as the data are rec-
orded, analytics are performed, and the data published with only slight la-
tency (e.g., as a tweet is tweeted it is recorded in Twitter’s data architecture
and micro-seconds later it is published into user timelines). In other cases,
the data are sampled in real-time but their transmission, processing or pub-
lication is delayed (e.g., mobile LIDAR scanning by vehicles captures scans
of streetscapes every second, but are stored on a local hard disk and trans-
ferred to a data centre at the end of each day) (Nokia 2015; Kitchin and
McArdle 2016).
    The temporal rate of data measurement and sharing is in part chosen
and in part imposed. How a system is configured involves making decisions
about balancing data resolution and noise (data quality) with respect to the
task requirements against system configuration and performance (e.g., life
of batteries, costs of data transmission/storage). The system components
and architecture also affect temporality. All digital processing involves la-
Kitchin                                                                    29
tencies related to memory buffering, CPU scheduling, and process inter-
rupts, and visualizations are temporally framed by the “number of frames
per second, or by refreshing cumulatively displayed information” (de
Lange, in press). Similarly, different networking technologies (broadband,
wifi, GSM, 3G, 4G, Bluetooth, Near-Field Communication) have different
process rates and latencies. Computation for some tasks can take time to
complete, even with high specification machines, due to the complexity
and size of the endeavour. As Mackenzie (2007, 89-90) notes system per-
formance and data recording is affected by the nature of device and net-
work “machine time”, including “seek time, run time, read time, access
time, available time, real time, polynomial time, time division, time slicing,
time sharing, time complexity, write time, processor time, hold time, exe-
cution time, compilation time, and cycle time”. He continues, “[w]hile
many of these are related (for example, read and write time), many are un-
related or antagonistic to each other (for example, real time, polynomial
time)”, noting that “[t]he relations between different timings are heteroge-
neous”. In complex systems composed of many devices and networks (e.g.,
sensors, computers, routers, servers, etc) there are multiple machine times
at play.
     Mackenzie (1997) thus contends that real-time is a fabricated temporal
condition, and Weltevrede et al. (2014, 127) conclude that there are vary-
ing forms of “realtimeness”. This realtimeness produces distinct “real-time
cultures” within platforms and systems. Weltevrede et al. (2014, 140-141)
thus conclude that real-time “does not unfold as a flat, eternal now or as a
global, high-paced stream, but (…) unfolds at different speeds in relation
to different devices.”. Moreover, realtimeness is provisional, always poten-
tially subject to disruption through faults such as network outages and soft-
ware crashes, and more malicious interventions such as hacking (Kitchin
and Dodge 2011). The production of realtimeness has to be maintained
through practices of upgrades, patching, and repairs in order for constant
contact and action to occur. Even so, real-time systems often fail, with
other modes of operation having to be deployed until the system is back
online and working again. In case study research concerning the real-time
operations used by a large retailer to manage stores, staff, stock, suppliers
and customers, and to direct operations, Evans and Kitchin (2017) docu-
ment how systemic system and equipment failures lead to partial and pre-
carious real-time systems, with staff having to revert to old practices or in-
vent new workaround solutions that often involve significant delay.
     Realtimeness then is relational, heterogeneous and contingent; the
product of the technicity of socio-technical arrangements and subject to all
kinds of interruptions and contextual unfoldings. As such, there is a diffuse
set of realtimeness operating within smart cities across infrastructures and
spatial media (Kitchin and McArdle 2016), yet the nature of real-time
across platforms and systems is little understood, as are their distinct real-
time cultures and how they make a difference to the nature, experience and
meaning of time, but also the culture, practices and institutional operations
30                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

of everyday life. Similarly, the effects of realtimeness on the transduction
of space is little understood. In terms of the smart city, my contention is
that time and space unfold as code/spacetime (not simply code/space as I
have previously theorised; Dodge and Kitchin 2005), wherein space-time
relations are dependent on computation to function. For example, the al-
gorhythms of a traffic control room seek to mediate the flow of traffic
through junctions (sites) by altering the sequencing (timing) of traffic lights
(Kitchin and Coletta 2017). If the code or computational infrastructure
fails, then the realtimeness of the system is suspended, with the traffic lights
either failing to work or operate on default settings; space-time is not trans-
duced as intended. The realtimeness of smart city systems, and the code/
spacetimes they transduce, work to create particular spatio-temporal
rhythms and tempo, and facilitate new spatio-temporal relations and be-
haviours. As yet, however, we have little detailed understanding of how
such realtimeness and code/spacetime work in practice both in a general
sense and with respect to particular smart city technologies/domains (such
as control rooms for utilities, real-time dashboards and passenger infor-
mation, smart meters for energy management, sensor networks for moni-
toring sound/pollution/flooding, etc).
    Given the drive to produce the real-time city, with ever-more aspects
of everyday life computationally mediated and operating in real-time, there
is a pressing need to critically unpack the nature and consequences of
realtimeness. It is to the task of unpacking consequences I now turn.


4. The Case for Asynchronous Cities

    A number of scholars have started to consider the implications and pol-
itics of real-time, arguing that a fixation on the present and speed of re-
sponse creates a number of issues that need to be countered by the pro-
duction of asynchronous smart cities. In essence, they challenge whether
acting in real-time is always the right to time to act and consider the conse-
quences of such responsiveness. There are four main, inter-related cri-
tiques, the first two of which concern the ability of individuals to manage
and cope with thinking and acting in real-time, the second two with the
nature of real-time governance and how societies are regulated. In all four
cases, there is a sense that living and managing in the here-and-now over-
emphases the present at the expense of learning from the past and planning
for the future (Bleeker and Nova 2009) and erases the frame of duration
and trends (de Lange in press). Purser (2002, 160) goes as far as to contend
that “[t]o think and act in real-time terms requires a certain kind of wilful
blindness to the past and future.”
    First, the emphasis on speed and instant reaction means there is no time
for reflection, contemplation, slow rational deliberation, considered an-
swers, or affect and emotion in decision making and response (Purser 2002;
de Lange in press). As Hassan (2007, 55) notes: “Users are compelled by
Kitchin                                                                    31
the momentum of the now. Control in this context is almost impossible:
take your time and you lose the sale, suffer a drop in efficiency, or miss the
‘valuable’ connection.”. Compressed time for thought and action means
that actors, such as urban infrastructure managers, have to fall back on ei-
ther learned routines or established unconscious cognitive biases (Purser
2002), or come to rely on forms of automated management enacted
through algorithmic systems (Coletta and Kitchin 2017). Family and
friends become hustled into decisions and actions that they might not take
if given time to reflect. Acting in real-time thus erodes choice and reflex-
ive and meaningful action and limits alternative and creative intervention
(Leccardi 2007). In other words, kairos (the right time to act judiciously)
is trumped by chronos (action with respect to the measure of a clock).
     Second, the demands of living and acting in real-time – of always being
connected and cognitively engaged through email, mobile phones, social
and spatial media, etc. – creates a temporal regime that compels never-end-
ing engagement, and produces stress through increased demands on peo-
ples’ time and attention, with few opportunities to disengage and relax
(Gleick 1999). As Crang (2007) details, while ICTs hold the promise of
helping people cope with the compression, densification and fragmenta-
tion of time by actively managing “temporal density” (intense, overlapping
temporal rhythms caused by multitasking) (Southerton and Tomlinson
2006) and “time scarcity” (the experience of being rushed or harried)
(Wajcman 2008), at the same time they compress and fragment time fur-
ther. ICTs often produce ever-more-extended and complex network of
tasks to attend to, producing time crunches in which it never feels there are
enough hours in the day to do all the things needed (Hassan 2007).
     Third, the reliance on algorithmic systems to process and respond to
real-time data creates forms of technocratic governance in which an intense
instrumental rationality (that is reductionist and functionalist in approach)
and technological solutionism (that presumes that complex urban situa-
tions can be solved or optimized through computation) are applied
(Kitchin 2014; Mattern 2014). Such an approach prioritizes optimization,
efficiency and rational decision-making as the key bases on which to man-
age and improve urban living (Bleecker and Nova 2009) and assumes that
the same technological solutions can be easily transplanted between cities
to produce similar effects (Kitchin 2014). Such solutionism tends to map
events in isolation, reducing them to singularities in which systems identify
and respond to out-of-the-ordinary occurrences so that dealing with the
exceptional becomes routinized (de Lange, in press). In other words, man-
aging the city in real-time creates a disengaged, decontextualized, rote,
rule-based approach that lacks reflection, deliberation, communal debate,
learning trajectory, and framing to local socio-spatial-temporal conditions
beyond instrumented metrics. They thus fail to take account of the wider
effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital that shape city
life and how it unfolds (Kitchin 2014; de Lange, in press). Moreover, they
tend to manage issues in instrumental ways rather than addressing their
32                                                               Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

underlying structural causes; that is, a traffic control room seeks to opti-
mize flow and minimize congestion, rather than shifting people from pri-
vate vehicles to public transport. As Bleecker and Nova (2009), Greenfield
(2013) and others have argued, part of the appeal of cities is their messy,
emergent, qualitative experiences, their anonymity, serendipitous encoun-
ters, and the unexpected. The “hygienist model of efficiency” (Bleecker
and Nova 2009) – the desire to assert order and control – thus does struc-
tural violence to what we might call ‘cityness’. In so doing, technocratic
forms of governance run counter to democratic politics, with real-time
computationally-mediated management excluding meaningful public par-
ticipation in governance, bypassing the creative, political and messy role of
people in shaping their own environments. As de Lange (in press) con-
cludes:

Creativity, always asynchronous and unpredictable in comparison to computerized
systems, becomes ballast rather than a resource. Unless they allow room for differ-
ential tempi of people using them, real-time technologies that aspire to infinitely
speed up their own working quite literally preclude the latent potential of people
to use these technologies for truly democratic collective self-mastery, governance
and creation.

    Fourth, the immediate actions of the present create a recursive, iterative
path dependency for the future with decisions taken shaping a system’s
imminent performance (Uprichard 2012). Moreover, as Uprichard (2012,
133) notes, the aim is often not simply to know now, but “to know about
now before now has happened”. Algorithmic and technocratic governance
thus works to prefigure, through pre-determined, programmed responses
and feedback loops, the unfolding of socio-spatial-temporal life. This is
leading, she contends, to the present being increasingly embedded into in-
stitutional structures and vice versa, with the result that the “present itself
becomes more and more plastic, to be stretched, manipulated, moulded
and ultimately ‘casted’ by those who can access more of it in the supposed
‘now’.” From this perspective, urban control rooms cast the present by it-
eratively pre-figuring it through on-going responses. The consequence of
always living in the now, Uprichard (2012, 134) argues, is we will increas-
ingly “cut our coats according to our present cloths”, becoming rooted in
a constant series of “plastic presents” that limit the possibilities of alternate
emergent futures and largely ignores the past or the future present.
    For Virilio (1997, 19) there is thus an emerging “tyranny of real time”,
a “dromospheric pollution” (dromos being the Greek for race, which
Virilio associates with speed/acceleration) in which the temporal demands
of real-time exceed our capacity to cope with them and take effective action
(Purser 2002). Moreover, real-time smart city systems produce the condi-
tion of continuous geosurveillance, in which spaces and individual mobility
are monitored at fine-grained temporal and spatial scales, enabling a de-
tailed tracking and tracing of people, objects, transactions and interactions,
Kitchin                                                                      33
and producing numerous privacy harms (Kitchin 2016). Real-time systems
produce a smart city then in as far as they seek to provide stability and
control in urban governance by reacting to unfolding situations, albeit in a
limited, technocratic means, but they do not necessarily produce greater
understanding or forms of smart citizenship (Kitchin 2014; de Lange in
press).
    For some, the fixation on operating in real-time needs to be countered
by maintaining asynochronicity in the smart city. Leccardi (2007), for ex-
ample, calls for an opposition to the “detemporalized” logics of a real-time
present and for a reappraisal of the value of the lived dimensions of time
and space and the connections between the past and present. Hassan
(2007, 46) likewise calls for people to be able to have more control over
their time and to be able to “refuse to be swept up into the acceleration of
society and the time-squeeze that is taking its toll on cultures and societies”.
Just as the continuous geosurveillance of IoT needs to be tempered by an
ethics of forgetting (Dodge and Kitchin 2007), the tyranny of real-time re-
quires an ethics of temporal dissonance. For de Lange (in press) asynchro-
nicity would enable citizens to live in the city at their own pace, not just
slowing down but operating at differential speeds. Bleecker and Nova
(2009, 19) contend that such an aspiration requires urban computing to be
citizen-focused and not simply about operational efficiency and optimiza-
tion, concluding “computing in an urban setting should first of all not be
about data and algorithms, but people and their activities”. They venture
that real-time computation should have layers or routines that do not work
instantaneously, are out of alignment and incongruous or decentralised,
and are more speculative, poetic and unexpected. Real-time systems con-
figured in such a way would produce lively cities, not simply ordered, op-
timized ones.
    While such calls for temporal dissonance and asynchronous temporal
relations may seem appropriate given the growing use of real-time systems
and their consequences, as Adam (2004) and Crang (2007) note, urban life
remains lively. In fact, temporal relations are being reconfigured not anni-
hilated (Crang 2007), with “instantaneity, simultaneity, networked connec-
tions, ephemerality, volatility, [and] uncertainty” running alongside and
being superimposed on “linearity, spatiality, invariability, clarity and pre-
cision” to create new “temporal multiplicity and complexity” (Adam 2004,
65). The result is that people find themselves enmeshed in several compet-
ing temporalities simultaneously. For example, a person heading to a meet-
ing at 10am, using their mobile phone to talk to a colleague on the other
side of the planet while waiting at a pedestrian crossing for the network-
controlled traffic lights to change is negotiating global time and local time,
clock time and network time, as well as social and natural time. She is ex-
periencing pronounced time-space distanciation of a long-distance call, as
well as very localised time-space choreographies of negotiating an intersec-
tion; both chronoscopic and chronological time. For Crang (2007, 70) then
people are negotiating a complex “chronotopia” of varying pace, tempos,
34                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

rhythms, scheduling, temporal relations and modalities, and these are con-
tingent for different people in different places. The trend towards real-time
does have consequences with respect to governance and individual time
geographies that require reflection and attention, but the emphasis of cri-
tique should be on the maintenance, rather than recovery, of asynchronous
and lively cities.


5. Conclusions

     Smart city initiatives reconfigure both space and time. In this essay, I
have concentrated on examining how temporality is being modulated, fo-
cusing on the drive to create real-time cities. Increasingly, urban manage-
ment is being operated in a perpetual present, with present conditions pre-
figuring an immediate reaction, and urban life is gaining speed, tempo and
temporal flexibility. As I have illustrated, real-time is relational, heteroge-
neous and contingent, taking different forms across platforms and systems
due to varying configurations and operations of machine time. As a result,
multiple cultures of realtimeness unfold and these intersect in practice with
other temporalities to produce complex chronotopias. However, while op-
erating in real-time has a number of advantages, particularly with respect
to responsiveness, efficiency, optimisation and flexibility, it also raises a
number of concerns regarding the formulation and practice of governance,
the compression and fragmentation of time, and how these impact on in-
dividuals, society and economy. To date, however, there has been relatively
little critical scholarship on the nature of real-time and its implications with
respect to different domains. While I and others have started to fill this
lacuna with some initial reflections, much more research and critical anal-
ysis – philosophical, theoretical, and empirical – is required to consider
several questions concerning the real-time city. There are many avenues for
such studies and reflection, but I propose concentrating on four related
concerns.
     First, there needs to be sustained consideration of the ontology and
epistemology of real-time and realtimeness. What is the nature of real-time
and realtimeness? How do we best make sense of real-time and realtime-
ness; to understand and explain theoretically the relations of time, technol-
ogy and the city? I have posited that real-time is relational, heterogeneous,
contingent and provisional, with systems exhibiting varied realtimeness
that produce chronotopias and almost but not quite real-time cities; what
are plausible alternative conceptions? Also, how should the dimensions of
realtimeness be measured? As I have detailed elsewhere with respect to
researching the nature and work of algorithms, unpacking the workings of
code and computational machines is often tricky to perform (Kitchin
2017). Digital systems are often black-boxed and proprietary, they are het-
erogeneous and embedded, and they are ontogenetic, being performative,
contingent, and mutable. Figuring out the elements of machine time and
Kitchin                                                                    35
their broader configuring within social-technical assemblages, as well as
how they unfold in practice, is far from straightforward.
    Second, there needs to be a systemic analysis of the relationship be-
tween real-time ICTs and individual time-geographies, modes of govern-
mentality, and the production of chronotopias. How does the cultures of
realtimeness of specific platforms and systems intersect with other tempo-
ralities to produce chronotopias? How do those chronotopias unfold in
practice and to what extent are they shaped by social relations (gender,
sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, class, caring responsibilities, etc.)?
What are the implications of these chronotopias for individual time-space
trajectories and for how institutions (e.g., employers) and social structures
(e.g., families) organize and regulate time? In what ways does real-time
monitoring and response transform regimes of governmentality and what
are the implications for city administrations and citizens? In what ways
does a prioritisation of acting in real-time alter the ways in which the past,
present and future shape social relations? As noted in the essay, there is
now a fair body of work that examines such questions with respect to mo-
bile and spatial media, but our understanding is still evolving and advances
in technologies produce new, emerging practices and phenomena.
    Third, the relationship between realtimeness and space/spatiality needs
to be examined and theorised. How does the adoption of real-time plat-
forms and systems affect the experience and meaning of time and space in
the contemporary city? How does realtimeness intersect with the transduc-
tion of space? Do real-time platforms and systems inherently transduce
code/spacetimes? How do code/spacetimes unfold contingently, relation-
ally and contextually with respect to particular smart city technologies and
domains (home, work, retail, public spaces, etc.) and practices (govern-
ance, mobility, consumption, production, etc.)? In this essay, I have pri-
marily been concerned with exploring the temporality of the real-time city,
largely placing the role of space to one side. However, time and space are
clearly interdependent, whether that is chronos and choros (clock time and
geometric space) or kairos and topos (social time and lived place), or
chronos/topos, or kairos/choros (Sui 2012). Indeed, some theorists would
posit that time and space are so thoroughly entwined that they operate as
a fused dyad – timespace (May and Thrift 2002); in other words, it is im-
possible to separate time and space into co-productions (time-space) or
consider them as separate phenomenon that instigate discrete processes
(time and space). From this perspective what are the real-timespaces of cit-
ies and what are their tempospatial implications?
    Fourth, the politics and ethics of real-time needs to be unpacked, a nor-
mative exploration of realtimeness conducted, and consideration given to
the resistance and subversion of dromospheric pollution. As detailed in the
third part of the essay, operating in an ‘eternal now’ and ‘perpetual contact’
produces a set of challenges both with respect to the unfolding of individ-
ual time geographies and the practices of governmentality. Speed, effi-
ciency, optimisation, interconnection, and automation are prioritised as
36                                                              Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

virtuous tempo-spatial relations, and téchne (instrumental knowledge) is
prioritised over phronesis (knowledge derived from practice and delibera-
tion) and metis (knowledge based on experience) (Parsons 2004; Kitchin
et al. 2015). There is thus a politics and ethics in adopting real-time tech-
nologies as it prioritises particular values and knowledges, which then have
consequences to how urban life is experienced and cities governed. As oth-
ers have started to argue, there is merit in a counterview of valuing asyn-
chronicity; of valuing kairos over chronos. As yet, however, an ethics of
temporal dissonance, such as the notion of “slow computing” (Fraser
2017), has barely been articulated. Similarly, the ways in which individuals
and communities are resisting realtimeness and seeking to act in alternative
temporalities are little documented. And we have hardly considered from
a normative perspective what kind of real-time city we want to create and
live in?
    As networked ICTs become increasingly embedded into the fabric and
workings of urban systems and everyday living, we will increasing reside,
work and play in the real-time city and experience realtimeness. It is im-
perative then, I believe, to address the questions I have set out above, im-
plementing a series of empirical and theoretical projects that examine in
detail the configuration, operation and consequences of real-time systems
and the changing tempo-spatiality of smart cities. In so doing, we will start
to flesh out the nature, politics and ethics of realtimeness, and produce
strategies to ameliorate some of the negative consequences of operating
ever-more in the here-and-now; to produce real-time cities that balance
chronos and kairos.


Acknowledgments

The research for this paper was funded by a European Research Council award,
The Programmable City (323636-SOFTCITY), and a Science Foundation Ireland
award, Building City Dashboards (15/IA/3090). I am grateful to Paolo Cardullo,
Claudio Coletta, Alistair Fraser, Sung-Yueh Perng and Sam Stehle for comments
on an initial draft of the paper.



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Kitchin                                                                     41
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