Twenty months ago I started a large five year project entitled the 'Programmable City'. I thought that I would be out and about doing fieldwork, catching up on reading, and writing empirically based papers. Instead I mostly spent that time setting things up, supervising other researchers or running training courses, reading and editing their stuff, writing contextual and more theoretical papers, giving talks, and working on other projects. One of my new year's resolutions was to change that and I've spent the last four weeks out and about doing fieldwork. I've conducted 30 interviews so far with key informants from city authorities, state agencies, companies, and civic groups, for a project entitled 'Smart Dublin', with another 15 or so to go. It's been a real joy. And the whole process has shifted my thinking on the notion of smart cities somewhat. The key thing now is to make sure I continue to find the time for this. I've already blocked off six weeks later in the year when I hope to doing a similar set of interviews in Boston. The next challenge is to try and block-off time to process and analyze the material and write-up the findings!
My posts this week
February reads
Review of
Red Joan by Jennie Rooney
Reviewing reviews
Review of
The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin
Two 3 year postdocs on the Programmable City project
The red section
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