Guest lecture: Smart City Limits: Towards a criminology of urban smartness

About the lecture: Smart City Limits: Towards a criminology of urban smartness 

The lecture will offer a brief criminological introduction to the smart city paradigm and in particular some of the grandiose corporate and tech industry claims that regularly surround the concept of urban smartness. More specifically it will outline five putative ‘smart city futures’: 
1) ‘The smart city as sociotechnical imaginary’; 
2) ‘The smart city as corporate “play” space’;
3) ‘The smart city as militarised tech zone’; 
4) ‘The smart city as cyborg city’; and finally, 
5) ‘The smart city as adversarial surface’. 

Adopting the perspective of cultural criminology, the lecture poses a series of questions about the future of urban space in ‘the age of the smart city’. In particular, it asks what will ‘living’ actually mean when urban life is ultimately defined and enforced by a network of computational systems?

About the lecturer: Prof. Dr. Keith John Hayward

Keith J. Hayward is Professor of Criminology at the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen. He has published widely in the areas of criminological theory, spatial and social theory, visual and popular culture, and terrorism and fanaticism. As one of the leading figures in the field of cultural criminology, Dr Hayward is particularly interested in the various ways in which cultural dynamics intertwine with the practices of crime and crime control within contemporary society; as a consequence, he has written on everything from the role of documentary filmmaking in criminology to the existential allure of ‘Jihadi cool’. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 12 books, the most recent being, Cultural Criminology (2018), a four-volume edited collection for Routledge’s Major Works series.