The temporal organisation and practices of planning work: The temporalities of digital infrastructure, the digital infrastructuring of temporality

Journal title STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI
Author/s Rob Kitchin, Juliette Davret, Carla Maria Kayanan, Samuel Mutter
Publishing Year 2025 Issue 2025/2
Language English Pages 25 P. 180-204 File size 395 KB
DOI 10.3280/SO2025-002008
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Digitalisation is having a profound impact on the relationship between time and planning. The temporalities of planning’s bureaucratic infrastructure is being transformed through its digitalisation, introducing machine and network time and reshaping the relations between past, present and future. In turn, the temporalities of digital infrastructure has led to re-infrastructuring of planning’s temporalities, introducing a new timescape wherein the pace, tempo, timings, time patterns and temporal modalities of planning practice have been reconfigured. Yet, despite the profound effect of digitalisation on temporal relations, clock time remains important in the organisation and work of planning given the centrality of time rules and timetables, and this will continue to be the case. Using a case study of the development and control function of planning in Ireland, this paper examines temporalities of planning’s digital infrastructures and the digital infrastructuring of planning’s temporalities, illustrating the ways in which the temporal organisation and practices of planning work are being re-cast.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, digital technologies, digitalization, infrastructure, planning, temporality.

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Rob Kitchin, Juliette Davret, Carla Maria Kayanan, Samuel Mutter, The temporal organisation and practices of planning work: The temporalities of digital infrastructure, the digital infrastructuring of temporality in "STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI " 2/2025, pp 180-204, DOI: 10.3280/SO2025-002008