Local governments across the world are in the middle of technological and economic developments that come together in the catch-all label of ‘smart cities’.
In a smart city, ICT-infused infrastructures enable the extensive monitoring and steering of city maintenance, mobility, air and water quality, energy usage, visitor movements, neighborhood sentiment, and so on.
Evidently, such processes use and produce massive amounts of data. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, for instance, the traffic authority monitors about 22,000 vehicle movements every morning,
1 while the regional environment agency produces hourly data about air quality from
sensors across greater Rotterdam resulting in over 175,000 observations per year.
The promise of such large amounts of data for smarter management of cities extends to other sectors as well such as (predictive) policing, crowd control or public sentiment monitoring.
The notion of data, in this context, extends beyond the big numbers churned out by monitoring technologies, but also includes the data present in city registers, the data from government or corporate surveys and the data from social media updates.
These data are ever more often combined and linked in order to produce joint indicators of city well-being, economic vitality or safety. Increasingly, local governments make these data also available to the wider public.
All of this raises issues about who has legitimate access, which data can be opened up to public usage, what is the appropriate privacy framework for the linkage of different data? In these discussions, issues like political and public acceptance of smart cities are important as is the question of everyday experiences in such ‘datafied’ cities (
Powell, 2014).
While some claim that ‘big data’ will help cities become richer, cleaner and more efficient, others argue that cities will turn into data-driven robotic places where creativity and deviance have no place. Kitchin (2014a) argues that there is little attention for such ‘politics of city data’ nor for the question how particular practices of data collection and analysis may have problematic social effects.
He adds that the ubiquitous collection of data about all city processes may produce ‘panoptic’ cities, in which “systems that seek to enable more effective modes of governance [may] also threaten to stifle rights to privacy, confidentiality, and freedom of expression” (p 12).