Essai

Governance of urban data commons as a matter of value redistribution in the smart city

Tommaso Fia

In today’s urban environments, “datafication” of social interactions and community activities is ubiquitous and actualises in various applications. One may think of sensor-enabled urban mobility, data-driven water supply systems, innovative waste management plants, and so forth. Data-driven solutions, forming the “smart city”, aim to tackle complex urban problems, and largely depend on marketising or privatising public services. Smart city models, therefore, tend to disguise processes of data appropriation by private enterprises (“data ownership”). By contrast, there is a bourgeoning legal literature exploring how decentralised data infrastructures can open up access...