As our ‘habitat’ is coming to life through outfitting our city with intelligent sensors, the question of who owns all this data is highly relevant. Different models of data ownership are emerging: tech companies with their centralized platforms still proliferate in the U.S., but decentralized structures are emerging in Europe, and centralized government-led initiatives are built in China.
Our home, street, city and skyscape are the four layers of our ‘Smart Habitat’. For citywide data-driven systems on the layer of the city, the question of data ownership is highly relevant: who decides under what conditions data can be used to develop applications? Across the world, governments have different mindsets in thinking about data ownership, which has different implications for the future of their cities.In the U.S., tech companies compete for public private partnerships to build citywide systems on their platforms. As each company has its own platform, municipalities often end up with ‘vendor lock-in’: the company behind the platform owns the data, and municipalities cannot freely use the data (i.e. to develop applications with third parties). Increasingly, the American model is encountering privacy concerns (e.g. Google in Toronto). Such (typically American) competition for PPP’s has become the dominant narrative about ‘smart cities’, but elsewhere in the world different models are emerging.In Europe, urban governance has increasingly started following a stakeholder model in which governments (local, national, European) work together with citizens and industry. While many European cities initially followed the American model, European governments have dealt with the backlash against tech companies in a different way. The GDPR, which goes into effect today, is a prime example of Europe protecting citizens against the power of tech companies. Data collected in urban environments is increasingly considered as a public resource. As such, European cities are now frequently adopting open data models: data that is collected in the city is made available on a publicly accessible platform (e.g. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris). However, the problem of open data is that certain data which might lead to useful applications may not be collected since opening such datasets to the public raises privacy concerns (e.g. car locations, camera’s).In China, smart city projects have been more ambitious because of the top-down structure of the central government (e.g. carbon trading, social credit systems). Another notable difference between Chinese cities and Western cities is that Chinese local governments perform far more administrative functions. Therefore, the push from the local government to use new technology to tackle persistent problems (e.g. traffic jams, environmental pollution) is higher in China, whereas Western municipalities focus more on improving basic government services (and ‘smart city’ remains a buzzword). However, China is struggling with integrating different platforms into a comprehensive database as it tries to aggregate all available data from its cities into a common platform.Around the world, different mindsets of governments mean that cities encounter different obstacles towards finding successful applications for persistent urban problems. Vendor lock-in of the American model means that local governments are increasingly hesitant to cooperate with tech companies. Privacy concerns and open data structures means that the range of potential applications in the European model is limited. The top-down model of China means that the lack of a comprehensive database prevents the development of potential applications. These differences imply that every region has to work around its own barriers to development and thus awaits a different enabling factor to boost ‘smart city’ projects.
