How Can You Make Your City Smarter? - Data Donation and the Smart City
We all have some idealistic view of what a smart city is or should be. Flying cars, trees, parks, no garbage lying around, no traffic, no cars, well… you get the point. A forever unrealistic utopia. In essence, a smart city, despite no agreed-upon definition, is a city that makes use of technological advancements in its daily activities. From planning to road networks, garbage collection, and managing traffic.
Smart cities operate on data. Large amounts of it. For example, smart traffic lights have sensors feeding them information on how heavy the traffic is. These data are then used by the traffic light to maximise the traffic flow, minimising the waiting time for the drivers. We all hate traffic, so this is a welcome measure. However, the data can also tell the city where and when specific pain points are, where accidents are more likely to occur, and a myriad of other things. The data here is collected via sensors and cameras throughout a city, in which citizens have very little knowledge or power over what is being collected. It is a form of surveillance.
There is, however, another way - by giving citizens control and allowing them to actively participate in their city planning on their terms. Citizen participation is not new; referendums, participatory budgets, and even elections are means for citizens to participate in their city’s life. As with everything, technologies also came to revolutionalise citizen participation in the form of data donation. Data donation is defined as an ‘act, by the data subject, of voluntarily allowing their data to be transferred to a third party that is requesting it, with the objective of promoting public good or for wider social benefit’. Here, instead of cities surveilling their citizens, it asks them to participate by donating their data. Citizens become agents in their own surveillance negotiating their involvement.
MyGlasgow App - a tool from Glasgow’s city council in the United Kingdom to foster citizen participation - asks people to, amongst many other things, report potholes. Strava and Waze are examples of two very popular companies sharing their users’ data with cities to help with road network planning.
At heart, data donation practices and their adoption are framed as an act of citizenship in respect of the wider public good - One’s social identity as belonging to a system that is not trying to surveil them, but that wants to work in tandem to improve how people experience the city.
There is plenty to embed in this conceptual development - citizenship, trust in government, trust in systems, norms regulating these exchanges, and so on. Way too much to explore in this short article, but hopefully enough to foment discussion. Food for thought.
