Citizen-centered data governance in the smart city: From ethics to accountability

Abstract

The concept of a smart city is tightly linked to the promise of using data as a resource to create value for citizens. The present paper systematically examines how such data-based value creation generates challenges for decision-makers in the smart city and how they can deal with these challenges. It formulates a coherent data governance framework that comprehensively covers ethical and legitimacy challenges which can arise over the various stages of data-based value creation. The framework translates abstract ethical requirements into a set of systematically derived governance mechanisms which are at the same time anchored in the concept of democratic accountability. This guiding principle does not demand that citizens necessarily become active themselves to realize citizen-centric data governance for socially sustainable smart city development. Rather, it demands that data governance comprises a suitable set of accountability measures that put the purposes of any data use center-stage.