Section 3.2 Broader Implications: Democracy, Data, And The Future Of The City It’s a familiar pattern: technology brings societal change to the city, and local democratic institutions respond to that change with the adoption of new policies. What often gets overlooked is that while new rules and regulations serve a practical, legal function in the literal work of managing urban space and markets, and regulating technology, these administrative or legislative texts also play a performative and symbolic role. Taken as cultural artifacts these policies reflect and codify societal values, and contemporaneous attitudes toward a given technology and its impacts. Understanding such value judgments inherent in tech policy can help us take stock of our assumptions and see more clearly what kind of new world they might be ushering in. In short, emerging tech policies have stories to tell—and if we want to understand where we are and where we are headed, these stories are worth listening to. This final section of the report seeks to articulate, summarize, and prompt questions about some of the stories of cultural values and assumptions playing out in the development and implementation of local government platform data sharing mandates the debate surrounding them—and what it all might mean for the future of data infrastructure, digital rights, and technological sovereignty in the emergent smart city.
New Frameworks Beyond the Binary Our hypotheticals from this report’s introduction speak to the apparent tension between intuitive ideas about user privacy and about government oversight of urban digital platforms and the data they generate. However, while review of the literature and close examination of the landscape of platform urbanism data sharing policies and programs may not bring us to the “correct” answer for how to balance these interests, the trend of more and more local governments mandating access to platform data suggests an increasing desire for governments to play a more active and informed role in the administration of digital services and the management of
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Towards Urban Data Commons? On the Origins and Significance of Platform Data Sharing Mandates
