Data Platforms for Smart Cities: A Landscape Scan and Recommendations for Smart City Practice

Abstract

Smart cities are complex configurations of technology, organisations and people that enable data about the city to be collected and flow to those who plan and deliver services in cities, leading to better urban outcomes for citizens and businesses. Platforms play a critical role in smart cities and in broader digital disruption across all industries. Platforms are essentially mechanisms that enable value exchange between two or more sets of stakeholders. On digital platforms, data may be the primary value exchange (e.g. Facebook) or a byproduct and enabler of other types of value exchange (e.g. Uber or eBay). The role of a platform is to match providers of data and services with those seeking these things, while minimising the transaction costs of doing so. These are exciting times, as digital technology has dramatically reduced the transaction costs of making such matches, greatly expanding the scope of platforms. This report examines platforms for collecting and sharing data relevant to people in an urban context, and the smart city initiatives through which they are being developed. It aims to provide an improved understanding of the socio-technical aspects of city-related data sharing and platform development by exploring the intersection of social, institutional and economic issues due to the rapid growth of data collection. It distils insights and recommendations to inform both the development of a transport mobility application and the development of social and technical architectures for urban data platforms in general. It is intended to inform practitioners engaged in smart city development work – specifically, in the design and development of the data aggregation and integration mechanisms (urban data exchanges) – by providing insights, highlighting key challenges, and offering recommendations to address these challenges. This work formed part of a larger project based on the development of a smartphone application through which individuals can choose to gather and share data on their commute while maintaining their privacy (the app and associated provable privacy mechanisms are described in a parallel report).