Citizen-Generated Data: Smart Citizenship as Collaboration and Contestation

This paper has the ambition to enhance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of data in smart cities by focusing on a type of data that is often ignored: citizen-generated data. Citizen-generated data is the... [ view full abstract ]

This paper has the ambition to enhance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of data in smart cities by focusing on a type of data that is often ignored: citizen-generated data. Citizen-generated data is the data that individuals generate and that can be used in the public domain for collective value production. The promise of citizen-generated data is that smart citizens generate data as a basis for collaborative governance and the production of public value. We conducted a comparative case study research in several different countries and analyzed a single case in the Netherlands in-depth to explore this promise. We found that citizen-generated data can indeed provide better information for collaborative action but, at the same time, citizen-generated data can also be used to challenge current positions and power structures. The contribution to the smartness of the city should thus be understood in terms of both collaboration and contestation. A smarter city is not one in which everybody only agrees and collaborates but one that also has developed checks and balances in its data.