Reclaiming data for improved city governance: Barcelona’s New Data Deal

Introduction

Data sits at the crossroads of key urban governance debates. With the deployment of new technologies in cities, vast troves of data are being generated from old and novel sources with unprecedented levels of volume, variety, velocity and granularity (Kitchin, 2014; UK Office of Science, 2015). In response, city governments are exploring new ways to leverage urban data to better inform decisions around planning, mobility, air quality and many other areas of urban policy (Goldsmith and Crawford, 2014; Ruhlandt et al., 2020). The use of data to enhance decision-making for improved public action is at the core of smart city governance (Barns et al., 2017; Kitchin, 2016; Ranchod, 2020). Novel data sources and analytic techniques can be applied to understand how everyday movements drive urbanisation processes (Howe, 2021); to analyse the effectiveness, efficiency and fairness of urban policing (Ellison et al., 2021); to explore segregated urban neighbourhood networks (Candipan et al., 2021); or to study the informal housing market (Harten et al., 2021). These are just a few of the applications of urban data that have led Bannister and O’Sullivan (2021: 3067) to conclude that ‘[b]ig Data is, by its intrinsic nature, an urban phenomenon’.

Despite this potential of urban data, governments face challenges when seeking to access and embed novel data sources into policy making (OECD, 2021; Puttick et al., 2022; Ranchod, 2020). In the context of increasingly powerful and globally distributed digital platforms operating across cities, conditions of access to and use of urban data are increasingly determined by the data-sharing policies of these privatised services (Barns, 2019; Sadowski, 2021). The ways in which urban digital platforms govern and co-ordinate their ecosystems of users through opaque uses of data and algorithms presents an increasingly significant challenge to governments seeking to regulate their operations and govern on behalf of citizens (Barns, 2020; Boeing et al., 2021; Van der Graaf and Ballon, 2018). Lack of access to crucial data needed to regulate the operations of disruptive platform providers demonstrates that even in a world of big data, data can also be scarce – especially if private companies can withhold it to prevent their effective regulation (Bliss, 2018; Boeing et al., 2021; Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018).

In this context, access to urban data controlled by private companies has become a focus for new data policies. The European Commission’s (2022) proposed Data Act seeks to ‘ensure fairness in the allocation of value from data among actors in the data economy and to foster access to and use of data’. Major European cities have also been forging new strategic competencies in data governance and management, championing the need for improved data protection, privacy and sovereignty (Beraldo and Milan, 2019; Hummel et al., 2021; Morozov and Bria, 2018). The city scale has emerged as a critical forum for the work of policy makers, activists, researchers and citizens in creating alternative models for data governance that ensure the value of data is more widely shared by citizens (Barns, 2020; De Lange, 2019; Mann et al., 2020; Micheli, 2022; Sadowski, 2021).

A leading example of such city-scale data reform is that of the City of Barcelona, whose agenda to create a ‘New Data Deal’ (Bria, 2018) following the 2015 election of Mayor Ada Colau received wide attention in academic and policy debates (e.g. Charnock et al., 2021; Janoschka and Mota, 2021; Kitchin et al., 2019; Mann et al., 2020; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2019; Sadowski, 2021). Barcelona has become what Charnock et al. (2021: 582) describe as a ‘referent for a radically different vision of urban governance – as the quintessential “rebel city”’, by formulating a ‘different vision of a smart city and smart citizenship’ (Kitchin et al., 2019: 11). As a leading referent, Barcelona ‘stands out internationally as a smart city that aims to harness technology to empower citizens’ (Mann et al., 2020: 1110), championing the rights of citizens to benefit from the value of their data rather than a widespread commercially-exploitative data capture (Charnock et al., 2021: 591).

As the leading referent city, we argue that Barcelona remains a key site not only for articulating different principles and policies of alternative data governance, but also for understanding the challenges of implementing reforms around urban data ownership. To this end, in this article, we aim to address in more detail the specific policies and programmes, such as the data sovereignty clauses introduced in procurement contracts, that aimed to reclaim access to corporate-controlled urban data. In doing so, we aim to extend existing research into the ‘Barcelona Model’, much of which has been undertaken in response to earlier funding and policy announcements, to address their implementation in practice. As Calzada (2018: 16) has recognised in his valuable analysis of Barcelona’s smart-city strategy and digital policy, more research is needed on the implementation of policies changing the nature of urban data ownership.

We therefore aim to focus specifically on the tools and programmes used to address the ownership and control of urban data in smart city governance. Our focus is on the policy initiatives deployed by the city and the internal dynamics required to implement those policies, to highlight key lessons for practitioners, researchers and activists seeking to advance a more proactive agenda for data governance. The paper is structured as follows. We first provide an overview of the academic and policy debates around corporate ownership of urban data and city governments’ efforts to regain control over it. We then briefly describe how this review of the current debates informed our methodological approach to analysing the case of Barcelona. The third section presents the results of the analysis, followed by a discussion of the key findings, in particular as they relate to the broader topic of city governments’ efforts to reconfigure data ownership in the context of smart city governance.

Resisting the corporate control of urban data

Corporate-controlled data, its ownership and use, have steadily moved to the centre of the smart governance debate (Barns, 2016; Sadowski, 2019). The control of data already figured prominently in the early debates around smart cities (Kitchin, 2014). These programmes were designed by companies with a view to expanding key insights from individual cities into globally-scalable digital products (Sadowski, 2021). However, following a number of relatively unsuccessful urban technology experiments, the notion that cities could be sites for highly scalable ‘urban operating systems’, where complex urban challenges could be centrally managed through data-driven insights, came to be challenged on a number of fronts by technology practitioners and urbanists (Greenfield and Kim, 2013; Mann et al., 2020; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2019; Sadowski and Bendor, 2019). As best exemplified, perhaps, by the case of the Sidewalk project in Toronto (Artyushina, 2020), the debate around smart cities has focused on the destruction of city governments’ capacities due to the privatisation of urban governance (Kitchin, 2015; Morozov and Bria, 2018) as well as the risks to citizens’ privacy derived from the abuse of technology devices to track peoples’ movements and actions (Calzada, 2018).

With the emergence of ‘platform urbanism’, the debates around corporate-controlled urban data have been framed in a different light. Platform companies’ exclusive control over data, often well beyond the capabilities of local governments, enabled these platforms to disrupt urban living while bypassing the regulatory framework and powers of local authorities (Barns, 2020; Sadowski, 2021; Söderström and Mermet, 2020). Here the debate was not only about the loss of capacities of city governments and the risks to privacy derived from surveillance tactics, but on the need to access critical data to respond to the irruption of business models that were transforming core aspects of cities such as mobility and housing. Since 2018, however, city governments have started to react to this situation by issuing formal policies requiring access to the data controlled by urban platform companies. An interesting analysis of these mandatory policies by Larrick (2022) shows a clear increase in the adoption of such regulations by US cities (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Number of data sharing policies introduced by US city governments (2012–2021).

Another concern around corporate control over data is the emergence of the monopolistic business models created through the exclusive control of massive amounts of data (Srnicek, 2016). This debate, often centred around Big Tech companies, has reached cities with global platforms’ efforts to own and develop urban space, in what has been identified as the third phase of smart urbanism (Sadowski, 2021). According to existing research, tackling the corporate enclosure and assetisation of urban data is key to deterring the unrolling of data rentiership models where companies seek to replicate in urban contexts the monopolistic positions achieved by platforms in the digital space (Artyushina, 2020). Accessing the data controlled by platforms is not justified solely on the grounds of regulating the operations of these companies, but as a challenge to the whole rentier business model advanced by these companies.

Breaking the corporate control of urban data therefore becomes a key tool to move from a corporatised view of urban data to a public value creation approach championed by city governments. This approach goes beyond the focus on privacy protection that has been one of the main concerns of the debate, including those studying the case of Barcelona (Calzada, 2018). Access to non-personal urban data thus may be essential to achieve some of the goals such as regulatory compliance or curbing monopolistic corporate power that destroys local businesses.

Following Kitchin (2016), the debate around accessing corporate-controlled urban data lies at the heart of a key normative question for the academic and policy debate on smart cities: what are the goals of smart city governance? Based on the literature, we can identify four goals that justify city governments’ control over certain corporate-owned urban data: regaining (lost) capacity to deliver public services (Barns, 2019; Ranchod, 2020), regulating disruptive businesses (Boeing et al., 2021; Ferreri and Sanyal, 2018; Larrick, 2022), informing policy-making (Bannister and O’Sullivan, 2021; Goldsmith and Crawford, 2014) and breaking data enclosure of monopolies to facilitate innovation and a more inclusive urban economy (Artyushina, 2020; Sadowski, 2021).

Depending on the goal(s) that city governments pursue, there will be different instruments regarding two key dimensions of the process of resisting corporate control over urban data: (i) the access of the data from the private entity and (ii) the use (in particular as it relates to whether it is made openly available) of the data that the city government accesses (Susha et al., 2017). In the first dimension, access to the data can be voluntary (data will only be accessed when corporate entities agree to share their data) or mandatory (data will be shared when required by a legal mandate). In the second dimension, data use can be placed in a spectrum from closed (remains under the sole control of the city government requesting the data) to open (published as open data) (Open Data Institute, n.d.).

If the goal of the city government is to access the data, for example of a micromobility operator, to regulate its use of the public space, this data may be mandatorily requested and does not need to be opened. If, by contrast, the goal is to pool data from different sources to transform corporate-controlled siloed data into a public infrastructure, then the data needs to be open. Table 1 provides an illustration of different examples of efforts to access corporate-controlled data mapped to these two dimensions.

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Table 1.

Mapping of examples to access corporate data.

	Closed	Semi-Open	Open
Voluntary	Bilateral programmes between cities and companies, such as Waze for Cities. a	The Secure Data Commons of the US Department of Transport. b	The Recovery Data Partnership of New York City. c
Mandatory	Data-sharing policies for micro-mobility operators. d	Shanghai’s Electric Vehicles Data Platform. e	The Net-Zero Data Public Utility. f

a

https://www.waze.com/wazeforcities/.

b

https://www.transportation.gov/data/secure/sdc-projectspotlight-cvp.

c

https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/542-20/mayor-de-blasio-launch-the-nyc-recovery-data-partnership-open-call-data.

d

See Larrick (2022) for a recent overview.

e

http://en.cctp.org.cn/product/35989.html.

f

https://www.nzdpu.com/.

A key gap in the literature, however, is understanding how these approaches can be implemented by city governments. This paper addresses that gap, arguing that to study city government efforts to regain control over corporate-owned data, it is essential to understand: (i) what goals are pursued by the city government; and (ii) what are the instruments deployed to achieve those goals?

With those questions in mind, we now turn to the methodology we used to study Barcelona’s efforts to regain control over urban data, its successes and limitations and the broader lessons that can be extracted for the debate around urban data ownership in the context of smart city governance.

Methodology

As set out in the previous section, through the study of the data governance policies implemented by Barcelona during the period 2015–2019 we seek to better understand city governments’ approaches regarding access to corporate-controlled urban data. The selection of the case of Barcelona was justified by its nature as a critical case (Yin, 2018). Although in the last years many city governments had become more proactive in issuing policies to access data from micro-mobility platforms, in 2015, when the policies in Barcelona started to be designed, very few city governments were active in this space. This pioneering nature, the breadth of Barcelona’s policies and the fact that they have been implemented, made it a critical case to study this topic.

Prior to 2015, the City of Barcelona became a key site for the promotion of smart city business opportunities. Keen to promote its smart city credentials, the City established partnerships with leading technology providers and Barcelona was positioned during this phase as a laboratory for the urban future (March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2019: 232). This wave of smart city activity included novel experiments by technology companies who promoted the idea that a city could be run like an ‘operating system’, in much the same way as a computer itself (Barns, 2017; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2019; Wiig, 2015). In 2015, with the election of Ada Colau and the appointment of one of the co-authors of this article, Francesca Bria, as Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, the city sought to overhaul its policy towards technology and data. While much of the attention towards the technology agenda introduced by Barcelona in 2015 has focused on its significance in advancing more ‘bottom up’ models of citizen-centric digital services, the implementation process of its policies around data has received much less attention.

To study this topic we reviewed public documentation such as regulations, project deliverables and evaluations, policy documents as well as academic and grey literature. To triangulate and complement the insights from one of the co-author’s key involvement in the smart city governance policies of Barcelona, we also conducted a set of semi-structured interviews with key decision makers, legal experts, technology advisers and city officials. A total of seven interviews were conducted between February 2021 and May 2021 with representatives closely involved in the implementation of the agenda (see Appendix 1). These included: one of the authors of the data strategy, a project manager from the municipal data office, one of the lawyers involved in the drafting of regulations and data sovereignty clauses, members and coders of the Metadecidim community as well as members from academia who actively participated in shaping the data agenda.

Through the investigation of these sources we sought to address the following key questions: (i) what were the key goals for regaining control over corporate urban data; and (ii) what were the key policy instruments deployed to achieve those goals? We also drew empirical data on the achievements, challenges and lessons learned in the process of implementing these policies that are presented in the discussion section.

A New Data Deal: Reclaiming urban data for public purpose in Barcelona

Discussion

Barcelona’s efforts to reclaim access to corporate-controlled urban data highlighted a set of different goals and instruments city governments can use to improve how they govern a city’s data ecosystem in ways that support improved citizen services. Since Barcelona’s data reforms were introduced, more city governments have experimented with tools such as mandatory data sharing policies (Larrick, 2022) and procurement clauses (Micheli, 2022). Barcelona was not only a pioneer in establishing mandatory data sharing requirements for corporations through its procurement clauses, but also sought to enable the creation of novel data infrastructures, such as that established through DECODE. The experience of Barcelona in implementing these initiatives offer a some important practical lessons for other city governments seeking to reconfigure data ownership regimes in their communities. We reflect on these lessons below, incorporating insights from those active in the implementation of Barcelona’s new data policies.

First, interviewees noted that mainstreaming and scaling the technological infrastructure piloted through DECODE faced some important challenges. A number of interviewees (3, 5 and 7) pointed to several reasons for this: weakening political support for the Mayor Ada Colau after the elections of 2019; ² the discontinuation of dedicated funding for programmes such as DECODE from the EU; as well as some usability challenges faced by its new technology. Beyond the described pilots, the DECODE initiative did not result in the release of a new app for widespread public use. The pilots remained relatively small scale, and while providing thought leadership and influence in design models for data governance, it did not advance long-term changes to citizen use of urban data via its new blockchain technology. Interviewees also described the fact that a number of the project developers were recruited to work on the private sector with a significant loss of expertise on the project. This outcome evidences the difficulties faced by governments in attracting and retaining critical capacity particularly in fast-growing technology sectors. The outcome also shows the need for increased public investment into privacy-enhancing technology to make cryptography usable and friendly and overcome the current trade-offs between privacy protection and the unlocking of data’s social value, as well as to strengthen the capacity inside public institutions and reduce the skill mismatch between the public and private sectors.

Second, and connected to this last point, our research also confirmed that policy measures to change data governance need to be accompanied by substantial political and resource investment in developing the necessary capabilities within the city organisation. In Barcelona, the city relied on strong charismatic leadership, but this was susceptible to waning support over time. This impacted the attention paid to the building of data capabilities of the city administration. One of the main challenges faced by the MDO was lack of skilled workers combined with the complexities and length of hiring practices. This required the MDO to focus on providing training and capacity building to other areas, and on supporting other departments when they are contracting data science services.

Third, given the conflicting interests and values operating over decisions about what data to share, with whom and how, city governments are well placed to make stewardship decisions over urban data flows (Beckwith et al., 2019). On the one hand, Barcelona’s data governance model is one rooted in civic participation, citizen control of data and a supporting civic community. On the other hand, the process of institutionalising the data commons model is achieved through the city administration, with public funding of the required technologies and with the development of supporting bureaucratic autonomy and capabilities. As described in Interviews 3, 5 and 6, this combination resulted in tensions, reflecting concerns around the degree of reliance on the city government as the central actor in the new data governance model. The City’s role in creating and supporting the institutions, norms and technologies necessary for the data commons was key to advancing this vision, but at the same time, the civic ownership of and participation in the process helped new ideas to infiltrate and expand what the City was willing and able to explore and test. Arguably, this productive tension can be seen as inherent to the experimental nature of data commons pilots, particularly when run in a democratic and inclusive way. The tension particularly lies in the institutionalisation of certain practices and innovations. Some of this process will necessarily lose autonomy and dynamism, but also open new opportunities by operating at a much greater scale. This tension was expressed through the outcomes of Decidim, which was ultimately expanded beyond the institutional remit of the City itself, to operate as a stand-alone platform for wider use and uptake by cities seeking to advance citizen-oriented participation and data governance agendas.

Fourth, central to the objectives of the Barcelona experiment was to shift how data was understood and used across the city, not so much as an asset extracted and used for competitive advantage by corporations, but as ‘a social “infrastructure” that must be public in order to ensure common well-being’ (City of Barcelona, 2018: 8). How data can contribute to better decisions and more effective and transparent policies in areas that are relevant to citizens was in turn demonstrated with key pilots run by the City of Barcelona. Yet, how this infrastructure can be used at scale to transform the city and its economy has not, we would argue, been sufficiently proven within Barcelona, despite efforts by smaller companies, cooperatives, civic organisations and citizens to act as an alternative data ecosystem to those developed by private global platforms. As described by one interviewee, an important reason for this is scale: the city level is often too small to generate viable examples of alternative models of data based on privacy preservation and public value. Here is where the role of the EU and the articulation of approaches that integrate the principles of new models of data governance into instruments such as the European data spaces is crucial.

Finally, despite the reported tensions, the City’s policies regarding data governance have achieved impact more widely. The range of programmes and interventions made by the City of Barcelona to ‘take back citizen data’ provided important guidance to cities by demonstrating how their governments can play an instrumental role in technology design and data governance in an era of global digital infrastructures. Critical here is the role played by Barcelona in influencing the wider regulatory reforms to advance the need for more public data infrastructures over private platforms.

In particular, Barcelona has demonstrated how a new governance model for digital rights and data sovereignty is possible, promoting an agenda that has extended to other cities, moving beyond the local level to influence the EU’s strategy and policy on data. In 2020 the European Union declared that it will use its convening and financial powers to ‘strengthen Europe’s “technological sovereignty for the data-agile economy”’ (European Commission, 2020: 16). This document also expressly references DECODE as one of the innovative tools that enable citizens to share their data while protecting their rights and declares the need to continue investing in environments that enable those innovations to flourish (European Commission, 2020: 10). The case of Barcelona has also informed the Vision for the Global Urban Age developed by the four biggest cities in Finland (Espoo, Helsinki, Tampere and Vantaa) and the think tank Demos Helsinki (2020). In Germany, the lessons from Barcelona are being tested by the City of Hamburg in its new smart city strategy (The New Institute, n.d.).

The influence of Barcelona has therefore gone beyond rhetoric and has provided concrete examples of policy instruments and technologies that can be used to implement this vision. The Ethical Digital Standards developed in Barcelona, and adopted by other cities, were designed to support a range of governments in implementing citizen-first models of technology procurement and data management. A key platform for such diffusion has been the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights. Launched by the Cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York in November 2018 and now with a membership of over 50 cities worldwide, the coalition operates as a network of cities helping each other in the greenfield of digital rights-based policymaking. The coalition is committed to promoting and defending digital rights in urban contexts through city action, to resolve common digital challenges and work towards legal, ethical and operational frameworks to advance human rights in digital environments. Some of the people who developed the Barcelona data governance framework remain active in the coalition.

Conclusion

Resisting corporate control of urban data has become central in the academic and policy debates on smart cities. Giving governments and citizens more democratic control over the data generated in the city is not only essential to de-activate surveillance regimes in urban settings, but also a key regulatory tool to respond to the disruption brought by platform companies and to curb monopolistic and rentier models that destroy local business ecosystems.

Despite the importance of the topic, research on this specific policy domain is still nascent. There is a need to advance our conceptual understanding of the issue and the empirical investigation of the policy responses that have started to emerge. This paper has contributed to addressing this gap using the City of Barcelona as a critical case study of a city that defined a new approach to data governance in the era of smart cities and platform urbanism. The case study underlined the role that cities can play as key actors in the design and implementation of policies and tools to rethink urban data ownership in smart city governance. Our research confirmed that these efforts face substantial barriers in developing the capacities necessary to balance the often greater resources and expertise marshalled by the private sector. It also showed that the commitment to the civic ownership and democratic participation of citizens in data ownership regimes, such as the one consciously advanced by the city of Barcelona, generates productive tensions between experimentation and institutionalisation dynamics that are difficult to manage. Finally, the research highlighted that Barcelona’s efforts need to be evaluated beyond the city’s boundaries, as its international impact is, perhaps, one of the most important legacies of the Barcelona experiment. By developing a bold agenda and implementing concrete measures while using the showcasing capabilities of a city of its size and relevance, Barcelona has fundamentally shaped a policy agenda that is spreading to other cities and influencing other levels of government.