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City Bricolage: Imagining the City as a Platform

  • Sarah Barns
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Part of the Geographies of Media book series (GOM)

Abstract

In this chapter addresses a set of  civic responses to platform intermediation that are focused around issues of urban data governance. This aims to highlight a range of alternate data governance models currently in play, which point to  different roles for city authorities acting as custodians of their city’s data assets. The development of urban dashboards, urban data marketplaces, and civic data trusts, in particular, represent  different ways that cities are increasingly acting as proactive champions of urban data as public infrastructure, supported by increasingly sophisticated approaches to data sovereignty and data commons. The data governance challenges associated with attempts to build a city ‘from the internet up’ by Sidewalk Labs in Quayside, Toronto highlight the growing politicisation of urban data and platform ecosystems. At the same time, the data governance conditions enabled via global platform intermediation, in the case of a company like Uber, continue to evidence powerful asymmetries of data access and use between global platform providers and place-bound civic authorities.

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© The Author(s) 2020

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sarah Barns
    • 1
  1. 1.Sitelines MediaSydneyAustralia

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