The proliferation of smart city policies worldwide in recent years has seen digital infrastructure, urban data and software design play increasingly central roles in the contemporary governance of the city. This article addresses the role of urban data platforms in supporting the delivery of smart city initiatives by city governments, with a view to establishing a typology for effective strategic investments in urban data interfaces aligned to governance objectives. Drawing on a range of different interfaces and approaches, the article discusses the proliferation of urban data platforms through a set of distinct functions and typologies. The discussion aims to position urban data platforms as key sites for the development of new governance models for smart cities, and forums in which decision-makers, researchers, urbanists and technologists seek to test the potentials and pitfalls of data-driven methodologies in addressing a range of contemporary urban challenges.

Introduction

Today’s cities are the engines of the new data economy. The rise of new digital services such as on-demand transport, intelligent water management, responsive lighting, and distributed energy resources are rapidly replacing the legacy infrastructures and service delivery models that have served the cities of the twentieth century. As a consequence, the millions of interactions and transactions that take place in cities on any given day—from volumes of energy used, movements of people, traffic, water and waste, social media interactions, emails, financial and retail transactions and multi-modal transport flows—are now generating huge volumes of ‘data exhaust’. Growing at an unprecedented rate, the data exhaust of our cities is of increasing value to governments and businesses as they seek to apply data-driven methodologies to improve the quality and efficiency of city services. As Goldsmith and Crawford write in The Responsive City (2014: 3), our ability to collect, analyse and share information today has great potential to transform and even reinvigorate the governance of cities. Smart city investments are now accelerating across the globe, resulting in the proliferation of data-driven tools and platforms, designed to usher in more ‘responsive’ urban services capable of addressing myriad city challenges (Arup, Livable Cities, UCL, & Smart City Expo, 2014; EIU 2017). This wave of smart city investment has sparked growing skepticism across research and industry communities in the idealisation of the smart city as a vendor-oriented vision of ICT-led urban growth (Batty, 2016; Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2015; Luque-Ayala & Marvin, 2015; McNeill, 2015; Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; Vanolo, 2014). However, these concerns are also accompanied by growing recognition that, whether or not cities are ‘smart’, the proliferation of data-driven platforms requires governments to play a much more active role in the management of their cities’ data assets – the vast amounts of data generated by citizens everyday – if they are going to enlist the support of data-driven tools and services to address their city’s most pressing challenges (Pettit, Lieske, & Jamal, 2017). Indeed, it is the capacity for city governments to support and cultivate partnerships spanning public and private data custodians, citizens and software developers, that is now provoking a shift away from the concept of top-down, vendor-backed visions of smart cities (now often pilloried as ‘smart cities 1.0’). In this context there is growing interest in more collaborative models of smart city governance (‘smart cities 2.0’) that emphasise a role for city governments in the curation and management of data assets to support a city’s strategic priorities. This paper addresses emerging concepts in smart city era governance and the influence of these concepts in driving investment in new platforms or interfaces for city data. As Luque-Ayala and Marvin (2015): 8) have argued, it is important we understand how particular technologies and interfaces associated with smart city investments emerge and continue to act within wider operating conditions of the city, in helping to “more intensively unbundle and rebundle users, space, services and networks”.