Digitization and urban governance: The city as a reflection of its data infrastructure

This article introduces the ‘House Model’, an integrated framework consisting of four data governance modes, based on the urban and smart city vision, context, and big data technologies. The model stems from engaged scholarship, synthesizing and extending the academic debates and evidence from existing smart city initiatives. It provides a means for comparing cities in terms of their digitization efforts, helps the planning of more effective urban data infrastructures and guides future empirical research in this area. The article contributes to the literature examining the issue of big data and its governance in local government and smart cities. Points for practitioners: Data is a vital part of smart city initiatives. Where the data comes from, who owns it and how it is used are all important questions. Data governance is therefore important and has consequences for the overall governance of the city. The House Model presented in this article provides a means for organizing data governance. It relates questions of data governance to the history and vision of smart city initiatives, and provides a typology organizing these initiatives.