Sustainability and Data Collection in the Smart City - A Case Study of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Tracking Project in Copenhagen

Sammanfattning: Cities around the world are facing a multitude of urban challenges that demand that they change the way they plan and think about their city, with one of the ways of approaching sustainability being the Smart city. A core feature of the Smart city is the idea of collecting large quantities of data on the city, big data, which is then used in various city solutions. In the wake of this, several questions dealing with sustainability surface and some of them are: transparency, privacy, citizen involvement and choice. The aim of this study is to investigate these and the smart city strategy by doing a case study of Copenhagen and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking project that started in 2014. Classic theories of surveillance such as Foucault’s Panopticism are used to further deepen the analysis. The results show that the Wi-Fi tracking project is a part of Copenhagen’s Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) program and collects the MAC addresses from the smartphones of citizens moving through the project area with activated Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. As this is done without the consent of citizens, the legality of the project is questioned. As for privacy, there seems to have been a change in the debate in and around the municipality, however the communication of the Smart city strategy to the citizens remains unchanged. The study concludes that Copenhagen has been shown to focus more on climate change, with their goal of being CO2-neutral to 2025, private business partnerships, and the digital infrastructure in the form of the vision of Copenhagen Connecting, and less on citizen participation and choice in this transformation, in contrary to much of the Smart city theory. This study has contributed to the topic by giving some insight into the process of creating a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking system within a Smart city strategy, and some of the issues that can surface when establishing such a system.