Greener cities: intellectual property and data in sustainable smart cities

The climate crisis places renewed attention on cities, as cities are particularly vulnerable to some effects from climate change but can also play a key role in mitigating the climate emergency. Cities, particularly smart cities, which are characterized by real-time data capture and the integration of digital technologies into physical infrastructure, have a key role to play in ensuring environmental sustainability. Smart cities could implement clean technologies (termed ‘cleantech’) that are intended to mitigate climate change effects. By adopting a critical perspective on intellectual property and drawing from the critical data studies literature, the chapter examines how smart cities might deliver on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 of environmentally sustainable cities. The chapter makes a twofold argument: public officials who plan and operate smart cities require a critical understanding not only of intellectual property (IP) rights, but also how digital data produced by smart city technologies should be collected, used, and governed. To make its argument, the chapter considers the roles of IP and data in the case of Google’s ‘climate positive’ smart city project in Toronto, Canada that was cancelled as of May 2020. As this case study demonstrates, those who own the IP of key smart city technologies and those who can monetize data flows from that technology are able to disproportionately capture economic benefits from smart cites. IP functions as an instrument of control in that it provides those who control the IP with the power to determine who is allowed to use the knowledge protected by the IP rights in question, a phenomenon that also explains how companies in the Global North that disproportionately control the IP rights on cleantech use those rights as a barrier to impede developing countries’ low-cost, widespread manufacturing of cleantech.