Seeing through the Smart City Narrative: Data Governance, Power Relations, and Regulatory Challenges in Brazil

“Smart city” is one of those buzzwords that simultaneously embodies multiple meanings and engenders controversies. Widely adopted by urban planners, it represents a corporate-driven narrative focused on achieving efficiencies through the use of data and real-time monitoring systems. City governments are implementing technologies framed in a specific narrative of “smartness” that continually fails to take into account questions of privacy, data governance, and the right to the city. The smart city technopolitical agenda – as the incorporation of networks, data and infrastructure – can be considered the physical embodiment of the “last mile” of internet governance. This chapter offers a much-needed critical, Global South perspective on the smart city ecosystem in Brazil, focused on power relations between state and non-state actors. It assesses the implications of different – or absent – regulatory frameworks for data governance and the role of expos in shaping the municipal agenda. Brazil is an important case study, not only for the leadership role that it has played over the past few decades in global digital policy and the right to the city movement but for the attractiveness of its market, the historical inequalities being exacerbated by technology, and the current transformation of the public debate in the country.