E-Toronto: Building a Digital Society

With the rise of smart city projects around the world, we begin to question “What is a Smart City”? With many smart city initiatives being led by tech giants with corporate agendas, projects often fail to launch. With a focus on big data-driven strategies, these initiatives take on more of a technocratic approach. As a result, these projects often look at citizens as sensors and fail to prioritize the value that people bring to the process of urban development. With data proving to play a key role in the process of decision making, researchers question who has the right to data? And with citizens playing a pivotal role in the process of data collection, how can its value also be shared with those who generate it? Through a speculative and critical design approach, this paper explores the question, “What if the citizens of Toronto could begin to control and engage with their data?” Beyond addressing major issues around data privacy, how could the city encourage data-driven participation under open data initiatives? By imagining E-Toronto, a smart city initiative that is citizen-centric, this thesis explores how data can become public infrastructure to support urban development and create new and more contextual experiences for citizens