Beatriz Botero Arcila, “Barcelona’s Digital Transformation Plan and the city’s quest for an alternative digital future: how much can cities do?”, 31.03.2022, 5:00pm – 7:00pm

Seminar Cities WIP (Work in Process) 

Sciences Po, Room K008, 1 Place Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris , Compulsory registration

In 2016, Francesca Bria, the newly appointed Digital Commissioner of Barcelona, presented Barcelona’s Digital Transformation Plan (DTP), an explicit attempt to move “from a model of surveillance capitalism, where data is opaque and not transparent, to a model where citizens themselves can own and control the data”. Barcelona’s DTP’s central objective was to enhance the city’s and citizens’ data and technological sovereignty and, by doing so, catalyze a whole new form of the digital information economy, a more egalitarian and sustainable one. This presentation will discuss how Barcelona’s city-power (formal, political, and economic authority) shaped the design of the DTP and how it shaped its attempts at implementing three of its flagship policies. In sum, Barcelona’s new policies were able to push the city in the local government’s desired direction – beyond what the orthodoxy would have conceded – yet the attempt was still curtailed by the cities’ local government law structure and the broader market structure of the digital information economy. Thus, the presentation will argue that cities are able to make important choices regarding their digital present and futures, but that these choices are limited by their formal authority and previous decisions. 

Speaker

Beatriz Botero Arcila, Assistant Professor of Law at Sciences Po, Paris and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She holds an SJD and an LLM from Harvard Law School and is a lawyer from Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research and expertise focus on data governance in urban environments. privacy law, data governance policy, municipal law, platform governance, and legal theory.

Collective discussion

For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr 

Compulsory registration