“Data is just like your blood, it has to flow”: Urban data platforms, the municipal data gaze and the making of the smart city

Abstract This article aims to enrich critical understandings of urban data platforms and their role in smart city implementation. Leveraging insights from critical data studies and drawing on the “data gaze” concept coined by David Beer, we examine the implementation of an open data portal in Edmonton, Canada to gain insight into the smart city‐in‐the‐making. Bringing together findings from policy analysis, key informant interviews, and an ethnography of an open data program, we show how the development of the open data portal necessitated an assemblage of imaginaries, viewpoints, and expertise—what we call a “municipal data gaze.” From this perspective, fundamental affordances and frictions linked to data flow come into view. While Edmonton's smart city strategy aimed to foster economic growth and service quality, data initiatives were beholden to privacy protection. Thus, in spite of the promise of the smart city agenda, there are places geo‐surveillance cannot go and cannot see.