Between Sovereign Commons and Control: The Governance Gap for Publicly Funded Urban Digital Twins: The Case of AccessCity and Virtual Gothenburg

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the development of Urban Digital Twins by empirically focusing onVirtual Gothenburg and the EU-funded European Citiverses Uniting for Inclusiveness (CU)project. UDTs are commonly employed to plan, simulate, and serve as a foundation for urbanplanning, built on a comprehensive data infrastructure in which private and public interestsconverge. Their emergence aligns with the EU’s shift towards a data economy. This shift hasbrought with it legislation such as the Data Act, the Open Data Directive, and the AI Act,intended to create common European data spaces. A data strategy that has raised questionsabout how advanced digital infrastructures, such as UDTs, should be governed, given thatthey operate across interfaces among multiple legal regimes governing distinct aspects.It narrows the scope to examine how the introduction of the Data Act, and especially Article43’s limitation on the sui generis database right in the Database Directive, manifests in thepublicly funded UDT (Virtual Gothenburg) and the CU project. The research question centerson these tensions, asking how Article 43 contributes to a regulatory gap for public UDTinitiatives. Moreover, the research question simultaneously asks whether an alternativecommons governance structure can reconcile and, in turn, fill the gap.Methodologically, this thesis employs a legal-dogmatic analysis operating through an EUlens, combined with a socio-legal analysis to highlight both practical and normative tensionswithin the EU’s data sphere. The legal dogmatic method is used to map the relevant EU legalregimes and to introduce domestic Swedish legislation as a comparative element. This isfollowed by analysing the EU’s sources and a socio-legal illustration of how the normativeissues manifest in the empirical case study of Virtual Gothenburg and the Citiverse project.The analysis converges on the conclusion that the contradictory legal lawscape is broaderthan a mere normative conflict and that a regulatory gap arises for “mixed databases” inUDTs. This conclusion is drawn from the internal database, which contains both protectedelements and non-protected elements. Moreover, the complete database is intended forcommercialisation and reuse by both private and public actors, subject to mandates ofopenness and exploitation, which poses significant governance challenges.To address and reconcile the gap, a Commons-based governance model is introduced. TheGovernance model employs a three-layered access structure with an original contribution,“sovereign common(s)”. Sovereign commons are introduced as protective measures, in whichsecurity interests and critical infrastructure are treated as sovereign, thereby justifyingclosure. Concluding that a functioning commons model may resolve uncertaintiessurrounding publicly funded UDT initiatives.