Personal data protection as a nonfunctional requirement in the Smart City's development

"Smart city" is a fuzzy concept, evading a unitary characterisation. Its blurriness is highlighted by the broad array of definitions with which academic and corporate literature have attempted at delineating the notion. This paper derives from the elaboration of several definitions that have been given to the concept of smart city. It maintains that a smart city is, succinctly, the specific set of practices and design choices underlying the instrumentation and digitalisation of the urban environment. The ICT underlying the smart city is however inherently political, has regulatory capacity, and thus influences both urban governance and management practices, and the life and behaviour of individual city dwellers. Following the principle of Data Protection by Design, we thus argue for the conceptualisation of the right to personal data protection as a nonfunctional requirement to be applied to the design and development of smart cities. This paper aims at contributing to the delineation of the scope and definition of the notion of smart city and of its driving values. Its goal is to frame the concepts of privacy and data protection as naturally belonging to the smart city's teleology, to the stack of values, goals, and goods that the smart city concept aims at achieving or safeguarding.