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

Abstract

This thesis examines the development of Urban Digital Twins by empirically focusing on Virtual 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 urban planning, built on a comprehensive data infrastructure in which private and public interests converge. Their emergence aligns with the EU’s shift towards a data economy. This shift has brought 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 questions about how advanced digital infrastructures, such as UDTs, should be governed, given that they 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 Article 43’s limitation on the sui generis database right in the Database Directive, manifests in the publicly funded UDT (Virtual Gothenburg) and the CU project. The research question centers on these tensions, asking how Article 43 contributes to a regulatory gap for public UDT initiatives. Moreover, the research question simultaneously asks whether an alternative commons governance structure can reconcile and, in turn, fill the gap. Methodologically, this thesis employs a legal-dogmatic analysis operating through an EU lens, combined with a socio-legal analysis to highlight both practical and normative tensions within the EU’s data sphere. The legal dogmatic method is used to map the relevant EU legal regimes and to introduce domestic Swedish legislation as a comparative element. This is followed by analysing the EU’s sources and a socio-legal illustration of how the normative issues 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 broader than a mere normative conflict and that a regulatory gap arises for “mixed databases” in UDTs. This conclusion is drawn from the internal database, which contains both protected elements and non-protected elements. Moreover, the complete database is intended for commercialisation and reuse by both private and public actors, subject to mandates of openness and exploitation, which poses significant governance challenges. To address and reconcile the gap, a Commons-based governance model is introduced. The Governance model employs a three-layered access structure with an original contribution, “sovereign common(s)”. Sovereign commons are introduced as protective measures, in which security interests and critical infrastructure are treated as sovereign, thereby justifying closure. Concluding that a functioning commons model may resolve uncertainties surrounding publicly funded UDT initiatives.