Big data Citizen-centred smart city governance. Evidence from Wuhan and the Coronavirus battle

Smart City governance is a topical subject and many scholars have developed diverse top-down and bottom-up models and frameworks. This paper presents insights from a qualitative and exploratory investigation from the city of Wuhan, China. It proposes and develops a novel urban governance, citizen-oriented and leveraging different emerging technologies such as mobile, social media and Big data. Our empirical results describe the actions realized by the Wuhan local government against the coronavirus epidemic disease between January and March 2020 to monitor the temperature of the citizenship and authorize or not their displacement in order to minimize the cross-contamination and avoid a large human mortality. Our conclusions corroborate the existence of this novel ICT urban governance model. In doing so, the paper advances our understanding of modern urban organization model which comprises of a 360° citizen holistic view, a data-oriented decision-making process and a centralized perspective of the citizen during all the data life cycle. The heuristic that manages this new governance model suggests ex-ante actions at individual or group level and largely exploits public and private sector information breaking (temporarily if necessary) the individual privacy rules for the purpose of its action.