TITLE:
Who Owns the Smart City? Smart Cities, Invisible Walls
AUTHORS:
Cesar Beck
KEYWORDS:
Smart Cities, Artificial Intelligence, Urban Surveillance, Asymmetric Visibility, Privacy, Public Accountability
JOURNAL NAME:
Beijing Law Review,
Vol.17 No.4,
November
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: The smart city was built around a persuasive promise: technology would make urban government work better. As cities have become more data-intensive, however, that promise has acquired a less familiar counterpart. The same infrastructures that help governments understand traffic, services, or public space also make the people moving through those environments increasingly knowable. This article examines the institutional conditions under which AI-enabled urban surveillance can serve legitimate public purposes without allowing informational power to escape meaningful public control. Methodologically, it combines doctrinal legal analysis, interdisciplinary smart-city scholarship, contemporary regulatory materials, and a case study of Flock Safety’s automated license-plate recognition network in the United States. The analysis develops asymmetric visibility as a condition in which technological systems acquire increasing knowledge about individuals while those individuals possess comparatively limited knowledge of, access to, or control over the infrastructures observing them. The Flock case shows that legitimate public-security capabilities can become institutionally dependent on privately operated informational infrastructure, while the American data-broker ecosystem demonstrates why information mobility beyond its original purpose also requires legal attention. The central finding is institutional rather than technological: the same capability can be defensible in one governance arrangement and difficult to justify in another. The article responds by asking law to follow urban information through its institutional life: why the city needs it, how much visibility that purpose can justify, where the information may travel, who answers for its use, and what remains open to challenge. These questions form the Public-Interest Smart Governance Framework proposed here.