“Smart city” is a buzzword, highly hyped up and 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. Technology, however, is inherently political, and has regulatory capacity. Following the principle of Data Protection by Design, we argue for the conceptualisation of the right to personal data protection as a nonfunctional requirement to be applied to the instrumentation of the built environment – to the so-called smart city. 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 concept of data protection as naturally belonging to the smart city’s teleology – to the stack of values and goals that the smart city concept aims at achieving or safeguarding.@en