A Modulated Approach to Digital Sovereignty
Exploring Huawei-Led Smart City Initiatives in South Africa and Italy
S. Calzati (TU Delft - Urban Data Science)
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Abstract
By delving into China–South Africa and China–Italy relations in the ICTs, this chapter compares two of Huawei’s smart city projects – the Open Lab launched in 2017 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Joint Innovation Center (JIC) launched in 2019 in Cagliari, Italy. The study assesses the extent to which these Huawei-led initiatives and their digital governance models do empower indigenous actors – that is, South African and Italian – in terms of production, access to and (re)use of data, or rather take the form of a new data-driven colonization. Findings show that while Huawei’s Open Lab tends to exclude African actors, either public or private, by favoring collaboration among foreign ICT partners, the JIC sees the collaboration between Huawei and Italian public and private actors. Huawei’s approach is modulated and adaptive to extend its corporate digital sovereignty and arrange the local communities’ digital infrastructures. Further field research should be conducted to: (1) obtain a more transparent picture of how data stemming from these initiatives is handled, by whom, and for which purposes and (2) assess the impact of the deployed smart city solutions on local citizens by foreign tech firms, including those from China.
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