Data, Governance and Opacity: Toward an Informational Right to the City

Abstract

This essay proposes a theoretical conceptual reflection on the informational right to the city, understood as a contemporary extension of Henri Lefebvre’s thinking on the right to the city. It takes as a starting point the urban transformations mediated by digital infrastructures and geospatial information systems, using BHMaps, the public territorial data platform of the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil, as an example of the tensions between transparency, control, and citizen appropriation of urban information. The analysis is grounded in the author's institutional experience at the Secretariat of Urban Policy (2015-2024), a period marked by the consolidation of GIS platforms and the digital transition of public administration. This experience provides a situated perspective on the relations between transparency, power, and informational curation. The text weaves together contributions from critical urban theory, critical cartography, and studies on digital urbanization, arguing that the informational right to the city involves not only access but also the collective capacity to produce, interpret, and contest the informational space, in dialogue with a praxis oriented toward the democratization of territorial knowledge. By recognizing the confrontations that permeate the production and use of digital platforms, the essay proposes rethinking these infrastructures as digital urban commons, guided by informational justice and collaborative governance.