Insights From Great Britain—Smart Rural: The Open Data Gap

The paradigm of the smart city has underpinned a great deal of the production and use of open data for the benefit of policy makers and citizens. This paper posits that this predominantly urban focus enhances the existing urban rural divide, thus sustaining inequality. It investigates the availability and use of rural open data along two parameters: data pertaining to rural populations, and to key parts of the rural economy (agriculture, fisheries and forestry). Further, it explores the relationship between key statistics of rural economies and rural open data and the use and users of rural open data. It finds that although countries with more rural populations are not necessarily earlier in their open data journey, there is still a lack of institutionalisation of open data in rural areas; that there is an apparent gap between the importance of agriculture to a country’s GDP and the amount of agricultural data published openly; and lastly, that successful urban uses of data cannot simply be transferred to the rural setting. It suggests instead the adoption of the emerging ‘smart region’ paradigm, that explores the reciprocal relationship between metropolitan and countryside locations, as most likely to support the specific data needs of rural areas.