Data Hegemony and Digital Enclaves: Lawscape Analysis of Taiwan’s Urban Data Governance

Abstract

Taiwan’s urban data governance reveals how concentrated data control creates spatial power through subtle mechanisms. This article introduces “data hegemony” and “digital enclaves” to examine COVID-19 surveillance in Taipei’s Wanhua district and concert management in Kaohsiung. Wanhua demonstrates coercive data hegemony—comprehensive surveillance under emergency powers that create visible harms (healthcare denial, spatial stigmatisation, and economic losses)—which enables civil society to contest through legal challenges. Kaohsiung demonstrates service-integrated data hegemony—surveillance embedded within service provision delivering genuine improvements (efficient crowd management, optimised facilities, and economic benefits) that foreclose contestation through satisfaction. This framework addresses critical gaps in privacy-centric and state-surveillance approaches by capturing how algorithmic categorisation produces collective spatial effects transcending individual privacy violations, with implications for democratic oversight in digitised cities.