1 Smart City as Time-Space Cartographer: South Korean Strategy for COVID-19 Control and its Implications for Democratic Control of Data Jung Won Sonn* and Jaekwang Lee** *Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, Email: j.sonn@ucl.ac.uk **Center for Sustainable Development, Seoul National University, Email: j.lee.10@ucl.ac.uk While the US, UK, France, Italy, and many other liberal democratic nations ended up implementing complete lockdown after thousands of deaths, South Korea keeps factories and offices running, flatten the curve, and maintain low fatality. There are some restrictions, of course. Namely, schools and universities are teaching online and large-scale gatherings have been banned. Many tourist attractions were closed and festivals were cancelled. However, such restrictions look very small when compared to the complete lockdowns currently in place in many European countries. There has been media coverage about South Korea’s testing capacity as the main reason, but there was little discussion on the big role that of smart city played. In this short paper, I would like to 1) describe how smart city technologies are being used as a key part of disease control in South Korea, 2) explain the social conditions for the extensive use of smart city technology, and 3) offer some critical insights into contemporary discussion on the issue of smart city and data protection. The smart city in disease control Taiwan has been the most successful in controlling COVID-19. Its number of patients is small and community transmission has been almost completely prevented. At the time this paper was written (3 April 2020), all businesses in Taiwan were running as normal. Such success was partly because Taiwan took a head start approach to the pandemic. Before the Chinese government and World Health Organisation confirmed that the new disease could be transmitted from human to human, Taiwan started to mobilise all means of disease control. Because such action could not be taken by any other government, many see South Korea as the model to follow. South Korea’s current status that is almost as normal was achieved through aggressive testing. South Korea can produce 100,000 test kits and conduct 20,000 tests per day, numbers to which the majority of Western European countries are still far behind (Parodi et al., 2020). Such testing capacity is due to a combination of several factors (e.g., the experience of the 2015 MERS outbreak, recent reorganisation of disease control agencies, recent growth of biotech industries, and good healthcare system). But who is to be tested? Not all patients walk in for testing. Many patients, mainly those in their twenties and thirties, continue to live their normal lives, spreading the virus without realising they are infected because their symptoms are mild. That is where the smart city comes in—in the form of a space-time cartographer. Smart technologies can trace the past mobility of patients and draw a time-space map similar to what geographers know from Hägerstrand. (Hägerstrand, 1970; Ellegård and Svedin, 2012) Under such mapping, the