Urban Neutrality
With recent announcements about major technology companies making a play into the urban domain, other cities around the world are scrambling to attract investment and jobs through either ‘innovation precincts/hubs’ or ‘smart districts’. The Amazon HQ2 bidding contest is a prime case.
If your city doesn’t have a precinct or development earmarked as ‘our silicon valley’ is it even a city?!
A further progressed example is the award of the Toronto waterfront development to a partnership between the City Government and Sidewalk Labs, a division of Google’s Alphabet. The vision is impressive:
Sidewalk Toronto will blend people-centered urban design with cutting-edge technology to achieve new standards of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.
Deals like this don’t come cheap either, with Sidewalk investing US$50m up front into the initial phase. However, the people affected by the initiative may pay a cost that goes beyond dollars — the price they pay may be the neutrality of the urban domain which has previously never been challenged in this way.
Whilst the neutrality of public space has always been contestable, the information generated and extracted for private gain within it has never previously been possible at the scale that is now becoming mainstream. It is this exploitation of data at a city scale, transacted for in exchange for use of digital services, that is changing the nature of urban neutrality in cities.
At a high level the economic shift led by the industrial revolution and globalisation centralised production and made people, more specialised in their trades, consumers of the product. This was a transition from more localised economies which supported more equal exchange of goods and services and kept the value generated circulating in the local economy.
Cities responded to this lifestyle shift — including reduced choice for consumers by global products undercutting the prices of local products — and shaped themselves to suit it by investing in major infrastructure to support the production, distribution and consumption of these products.
The risk of modern societies is that the people are still generating the product, but the product is now data, and they are not consumers but they are the source of the product itself, and victims to its application. Modern digital economies now mirror the value extraction reward of industrial ones. To increase profits, technology companies must extract more data.
Cities are a reflection of the economy and lifestyle they support, but to change the economy the physical nature of the city must also change. This is being gradually recognised by urban developers the world over, with the changing nature of the workforce demanding that in a buildings sense the era of product economy (build cheap, sell/lease high and move on) is over.
Now the demand is for highly engaging services and experiences for users. Some private developments have been able to provide these, like the much cited Edge building, and WeWork is a fine example of providing well considered experiences and services for workplaces.
These however are all private spaces, accessible through membership only, and often out of town where integrations and competition with other urban systems is not an issue. The demand though is shifting to inner city areas. The challenge being providing the same experiences and services to non-private urban domains and to all users not just employees or those directly paying for them, but the reward being precious data about all people, movements and transactions in a city.
And this is where the technology giants come in: they are able to provide the most seamless, interconnected digital experiences that the built environment has yet to offer beyond — the true realisation of the ‘smart city’ dream.
We must remember though, whilst different to most private developers who are looking for a financial return per square meter, that these technology companies are also looking for a return. Their return is in a new economy that is not transparent to us, where each data transaction (a search query, a GPS location, a purchase etc) also has a value associated with it. Every Google search someone makes generates value for Google by being able to charge advertisers more for a better likelihood of a sale.
Their play is to provide digitally enabled experiences and services at a city scale that don’t have the same limitations of number of users that a private development has. Their overall aim is to establish complete monopoly over data within a city for the ultimate product — information about you and us.
As the Guardian wrote about following Amazon’s purchase of WholeFoods, surge and value based pricing is looming as information about consumers becomes richer. In a private retail sense this is one thing, but if applied universally to services across the urban domain it is quite something else. This may not be likely in its entirety, but if we give up our public domain to technology-led developments the journey is one step closer to becoming a reality.
If this occurs, the public domain ceases to be neutral, which will change the nature of cities. People come to cities for greater interactions and opportunities, but if just by being in a city you become the product does that increase people’s opportunities?
And so we must question, is the vision of becoming the ‘next silicon valley’ really an attractive proposition? What that might entail in its purest sense (siloed developments offering no shared urban space, each looking to extract as much value from the economy for the benefit of as few people as possible) or in a current manifestation (technology led developments funding capital works to access data) we need to always question who is going to benefit and at what cost beyond the directly financial?
