Who owns the city?
Research in Progress | Urban Utopia: Disruptive Ethics of the digital City | A City Political Ideology Theory
In this short piece Moritz Dittrich asks who controls our visions of urban futures in the era of the ubiquitous smart city? Moritz is a current Master of Research in Architecture student at the Royal College of Art.
i. Just Give Us A City
Who owns the city? This does not necessarily have to be a question of property or land ownership, if we understand city as an idea[1]. We might argue that the built city should represent the ideas of its citizens. As Richard Sennett argues, “[t]he forms of the built environment are the product of the maker’s will”[2]. But, who are the makers and what is their will?
Since IBM took the ‘Smarter Cities’ Concept to Rio de Janeiro in 2010, smart or digital cities are trending. Google is working on a digital city in Toronto, Bill Gates is planning to build a smart city in the Arizona desert and recently The We Company announced their plans to enter the field of digital cities as well.
Some people say the whole trend is simply a result of the financial crisis of 2007-8 when tech companies had to balance their financial losses and were looking for new markets for their products. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., got excited:
Is this how we want the future of our cities to be decided? A bunch of tech giants with a higher market value (Alphabet: $756 bn.) than the State of Denmark (GDP: $325 bn.) creating their personal living city labs out of what has been for ages a place of social consciousness. Furthermore the suggestion that people should “just give us” a city, indicates a fundamental disruption in urban ethics.
ii. Californian Ideology
Utopian visions have been – especially in times of crises – a manifestation of aspirations, a useful tool for the critique of the existing, and a strategic option for progressive political forces. However, after the turn of the millennium, when tech companies started occupying the city as a market, urban utopia became the central means of staging needs in neoliberal Silicon Valley and thus a central force of late-capitalism to sell products.
In contrast “a utopian method … provides a critical tool for exposing the limitations of current policy discourses about economic growth and ecological sustainability.”[3] But in connection to the digital city, utopia seems to become a tool of forecasting by techno-liberals. When Eric Schmidt speaks of “tak[ing] technical things that we know and apply[ing] them to cities”, this sits squarely within the definition of so-called solutionism, but works against a sustainable balance between convergent and divergent thinking strategies.
This staging of technological desire feeds into the neoliberal ‘Californian Ideology’. Reflecting both the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship this ideology is only made possible through a universal belief in technological determinism. Linked to this ideological history, this research begins by deconstructing the beliefs, approaches and social values of the developers behind future urban visions in two case studies: Barcelona Digital City and Toronto Waterfront.
But it is not enough to simply agree or disagree with these visions. Our modern 21st-century world is too complex for simplicity. Rather a fundamental discourse in future thinking is needed.
“Pure opposition is not enough for social progress, because for that a goal is needed not a not-goal.”
In the opening of his book the Principle of Hope ,Ernst Bloch writes that “[t]hinking means venturing beyond.” This phrase is, in a nutshell, what research can, or even must, provide. Research should engage the theoretical pros and cons of endless scenarios in an open and inclusive discourse with a as diverse a community as possible. This work aims to be an invitation for this kind of research discourse.
iii. Toronto Waterfront
Referencing Sidewalk Lab’s website, the project with the title Toronto Waterfront, is going to become a
What I find certainly interesting here is that “Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company that uses new technology to address big urban challenges and improve quality of life in cities”. Looking at what Sidewalk Labs publishes on their websites one may get the impression of an open and democratic planning strategy, inclusive with a diverse population. But we don’t get to elect the Board of Sidewalk Labs. Are there hidden (or not so hidden) intentions of Google and Alphabet Inc. within this development? As commercial corporations are their aims simply to increase profit?
iv. Barcelona Digital City
With Barcelona’s Digital Transformation Plan (DTP) the Barcelona City Council aims for an ethical data strategy that focuses on privacy, transparency and digital rights throguh the use of open standards and open software for citizens. Very shortly after the election in June 2016 the new Government of Barcelona brought Francesca Bria into office as chief technology and digital innovation officer. As a member of the government her task is to rethink the role of the government, to rethink how government works and to rethink the participation of citizens in the policy making process. The goal is to shift towards seeing technology as a tool to implement the policies of the government, rather than of technology driving policy formation.
The government solves the problems of the citizen supported by technology but does not takes technology itself as the solution. Bria phrases the main difference between the approach of Barcelona’s City Council and for example projects like Toronto Waterfront thus:
v. Who owns the city?
Defined by a grounded argument on the digitalisation as a product of liberalising technology and the centralisation of economic dynamics in cities and in the context where we seek for not less than the matter of architecture, I furthermore argue against one of capitalism’s basic claims: that we live in a world without alternatives. Or to put in other words: buy my product(s) or die. As urban citizens function as one of the central engines of society[4], and as platform capitalism[5] of Google and Co. occupies such immense market space, this basic claim becomes a battle about inclusion and exclusion in the city. Will the urban as the common platform of economic, social and political life survive?
With my research I intend to position myself at the intersection between utopia as a tool of critical theory, recently almost exclusively used in the social studies, and urban theory as the investigation into socio-spatial formations under late-capitalism and in the digital city. Who is influencing the way we think about cities, and in what ways? How are we and how do we want to think about cities? Finally, what do we want our cities to look like? If the city is an idea, we must ensure that it cannot be owned.
Endnotes
[1] see the definition of cité and villé in: Sennett, Richard (2019) Building and Dwelling — Ethics for the City. Penguin Books. London (p.1)
[2] Sennett, Richard (2019) Building and Dwelling — Ethics for the City. Penguin Books. London (p.2)
[3] Levitas, Ruth (2013) Utopia as method: the imaginary reconstruction of society. Palgrave Macmillan. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England (p.xi)
[4] Eckardt, Frank (2004) Soziologie der Stadt. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld (p.9)
[5] Srnicek, Nick (2016) Platform Capitalism. Polity Books. Cambridge
