A Brief History of Recent Technological Urbanism
What a genealogy of recent technological urbanism means for sovereignty
Some describe cities as living and constantly evolving organisms. Often, these mutations and adaptations have been provoked by the twists and turns of technological transformation.
Deep technological revolutions transform economies and societies, and cities within them. The remains of industrial cities are a visible footprint of such evolutions. As part of the rush to produce and move around industrial goods, many cities were built close to waterways, transport routes, markets and raw materials. Infrastructures and houses were built to enable such activities and to accommodate the millions of workers flocking to their factories, docks and train stations. Later, when technological changes made those industries obsolete and gave way to a different type of economy, dominated by creative and tourism industries and professional services, cities had to clean off their industrial debris and catch the bandwagon of the new economy. Those cities that didn’t still show the physical, economic and social scars of their sluggishness.
Technologies have also transformed city life in more direct ways. Cities attract people through their promises of better paid and more interesting jobs, open societies, diverse people and ideas, booming cultural scenes or better services. Many of the benefits derive from the close clustering of people, organizations, and ideas. But this agglomeration also carries downsides in the form of costs, crime, contagion, or contamination. When a technological innovation reduces one of such downsides of urban living, more people will be willing to live in the city, and urban settings will flourish. In the nineteenth century, diseases were rampant and life expectancy was low for city dwellers. Improvements in sewage systems and the ability to provide clean water reduced such dire perspectives of urban life, drastically reducing the costs of living in a city and allowing further urban growth.
Technological changes in mobility, water, sanitation or buildings are therefore constantly shaping cities and urban life. Many of these changes go largely unnoticed and only show their impact after they are well established. Over the last two decades, however, there has been an explosion of rapid and widely-trumpeted technological changes targeted directly at shaping how cities are run and lived.
Jathan Sadowski (2019) tracks this recent history and divides it in three, overlapping phases. Oversight, was led by major technology firms selling city governments a range of solutions and services meant to address a full suite of urban problems (Alizadeh, 2017; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2015; White, 2016). … These systems – which are, by varying degrees, digitally-enabled, data-driven, network-connected and automated – are marketed as ways to make cities more efficient, more convenient and more liveable. This is the phase associated with the smart city brand or movement. A bit later emerged what Sadowski labels Operation, linked to the idea of platform urbanism, characterized by business models that use platform technologies to connect consumers and service providers and more intent on rapid scaling-up via network effects and venture capital and more antagonistic to government policies and incumbent industries (Barns, 2020; Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Pollman and Barry, 2017). The third phase, Ownership, merges, according to Sadowski, technology capital with real estate capital, with technology companies morphing into property developers. This phase,, is epitomized by developments like Hudson Yards in New York or Sidewalk in Toronto.
This genealogy is useful and connects well with other accounts of this evolution, such as Sarah Barns’ description of the emergence of Platform Urbanism. According to Barns, under the banner of the ‘sharing economy’ movement, platforms moved from the virtual to the material, and were welcomed as a more bottom-up and distributed alternative to the ‘top down’ images of the technocratic and corporate-driven visions of the smart city. This initial optimism has increasingly given way to the understanding of platforms as described by Sadowski.
In his paper, Sadwoski goes a step further and tries to characterize how each of the phases affects sovereignty, understood as the authority and ability to make decisions about how people live, the places where they live and the things that direct their lives. In the oversight phase, democratic sovereignty is sapped by technocratic outsourcing. In the operating phase, digital platforms attempt to snatch sovereignty away from government through their regulatory control over the terms on which others can sell goods and service. Finally, the third ownership phase seems an effort to take full territorial sovereignty over parts of the city.1
Image Source: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/19/alphabet-google-sidewalk-labs-high-tech-future-city-toronto-waterfront/