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Abstract
While acknowledging the city as a site of disciplinary and technological disruption, this paper introduces Bratton’s stack theory as a way to understand smart cities more generally, and Waterfront Toronto specifically. We build on Bratton’s position by closely examining twenty-first century histories and anthropologies related to the internet, privacy, and the dominance of big data. Our principal concern is with the transformation of personal and environmental data into an economic resource. Seen through that particular lens, we argue that Toronto’s smart city has internalized relations of colonization whereby the economic objectives of a multinational technology company take on new configurations at a local level of human (and non-human) information extraction—thereby restructuring not only public land, but also everyday life into a zone of unmitigated consumption.
Notes
Notes
1 Google LLC is a technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search engines, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, software and hardware. In August 2015, Google reorganized its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Under the new umbrella, Google’s search, data aggregation and advertising subsidiaries were joined by Sidewalk Lab and its suite of urban products: high-speed broadband services, Android Pixel2 phone, mobile mapping, autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, smart homes and all of the data captured therein.
2 Christopher Alexander, Horst Rittel, Chris Jones and Bruce Archer were four key members who founded the Design Theory and Methods Movement that argued for the application of a rational approach to design and research. At University of California Berkeley, Rittel went on to propose a “second generation” of design methodology that places a larger value on user participation. The present-day “third generation” focuses on computational design methodologies. From Christopher Reznich, “1973: Horst Rittel & Design Methodology,” Medium, February 19, 2017, https://medium.com/designscience/1973-7921763949fd. (accessed August 10, 2018)
3 Benjamin Bratton, The Stack (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered or “stacked” protocol structure, in which network technologies operate within a modular, vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of emerging smart cities.
4 Rob Kitchen and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 16.
5 Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011), 63.
6 Bratton, The Stack, 5.
7 Langton Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, ed. L. Winner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–39.
8 David Murakami Wood and Stephen Graham, “Permeable Boundaries in the Software-sorted Society: Surveillance and the Differentiation of Mobility,” in Mobile Technologies of the City, ed. M. Shellar and J. Urry (London: Routledge, 2006), 178.
9 Daniel L. Doctoroff, “Reimagining Cities from the Internet Up,” Medium, November 30, 2016, https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/reimagining-cities-from-the-internet-up-5923d6be63ba. (accessed July 16, 2017)
10 The author was a US Delegate for the Consulate General of France in San Francisco Smart & Digital Cities Tour in 2013. See https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smart-and-digital-cities-tour-a-delegation-of-american-experts-invited-to-attend-the-paris-digital-world-festival-futur-en-seine-in-june-210884131.html. (accessed August 10, 2018)
11 Most of Alphabet's staff are employed at Google’s corporate headquarters, as are those of Android, YouTube, Google Apps, Google Maps and Google Ads. Another seven companies have been established as Alphabet subsidiaries: Calico, Google Life Sciences, Nest Labs, Google Fiber, X, Google Ventures and Google Capital. Alphabet’s vertical integration of products is conceptualized as urban building blocks – a software/hardware grammar that enables a smart city.
12 Alphabet’s real-estate division looked at approximately 150 different cities to find an ideal experimental site.
13 While New York promoted the kiosks as free public Internet access, the search engines were disabled when low-income residents began to use the kiosks. See Patrick McGeehan, “Free WiFi Kiosks Were to Aid New Yorkers. An Unsavory Side Has Spurred A Retreat,” September 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/nyregion/internet-browsers-to-be-disabled-on-new-yorks-free-wi-fi-kiosks.html. (accessed July 21, 2018)
14 In 2016, the Department of Transportation solicited research proposals for a $50 million Smart City Challenge. Alphabet, AT&T and other corporations obtained provisions from the Department of Transportation to partner with the winner. Columbus’ winning proposal had a strong social focus, promising to use transportation to improve the city’s underserved neighborhoods. Autonomous vehicles would be used to link the Linden neighborhood, where unemployment is three times the overall city average, to a nearby job center. City officials said that the new service would also help poor families get better access to health care and other essential services. They promised that the $50 million grant would serve the low-income population by creating transit cards for ride-hailing services, even if those residents did not have a smartphone or a bank account. As of January 2018, Columbus has not implemented any of those services for South Linden residents. Refer to: http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-columbus-ohio-smart-city-winner.html. (accessed July 23, 2018)
15 According to Carol Webb of Waterfront Toronto: “The Request for Proposals, and the responses, included confidentiality provisions and only the name of the successful proponent was announced. The names of the other proponents were not made public.” Email correspondence with author, January 8, 2018.
16 The Eastern Waterfront development will be primarily populated by Alphabet employees who are able, affluent and healthy, thus skewing the experiment results. While Sidewalk Labs’ promotional film illustrates an inclusive city, its 156-page design proposal does not mention Toronto’s underrepresented populations – the unemployed, single parents and the uneducated.
17 In November 2017, the company took another step toward implementation, launching four new “labs” that will work on housing affordability, health care and social services, municipal processes and community collaboration.
18 Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook (New York: Penguin, 2017), 165.
19 “Consumption,” Business Dictionary, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/consumption.html. (accessed January 15, 2018)
20 Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies (London: Verso, 2017), 24.
21 Galloway, Four, 165.
22 We do not mean to imply that Sidewalk Toronto residents will not have other choices. While all residents will access Alphabet’s broadband network, restricting the type of phone or apps would not be possible, although Alphabet employees most likely, either through peer pressure or otherwise, will be encouraged to use Android products.
23 “Most platforms are parasitic: feeding off existing social and economic relations. They don’t produce anything on their own – they only rearrange bits and pieces developed by someone else. Given the enormous – and mostly untaxed – profits made by such corporations, the world of ‘platform capitalism’, for all its heady rhetoric, is not so different from its predecessors.” Eygeny Morozov, “Where Uber and Amazon Rule: Welcome to the World of the Platform,” The Guardian, June 6, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/07/facebook-uber-amazon-platform-economy. (accessed December 30, 2018)
24 During its first two years in operation, Sidewalk Labs looked at 152 places in the United States and several others around the world for a site to begin building cities of the future. See Ian Austen, “City of the Future?,” New York Times, December 29, 2017.
25 Chamee Yang, “The Paradox of Urban Mobility and the Spatialization of Technological Utopia,” in Intelligent Infrastructure: Zipcars, Invisible Networks & Urban Transformation, ed. T. F. Tierney (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 186–208.
26 Thanks to Professor Jean Pierre Protzen for forwarding “Data for the Garbage Disposal,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 8, 2017.
27 Credited to Andrew Lewis in his blog, MetaFilter, by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly), September 2, 2010, twitter.com, https://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/22823381903 (accessed July 16, 2017).
28 Felix Stadler, “Between Democracy and Spectacle: The Front-End and the Back-End of the Social Web,” in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 242–256.
29 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future
at the Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2019), 8–10.
30 Shannon Mattern, “Databodies in Codespace,” Places, April 2018,
https://placesjournal.org/article/databodies-in-codespace. (accessed May 2, 2018)
31 According to a Los Angeles Times article, the FCC protects consumers when they sign up for or use their broadband connection, and the FTC protects them when they use the products and services running over that network, for example websites, social networks and streaming services. In 2016, the FCC adopted rules requiring broadband providers to obtain explicit permission from consumers before using their sensitive personal data for purposes other than providing broadband. Advocates for repealing those protections argue that they create consumer confusion by establishing two sets of rules: one for broadband providers, set by the FCC; and another for online products and services, policed by the FTC. See Terrell McSweeny and Mignon Clyburn, “The Commissioners of the FTC and FCC Are Worried About your Online Privacy,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2017, http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcsweeny-clyburn-internet-privacy-20170331-story.html. (accessed December 2, 2018)
32 The Internet, similar to water, energy or telecommunications, is a public utility, and should be regulated as such. See Cecilia Kang, “Court Backs Rules Treating Internet as Utility, Not Luxury,” New York Times, June 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-appeals-court-ruling.html. (accessed December 8, 2018)
33 Also known as Scientific Rationalism.
34 Bratton, The Stack, 8.
35 Graham, Cities Under Siege, 79 (citing Kipfer and Goonewardena).
36 Jonathan Beard, a longtime community developer at the Columbus Compact Corporation, “sees a bait-and-switch approach – Columbus has a history of using social equity as a guise to obtain government funding, without fulfilling its promises to low income residents. By Columbus’ own admission, those opportunities haven’t reached poor, predominantly African American neighborhoods such as South Linden.” Laura Bliss, “Who Wins When a City Gets Smart?,” CityLab, November 1, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/11/when-a-smart-city-doesnt-have-all-the-answers/542976/. (accessed January 25, 2018)
37 Charles Arthur, “Google Facing Legal Threat from Six European Countries Over Privacy,” The Guardian, April 2, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/02/google-privacy-policy-legal-threat-europe. (accessed January 20, 2018)
38 Bratton, The Stack, 9.
39 Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–169.
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T. F. Tierney
T. F. Tierney is Associate Professor of Architecture with a designated emphasis in new media at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, USA. As founding director of the URL: Urban Research Lab, Tierney explores the intersection between networked technologies and the built environment. During 2013, Tierney was a US Delegate to Smart & Digital Cities in France; she was selected for the quality of her research in the application of new technologies to build the next generation of cities. Tierney also serves on the editorial board of The Bartlett’s ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, University College London. Recent publications include Intelligent Infrastructure: Zipcars, Invisible Infrastructure and Urban Transformation (UVa Press, 2017); and The Public Space of Social Media: Connected Cultures of Network Society (Routledge, 2013), which was a finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award.