Speaker
Description
This paper draws on the policy mobilities literature in urban studies——policy failure (Temenos/Lauermann 2020) in particular——to understand the strategic practices of large digital corporations (LDCs) in urban development. While it is relatively new that LDCs are actors in urban development, their role has moved beyond being the producers of new technologies that claim to make cities more efficient, green and smart. They are, for example, in the background, forging their position in the functioning of cities by taking up space (land, water, bodies) for urban infrastructures such as data centers (Carr 2021). At the same time, they are also driving the production of what we refer to as their symbolic spaces. These are Amazon’s HQ2 and the digital city proposed by Sidewalk Labs Toronto (daughter of Alphabet Inc.)——projects that epitomised both their importance in the field and the height of their technological innovation. Yet, with the exception of the HQ2 in Arlington, these projects never materialized. We argue that this was not a coincidence. Rather, both LDCs effectively mobilized a strategy of policy failure. The lens of policy failure shows that LDC-led digital cities is less about flashy cities equipped with avant-garde technologies and more about post-political modes of governance that drain public institutions of time and resources, reconfiguring state-society relations. Practitioners need to understand and watch for the flags of this disingenuous behaviour.
Carr (2021) “Digital urban development—How large digital corporations shape the field of urban governance” https://orbilu.uni.lu/bitstream/10993/45932/1/DIGI-GOV%20Brochure%20January%202021.pdf
Temenos/Lauerman (2020) The urban politics of policy failure. Urban Geography, 41(9):1109-1118.
| I am willing and able to travel to Norway unless Covid-19 restrictions prevent me from traveling to Stavanger. | YES |
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