Digital Urban Renewal

‘They were tearing down his house, because San Francisco is engaging . . . most cities are engaged in . . . something called urban renewal, which means moving Negroes out: it means Negro removal, that is what it means. The federal government is an accomplice to this fact.’ This is how, in an interview with Kenneth Clark for WGBH-TV,[1] James Baldwin describes the infrastructure-based urban-development policy of the 1970s that created – not only in the USA – segregating boundaries in inner cities in the form of city freeways that favoured the exodus of white residents, or ‘white flight’, to the suburbs. The most blatant consequences of this policy can be seen in the case of the ‘Motor City’ Detroit, where old, white, industrialist money encircles an inner city that is impoverished, hollowed-out and predominantly black, a division marked by the 8 Mile immortalised in music and film by ‘white trash’ hip-hop artist Eminem.

In 2011 the consultancy firm Ovum[2] continued to use the historical burdened term when proposing a ‘digital urban renewal’ for the networking firm Cisco, describing this process as ‘retro-fitting existing cities with smart solutions’ and ‘the urban challenge of the 21st century’.[3] The proposal called for a ‘digital urban planner’ to formulate ‘tools for developing a digital master plan, including case studies and templates’, all to be investigated in ‘living laboratories’. Kate Crawford argues that such proposals entail an ‘encroachment of the politics of simulation into lived urban space’.[4]

At the same time Cisco speaks of ‘the ongoing evolution of IP and the Internet as an underlying framework for services, telepresence and videoconferencing, mashups and open application programming interfaces (APIs), new connectivity technologies, including high-speed fixed and mobile broadband, smartphones, positioning technologies such as GPS, cameras and image processing, machine-to-machine and sensor networks, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and near-field communications, augmented reality on mobile devices’ – that is technocratic solutions which echo the aspirations of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses.

As Ben Green writes in his latest book, The SmartEnough City, ‘it is remarkably clear that urban systems such as transportation and water bear an ideology. Just ask anyone who used to live in the black communities that were destroyed last century to make way for highways that connect cities to white suburbs’. The mathematician and data scientist speaks from professional experience, having worked in the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology: ‘As chief information officer of the City of Boston from 2014 to 2018, I sat through many pitches from companies selling “smart cities” technology. A memorable one came from two Fortune 500 companies who had partnered to offer a connected device that would sit on top of our streetlights and provide cameras, sensors, and computing capabilities at tens of thousands of locations across Boston.’ One vendor claimed that what was exciting about the product was the fact that ‘we give you the platform and the data and you get to figure out all the ways you can get value from it’. Along with the news that the user would have to find out if the product was suitable, Green’s boss, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, learned ‘that annual service costs alone were almost as much as the city spends on snow removal and trash collection combined. Not a proposal that I was going to rush down to the mayor’s office.’[5]

‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ versus ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism’

The effects of ‘digital urban renewal’ can be observed in the latest protests in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area between Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Oakland. The metropolitan regions on the West Coast in particular are regarded as pioneers in the digital new world, which grew out of orange groves and suburban garages.[6] The social and urban consequences of ongoing digitisation and automation are evaluated in very different ways. On the one hand, there is the boundless enthusiasm for a neo-feudal clerisy, as Joel Kotkin calls the ‘tech preachers’ in his highly readable book ‘The Coming of Neo-Feudalism’.[7]But opinion on the left is also wide-ranging. Aaron Bastani – like many other leftwing accelerationists – writes in his techno-optimistic publication Fully Automated Luxury Communismof the imminent end of capitalism and the liberation of human beings in automated communism, a view also propounded by Mark Alizart (Cryptocommunism) and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (Inventing the Future. Postcapitalism and a World without Work). On the other hand, in her collection Technopolis Katja Schwaller reports on current urban conflicts in the Greater Bay Area. The 100-kilometre-long metropolitan region includes the world’s most expensive patches of real estate but is also a place where even software engineers live in their cars and those doing the dirty, menial jobs have to travel in substandard public transport watching Google buses whizz by.

The invention of the silicon chip brought about the creation of what was dubbed Silicon Valley in 1970. The computer chip industry was fostered by the astronautic-military complex and the computer-based fantasy film industry by means of high state subsidies, a comprehensive regional economic policy that Katja Schwaller refers to as ‘state “welfare” for companies’. Today the former plantation landscape area is no longer dominated by the factories that have now moved to China’s Pearl River Delta but instead by zones for internet-based ecosystems and the capital investors that support them. Urban tech covers the entire scope of the supply industries: ‘The tech forest has a thick undergrowth of services that support it’, which covers a range extending from legal firms and corporate consultancies to research enterprises and the real-estate industry, according to the critical geographer Richard Walker.[8]

In the meantime, tech companies such as Twitter and Uber have discovered the advantage of being located close to the centre of San Francisco and have further heated up the real-estate market. Easing this problem by increasing density is being hindered both on an egotistical and legal basis. Sub-cultural quarters and niches for less privileged peoples are being forcibly expropriated and hyper-capitalistically reallocated. Tech, finance and real-estate capitalism work hand in hand; those who profit are the nutrition-conscious, hardworking, pale tech newcomers. Whole city quarters are turned upside down and reformatted in discursive and ‘real’ terms to suit their lifestyles. It is in this sense no coincidence that protests have been taking place at both ends of the Google bus lines and extending into the canteens of the tech properties so richly furnished for the privileged. The campus that meets every need around the clock for one means camping on the roadside for another: ‘Around a sixth of the population of the San Francisco Bay Area lives in poverty or suffers from hunger and health problems’, says the critical geographer Richard Walker.

Bye-Bye, Silicon Valley

The tech firms are currently reacting to the misery by simply moving to Texas or other tax havens where no income tax is levied. California, by contrast, charges the highest rate of income for top earners like Musk in the whole of the US. Twitter is also stationing less of its staff at its headquarters in San Francisco. CEO Jack Dorsey is quoted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungas saying that no one wants to move to San Francisco anymore, adding that people currently working at home are probably asking themselves whether they really need to live in such an expensive city.[9]The photo platform Pinterest paid a fine of around 90 million dollars merely to buy its way out of a rental contract for a new office building.

Hewlett Packard is relocating its headquarters to Houston, and Oracle is moving to Austin. Moreover, Elon Musk, CEO of the electric carmaker Tesla and the aerospace enterprise Space X, has just announced the relocation of operations from California to Texas. The main reason given is the lack of available housing in the Bay Area, augmented by the fact that people no longer want to have to look at the misery that they have ultimately created themselves: ‘Apart from the cost of living, the company [Oracle] also pointed to the dilapidation of the Californian city’. The Bay Area is thus being deprived of the meagre tax receipts necessarily levied to compensate for the devastation wrought by tech companies.

Joe Lonsdale was a co-founder of the software company Palantir and now runs a venture capital firm, with which he has also recently moved from San Francisco to Austin. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, he stated the case even more cynical than Musk, writing, ‘The harsh truth is that California has fallen into disrepair.’ He points the finger at bad political decisions and excessive bureaucracy, arguing that it is restrictive building regulations that have hindered the creation of affordable accommodation. The streets of San Francisco, he complains, are full of homeless people, needles and excrement, and as a result his wife is afraid to walk around there with their two daughters. But who has made the area so destitute?

Unlike in 2000 or 2010, he points out, California now has competitors when it comes to offering a pool of workers with the necessary qualifications. Palantir itself is moving to Denver Colorado. Effects are already becoming evident on the real-estate markets in the Bay Area and in Texas: ‘Although San Francisco continues to have the highest rents in all America, the real estate portal “Zumper” reports that within the past twelve months the average price of a two-room apartment has dropped around 23 percent to 2700 dollars. No other large city in the country has registered such a sharp decline. By contrast, rents in Austin have risen compared to last year.’ (FAZ)

311 is a Joke

The Swiss researcher, DJane, interviewer and translator Katja Schwaller studies Californian cynicism and has edited a collection that combines over a dozen essays on the Bay Area with views on the implications of parallel developments in Europe. She studies protest mural and social projects and conducts interviews that give voice to opinions in the alternative political scene. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, for example, makes ‘big tech’ visible and tangible (vulnerable): How does one discern the ‘deeper geography of bank lending and speculation’, and what role is played by Airbnb, based in San Francisco and responsible for the repurposing of living space on a large scale? The activist collective has also created a scandal around the 311 call service, which was originally introduced to report potholes but has become increasingly used to complain about ‘impairment of quality of life’ in order to get police to remove annoying individuals. The introduction of 311 apps has seen the number of reports increase nine-fold in recent years and contributed to the growing criminalisation of poverty.‘In fact, 311 apps largely prioritise the same types of issues as discriminatory ‘quality of life’ or ‘broken windows’ policing, leading to the criminalisation of minorities in gentrifying neighbourhoods’, writes Ben Green.[10]

The essay by Rebecca Solnit investigates the long history of ethnic-racist displacement policies in San Francisco’s Mission, Castro and South of Market. ‘We are living in a time in which one of our great cultural treasures – urbanity – is being plundered’, writes queer activist Sarah Schulman. At the WeWork co-working space the only black people to be seen apart from reception and security staff are hip-hop stars or Angela Davis – on the carpet. This is how digital urban renewal feels.

Silicon Valley Paradox

Here we can study the Silicon Valley Paradox and its applicability to other regions: ‘when a fulltime job in a company-owned cafeteria where the highly paid employees of the tech industry get everything for free no longer pays for enough food on the table at home’. The relationship between the techies and the service personnel recalls slavery in the South: ‘People slave away while all around them everything is in abundance. And it was always like this’, says the activist urban researcher Ofelia Bello.

The tech cruise ships as completely catered working, accommodation and recreational environments are creating ever wider fissures in their urban anchorages. ‘The Bay Area is floating on a whole current of surplus value that is created around the world and then pumped back into the metropolitan region by global companies’, says Richard Walker in a passage quoted in Technopolis, but these riches are reaching less and less people.

Even during the Corona crisis, the big tech companies are outdoing other firms. In late summer 2020 the Nasdaq-100 stock market index registered a 30 percent rise in the value of tech stocks, corresponding to the level of growth in 2019, when the US economy was experiencing its eleventh consecutive year of expansion. The winners in the current crisis are thus above all Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Zoom, Microsoft and Google (Alphabet). Apple shares alone have gone up to 500 dollars this year, an increase of 70 percent. ‘The company needed 42 years to reach its first billion-dollar market capitalisation. In this round it took only 21 weeks to reach 1000 billion dollars.’[11]

Tech-Lash

It could be that 8 May 2020 will become a significant date in the history of the city and digital modernity. On this day, Dan Doctoroff, the boss of “Sidewalk Labs” announced he was abandoning his biggest project – the construction of a ‘smart city’ in Toronto, which was supposed to illustrate the future of the city. Sidewalk is not just any company. It is the urban planning department of the Google parent company Alphabet. (Niklas Maak)[12]

In both the USA and EU, tech companies are increasingly finding themselves subject to committees of inquiry, additional tax demands and breakup scenarios. As early as 2013, in his article ‘The coming tech-lash’, Adrian Wooldridge predicted a coming backlash against the technology branch. The article is accompanied online by a protester holding up a cardboard sign displaying the slogan ‘Occupy Silicon Valley’.[13] In his letter, the Economist editor not only predicts a ‘growing peasants’ revolt’ against the ‘sovereigns of cyberspace’ and the ‘Silicon Elite’[14],but also points to a contradiction between public funding of the tech industry and its anti-social attitude to society: ‘Geeks have turned out to be some of the most ruthless capitalists around[…] At the same time the tech tycoons have displayed a banker-like enthusiasm for hoovering up public subsidies and then avoiding taxes. The American government laid the foundations of the tech revolution by investing heavily in the creation of everything from the internet to digital personal assistants. But tech giants have structured their businesses so that they give as little back as possible.’ The aim is maximum efficiency and minimal costs to ensure that the return on investment is as high as possible.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Arch+#241, Berlin, 2021