Talking at the Smart City Research Symposium

On September 22, Carr & Hesse were pleased to meet colleagues in Norway to present, "Policy failure in urban governance: the case of large digital corporations" at the session convened by Siddharth Sareen, Anders Riel Müller, Kristiane Lindland, Ragnhild Sjurseike, Jens Kaae Fisker entitled, Social and Spatial justice in times of transition, which is part of

the Smart City Research Symposium organized by the Research Network for Smart Sustainable Cities at the University of Stavanger, Norway and Nordic Edge Expo.

Our Abstract:

This paper draws upon the branch of urban studies literature known as policy mobilities (McCann 2011) and, particularly, policy failure (Temenos & Lauermann 2020) to understand the strategic practices of large digital corporations (LDCs) in urban development. While it is a relatively new phenomenon that LDCs are appearing as important actors in the field of urban development, their role has moved beyond being simply the producers of new technological products that supposedly make cities more efficient, green and smart. They are, for example, in the background, forging their central position in the functioning of cities by taking up space (land, water, bodies) for so-called essential urban infrastructures such as data centers (Carr 2021) needed to support their technologies. At the same time, they are also driving the production of what we refer to as their symbolic spaces of LDC-style digital cities. These are Amazon’s HQ2 and the digital city that was proposed by Sidewalk Labs Toronto (daughter firm of Alphabet Inc.), projects that epitomised both their importance in the field and the height of their technological innovation. Yet, striking about these cases is that, with the exception of the HQ2 in Arlington, these projects never materialized. In this paper, we argue that this was not a coincidence. Rather, both Amazon and Alphabet effectively mobilized a strategy of policy-making that has recently received attention in the urban studies literature: policy failure (Lovell 2017; Temenos & Lauermann 2020). Viewing these cases through the lens of policy failure shows that LDC-led digital cities is not so much about producing flashy cities equipped with avant-garde technologies as it is about endorsing a post-political mode of urban governance that drains public institutions of time and resources and reconfigures state-society relations. This is a cautionary tale for practitioners, who need to understand and watch out for the flags of this disingenuous behaviour.

References
Carr, C. (2021) “Digital urban development -How large digital corporations shape the field of urban governance (DIGI-GOV) – Project Summary” University of Luxembourg.
Lovell, H. (2017) Policy failure mobilities. Progress in Human Geography 43(1): 46-63.
McCann, E (2011) Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: Toward a research agenda. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101: 107–130.
Temenos, C., and Lauerman, J. (2020) The urban politics of policy failure. Urban Geography, 41(9): 1109-1118.

 

We are looking forward to continuing this co-operation. We owe, in part, our participation to Bettina Bleumling and Anders Riel Müller who invited Carr earlier in 2021 to compare Toronto smart city developments with that of Barcelona -- the latter presented by Ramon Ribera Fumaz.  More info here.

 

It is with great regret that we cannot present in person, but we are grateful to U. Stavanger for providing hybrid options.