#33: Platform Blues
Sidewalk Labs, the unit Google spun off a few years ago to focus on smart cities, is finally getting a chance to realize its parent company's dream of building a city from scratch, on Toronto's waterfront, according to its own specifications. Never mind that Google's core products have already revolutionized the flow of information through urban environments more than Sidewalk ever will; these companies join a long succession, going back millennia, that observed existing cities' countless shortcomings and dreamed of a blank canvas to build a better version themselves from scratch. History is littered with the handiwork of those who actually got the opportunity, which we typically recognize, in their residual built forms, as interesting failures.
Evgeny Morozov, reacting to Sidewalk's Toronto project, suggested that Google's ultimate goal is "to remove barriers to the accumulation and circulation of capital in urban settings." Cities as we know them, in fact, seem philosophically inconvenient for a company whose original mission statement was to "organize the world's information." Information embodied in physical space is much harder to organize, comprising inefficiency that actually serves a purpose, and often a purpose that benefits cities' most vulnerable inhabitants. Google's project to facilitate the flow of capital within cities invites the counterpoint that most people in cities would rather be protected from the flow of capital than further enable it.
If cities are just another kind of platform, as Sidewalks's Dan Doctoroff claims, then our greatest concern should be Google's public acknowledgement of this as its vision for the Toronto experiment. A few years ago the idea that everything should be a platform may have appealed to a wider audience, but lately it's become apparent that too many "platforms" have mutated into mechanisms for capturing value created by individuals and transferring it away from them. If that isn't a definition of bad urbanism, I don't know what is.
Reads:
Moral Machine, an MIT project that presents you with two driverless car dilemmas at a time and lets you choose which one is "better" - for example, should the car kill two passengers or five pedestrians who are jaywalking? It gets difficult almost immediately. (Thanks Chandan)
A disturbing sign-of-the-times article about the for-profit ankle monitor industry and its exploitation of immigrants, even as it helps to get them out of detention.
The underrated role of tents in contemporary architecture.
Until next time,
Drew