The smart city itself, as a coherent object of discourse, arises out of a specific set of conditions produced by late capitalism, under which cities compete against each other as global destinations for capital and talent. - Adam Greenfield[1]

There has been speculation about the ‘digital city’ ever since the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1991.[2] In 2008 this idea was remodelled as a saleable article in the form of the ‘smart city’. However, with the launch of Apple’s iPhone around the same time, a device that quickly became the standard for the so-called ‘smart phone’, the ‘smart city’ propagated by big technology firms like Siemens AG, the IBM Corporation and Cisco Systems rapidly became obsolete[3]: The idea of the top-down instalment of sensors centrally networked with a mainframe computer has been supplanted by the ‘smart phone’ as a computer-aided sensor-machine that transforms everyone into a data collector. This multiply readable data is commercially aggregated by operations ranging from Facebook and Cambridge Analytics to the NSA and the Chinese social credit system: the digital city is becoming a data factory.

Data Freeway

'Sitting in traffic on a Los Angeles freeway, looking at my edits for this essay [...]. Today, bumper-to-bumper, we are now all also on our phones and PDA’s: taking meetings, texting, emailing, Googling, checking on this and that, editing essays on our iPhones. This is the home and office.'[4] As the US designer and techno-urbanist Benjamin H. Bratton already describes in the essay he edited in a traffic jam in 2008, mobile computers (smart phones) and the automobile (autopiloted in the future) are a game changer: 'The "mobile" began life as a "car phone" but now the terms are reversed. In Transformers, the alien-robot became a car, the phone became a robot. Here now the car becomes a phone. As mobility has transformed from mechanical to informational, the car is augmented by hands-free telephony, Bluetooth networks, in-dash GPS navigation systems offering visualised or spoken directions, iPod jacks, big screens counting down the drops of fuel while talking to you in weird accents, and emergency concierge communications by built-in satellite intercom. The handset does all this too, steering me in different directions by maps, recommendations, search results, geotags, and so forth. The phone and car find ways to subcontract each other's functions, one to the other and back again.' The car becomes an instrument of a world made machine-readable: 'That new primary, brandable experience interface doesn’t focus on how a car looks in the world, but on how the world looks gazing out through the lens of the car.'[5]

The first of what are now five parts of the ‘Transformers’ series opened on the same 'blockbuster opening weekend' as the release of the first iPhone. The transformation of robots into cars and trucks into fighting machines points to the end of industry, and its preferred backdrop is the rusting remains of declining metropolitan centres such as the 'Motor City' Detroit. Here, shooting a movie can hardly leave behind anything more than even grimmer ruins and their screen images. For some time now, teenage dreams have been oriented to owning not a first car, but rather the new iPhone, or most current gaming console for navigating the dystopian game ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. Against this background, Bratton asks 'how can we properly theorise the digital at the scale of the city, and the city rendered as digital media?'

City of Bits

William J. Mitchell’s rather techno-euphoric book City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn was originally published in 1995. Reading it today, it is astounding how many of its prophecies have come to pass, albeit more than 20 years later. On the other hand, even at an early stage the sociopolitical implications of data-driven development were the subject of a critical debate that extended well beyond tech circles. The same year that Mitchell’s book was published also saw the formation of the 'nettime list'[6] and the publication of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s The Californian Ideology[7], both of which launched widely read critiques of Silicon Valley capitalism and raised questions that would go on to shape the tech discourse of the culturally oriented left. The dystopian, educational tone of such critique was reflected in Hollywood films and their sequels such as Blade Runner(1982), Terminator(1984/1991), RoboCop(1987/1990), Die Hard(1988/1995) and Total Recall(1990). The two first RoboCop films were actually instructional films about the intertwinement of the real estate business, robotics, repressive urban governmental practices, and the drug economy. And 35 years ago, the makers of Die Hard already saw what 'smart' building and police surveillance technologies had in the pipeline.

From the beginning, the discourse of the city was connected with the tech complex. In the 1990s the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) shared office space in Berlin’s Kronenstrasse with urbanistic cultural initiatives and members of nettime. Digital-urban models were an early focus of discussion in the context of DeDigitale Stad in Amsterdam (1994)[8] and – initially far less critically – Telepolis Luxemburg (at the time an exhibition and conference project run by Florian Rötzer – subsequently editor of the critical online magazine of the same name – and Burda Media, which today organises the industry conference DLD. Digital, Life, Design)[9]. Many digital pilot projects were launched in 1995 only to fail around 1999 with the crash of the New Economy. Even back then, one saw floors of buildings devoted to digital tech bloom briefly in Berlin-Kreuzberg and then collapse.

Tech Urbanism

Over 25 years after the initial ‘digital city’ euphoria, the term tech urbanism now signifies a far more comprehensive discourse around the interaction of digital technology and the city, also because this relationship has now become more palpably materialised in the form of buildings and displacement, business models, data vacuum-cleaners and 'bullshit jobs'.[10] 'Cities are the decisive venue: They are the chief site of upheaval, and also where enterprise can most easily be monitored', writes Bauwelteditor Kaye Geipel.[11]

Current issues connected with this theme in Berlin, for example, include the campaigns against the Google campus, the Zalando outlet in the district of Kreuzberg, and the Amazon Tower as part of the Mediaspree property investment project, which – in part informed by the dramatic urban dislocations in the Bay Area of San Francisco and Silicon Valley – are driving many residents of the 'technopolis'[12] onto the streets, in a dual sense. At the same time, we have seen residents of New York and trade unions successfully block the location of Amazon’s second headquarters in the city in the face of the ruinous competition initiated by the company between locations vying to host Amazon HQ2.

Twelve Hundred Sensors On Board

'In the coming year it will become even clearer that the cloud is no longer something located in a computing centre somewhere. Instead it will be on your telephone, in your car and the autonomous truck you see driving past on the freeway, and in the furnishings of your smart home', says Werner Vogels, chief technology officer of the Amazon cloud service AWS. 'For example, Audi has just presented a car that has around twelve hundred sensors on board and nevertheless still looks like a traditional Audi. There are cameras and long–range and short-range radar. It’s basically a giant computer on wheels that looks like a conventional car.'[13]

Autonomous driving in the urban context, an environment so complex that it is beyond the currently available level of computing power,[14] requires sensors, computing centres/capacity, algorithms, and labour power that can process all the data required for maps, advertising , collision avoidance and business models driven by data extraction that have yet to be developed. And then there’s everything else in the city that moves, from the individual ‘smart phone’ to all the app-based services and mobility offerings (BerlKönig, Uber, Airbnb, etc). The way the urban professionals of platform capitalism here in Germany want to live, eat, and be delivered to, requires a logistics system extending deep into Poland (Amazon, Lieferando, Durstexpress, etc). In a time of low interest rates, profits are no longer being invested only in the capital market (N26-Bank, Revolut, RoboAdviser, etc) but also in ‘concrete gold’, which is leading to an explosive coupling of the creative industry with the real-estate finance-industrial complex.

Concrete Gold

The phenomenon became concrete (in both senses) and tangible, for example, in the case of the Aufbau Haus (2011–15) located on Moritzplatz in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, a new building for a creative-industry start-up venture. The project was the brainchild of Andreas Krüger (director of Planet Modulor, now belius GmbH) and the role of business angel was played by the publishing and real-estate investor Matthias Koch (Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG). Its immediate surroundings became host to a cluster of working spaces, tech manufacturers and backyard firms. And in 2014, despite protests, local government started to wind down the operations of the Bona Peiser Library, a local broad-based institution located on the edge of the socially disadvantaged Otto Suhr Housing Estate.[15]

The tech industry employs a kind of dual strategy that relies in equal measure on the cloud[16] and ‘concrete gold’. The Berlin start-up factory Rocket Internet – responsible for founding companies such as the fashion supplier Zalando and the meal service Delivery Hero – is currently pulling back from the stock market, while in recent years the Samwer brothers, who own the majority of Rocket Internet shares, have been snapping up large amounts of real estate via newly founded subsidiary enterprises, including a former post office in Kreuzberg, the Ufer-Hallencultural quarter in the district of Wedding, the Admiralspalast theatre in the Mitte district and an apartment block in the Neukölln district. These properties are not being acquired for the investors’ own use but rather as long-term investments for money that has been earned in a short time.

Digital Goes Bricks & Mortar

First, online shopping forces business physical shops to close their doors, then internet firms take over the building shells. The building near the Ostbahnhofrailway station in Berlin that was initially constructed as part of the GDR Centrum department store chain and then operated as a Galeria-Kaufhofoutlet until 2017 is now a cleanly filleted skeleton of concrete pylons destined to become the headquarters of Zalando, more than 80 percent of whose internet traffic originates from mobile devices. Meanwhile, despite vigorous resistance by local residents[17], the Karstad tdepartment store on Hermannplatz in western Berlin is scheduled to be transformed into a hybrid comprising shop-in-shop, an Amazon logistics warehouse, co-working space, a reuse centre with living spaces, clad into a historical façade.[18] An Amazon Prime warehouse for deliveries on an hourly basis has been erected in a former electronics supermarket on western Berlin’s main boulevard, Kurfürstendamm. And in the USA, Amazon is converting disused or 'dead' malls into conveniently located logistics centres – dubbed fulfilment centres – for the warehousing and distribution of goods ordered online. The transformation of the Neckermann goods distribution hub into a data processing centre can also be seen in this context. At the same time Amazon is establishing a chain of shops without staff in which food can purchased 'seamlessly', i.e. with minimum effort and without using cash, and all goods are digitally tracked.[19]

And yet it is precisely at seams, joints and interfaces that much of what is interesting and valuable about urban life takes place. Every technological intervention that smoothes and lubricates this experience destroys urbanity. 'A remarkably passive notion of urban subjectivity and even citizenship is inscribed in the visions of the smart city we’ve been offered – one that asks of our lives only that they be convenient, and of us only that we acquiesce to the creeping privatisation of municipal services', as Adam Greenfield puts it.[20] Even the architect Rem Koolhaas refers approvingly to 'places without guardianship' located 'outside all efficiency margins', arguing that it is the diversity of 'non-managed spaces' that allows 'living efficiency to blossom'.[21]

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