Urban Utopia: Disruptive Visions of the Digital City between Toronto and Barcelona

August 2019 | 2 Minuten Lesezeit

If we consider the city as a concept¹, ownership does not necessarily has to be a question of property, rather represent the ideas of its citizens. Richard Sennett argues that “the forms of the built environment are the product of the maker’s will”². However, who are the makers of the digital city and what is their will? Because it seems that the digital city has a financial motivation, this thesis criticises urban utopias by big tech companies, that take over digital city-making. I argue that it indicates a fundamental disruption in the envisioning of the future urban. Urban utopia becomes the convenient means of staging needs in neoliberal Silicon Valley and thus a central force of late-capitalism to sell digital products. These visions sit squarely within the definition of so-called solutionism³ and the staging of technological desire feeds into the neoliberal ‘Californian Ideology’⁴. This research begins by deconstructing the approaches and structures of the makers behind future urban visions in two case studies: Barcelona Digital City Plan by the City Council of Barcelona and the Project Vision by Sidewalk Labs for Quayside at Toronto’s Waterfront. I further argue that the digitalisation is a product of liberalising technology and the centralisation of economic dynamics in cities.

See also: Dittrich, Moritz (2019) Who owns the city? In: The Matter of Architecture. Royal College of Art. London.

1. See: urban in: Lefebvre, 1996 or cité in: Sennett, 2019 ↩︎
2. Sennett 2019, 2 ↩︎
3. Morozov, 2013 ↩︎
4. Barbrook & Cameron, 1996 ↩︎