From Public Books:
In Cities, Knowledge, and the Digital Age, a new partnership between Public Books and SFMOMA’s Public Knowledge project, we seek to understand how technology has changed cities. Today’s article is in conversation with Bik Van der Pol’s “Take Part,” which asks: “Is there room for San Francisco in San Francisco?”
As New York City and Greater Washington, DC, prepared for the arrival of Amazon’s new secondary headquarters, Torontonians opened a section of their waterfront to Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, which plans to prototype a new neighborhood “from the internet up.” Fervent resistance arose in all three locations, particularly as citizens and even some elected officials discovered that many of the terms of these public-private partnerships were hashed out in closed-door deals, secreted by nondisclosure agreements. Critics raised questions about the generous tax incentives and other subsidies granted to these multibillion-dollar corporations, their plans for data privacy and digital governance, what kind of jobs they’d create and housing they’d provide, and how their arrival could impact local infrastructures, economies, and cultures. While such questioning led Amazon to cancel their plans for Long Island City in mid-February, other initiatives press forward. What does it mean when Silicon Valley—a geographic region that’s become shorthand for an integrated ideology and management style usually equated with libertarian techno-utopianism—serves as landlord, utility provider, urban developer, (unelected) city official, and employer, all rolled into one?1
We can look to Alphabet’s and Amazon’s home cities for clues. Both the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle have been dramatically remade by their local tech powerhouses: Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle; and Google, Facebook, and Apple (along with countless other firms) around the Bay. As Jennifer Light, Louise Mozingo, Margaret O’Mara, and Fred Turner have demonstrated, technology companies have been reprogramming urban and suburban landscapes for decades.2 And “company towns” have long sprung up around mills, mines, and factories.3 But over the past few years, as development has boomed and income inequality has dramatically increased in the Bay Area, we’ve witnessed the arrival of several new books reflecting on the region’s transformation.
These titles, while focusing on the Bay, offer lessons to New York, DC, Toronto, and the countless other cities around the globe hoping to spur growth and economic development by hosting and ingesting tech—by fostering the growth of technology companies, boosting STEM education, and integrating new sensors and screens into their streetscapes and city halls. For years, other municipalities, fashioning themselves as “the Silicon Valley of [elsewhere],” have sought to reverse-engineer the Bay’s blueprint for success. As we’ll see, that blueprint, drafted to optimize the habits and habitats of a privileged few, commonly elides the material needs of marginalized populations and fragile ecosystems. It prioritizes efficiency and growth over the maintenance of community and the messiness of public life. Yet perhaps we can still redraw those plans, modeling cities that aren’t only made by powerbrokers, and that thrive when they prioritize the stewardship of civic resources over the relentless pursuit of innovation and growth....MORE
Nearly 20 years ago, long-time San Francisco resident Rebecca Solnit, in her Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, described the coming gentrification, privatization, and homogenization and subsequent hollowing out of a vibrant metropolis. This prescient book of linked essays, illustrated with photographs by Susan Schwartzenberg, was reprinted in 2018. As we reencounter Solnit’s resonant lament, we meet a host of new San Francisco characters in Cary McClelland’s 2018 Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley. McClelland, a one-time San Franciscan, interviewed more than 150 regional residents and laborers—from angel investors and ER doctors to Uber drivers to longshoremen. His edited transcripts of those conversations offer a prismatic view of this economically stratified and segregated metropolitan region.
While McClelland presents a loosely stitched-together quilt of San Franciscan subjectivities, Berkeley geographer Richard Walker, another Bay Area fixture, has produced the kind of book only an embedded scholar with enviable endurance can create: a deep, virtuosic saga supported by mounds of data and fieldwork. His Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area echoes and updates many of Solnit’s and McClelland’s subjects’ laments, while also explaining, in great detail, how the conditions for their shared concern came to be: how San Francisco became a hotbed of counterculture, environmental activism, and technological innovation, and why those distinctions are now in tension and under threat.
Finally, urban historian Alison Isenberg, in her Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay, turns to a different set of sources—archival records, the alternative press, unpublished manuscripts, and old architectural renderings—to rewrite a chapter of the city’s narrative that can’t be told through economic data, macroscale maps, or tech company profiles. Focusing on a selection of large-scale Bay Area urban redevelopment projects from the 1940s through the 1970s, Isenberg argues that the assemblage of agents and concerns shaping the modern city’s form and character was much broader than what we find portrayed in dominant East Coast development narratives, like Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Robert Caro’s profile of planning mogul Robert Moses.4 In short, she demonstrates, urban change isn’t driven solely by developers and preservationists.
Solnit, McClelland, and Walker join in celebrating San Francisco’s history of racial and socioeconomic diversity, cultural inclusivity, and technological innovation. “We were a sanctuary for the queer, the eccentric, the creative, the radical, the political and economic refugees, and so they came and reinforced the city’s difference,” Solnit writes. McClelland extends the list, adding a couple of the city’s less noble accomplishments: “It bore witness to the Gold rush, the Transcontinental Railroad, Japanese internment, the Beat poets, the free speech movement, the AIDS crisis and modern LGBTQ politics, and the birth of the semiconductor and motherboard.” This mix of factors—along with the region’s clustering of complementary industries (“agglomeration economies”), its “liberation from rigid corporate culture,” and its mix of cyberculture and counterculture, military contracts and university research, progressivism and libertarianism—made the Bay Area a fertile ground for the growth of Silicon Valley, Walker argues.
Today, Walker continues, “the bay region is one of the prime generators of new wealth on the planet, and home to many of the largest and richest corporations astride the globe. It is, moreover”—still—“a place in the vanguard of many political and cultural movements, sending forth ideas that are changing life far beyond its borders.” Yet such material wealth and intellectual and cultural richness have generated their own problems, both in the world beyond its borders and, especially, at home: sprawl, a dearth of available housing, widespread homelessness, debilitating air pollution, more frequent and deadly wildfires, water scarcity, and insufficient resources for all the low-wage workers—often women and people of color—who support the everyday material operations of the tech industry and the city that houses it. “Think of San Francisco as both a laboratory of the new and a preserve for the old subversive functionality of cities,” Solnit writes. Now, “Think about what happens if both these aspects get bulldozed by the technology economy.”
“For San Francisco to become a place that just provides opportunities to buy pet food online is, to say the least, a decline whose effects will be felt far away,” Solnit says, referencing Pets.com, the signature “bust” story of the first dot-com boom. The Bay Area’s consumption of resources impoverishes the surrounding region, and its concentration of wealth and talent leaves less for other cities, Walker notes. We also can’t ignore Silicon Valley’s powerful cultural imperialism, whose effects are felt both locally and globally. McClelland quotes Alex Kaufman, who runs a design team at Google: “It’s this messianic tech thing. We’re saving the world mostly making useless products that solve problems that real people don’t have—it’s problems rich twenty-year-olds have.” He laments tech’s widespread “callousness” and “oversimplification of political problems.”
Almost two decades ago Solnit saw that the efficiency-minded tech industry was framing the messiness of public life as comparatively inconvenient and inefficient, and that the sector thus played a key role in “accommodating spatial privatization and speeding up an economic privatization.” What results, she argues, is a Hollow City, one whose colorful Victorian homes and corporate workspaces mask its increasingly monochromatic populations and cultures. Paul Gillespie, a cab driver quoted in McClelland’s book, wonders: “If you are riding the Google bus, and you are looking on your cell phone for stories that are tailored just for you, and at night you are taking an Uber to a nightclub or restaurant with a lot of other people just like you, where is the interaction with everyone else? Where is the knowledge of what other people are thinking or what’s going on in the world?” Walker likewise acknowledges the tech industry’s role as global evangelist for the exploitative sharing economy, the Californian Ideology, and neoliberalism, and its failure to address privacy breaches and fake news and technological solutionism—all of which have shaped politics and economics around the globe....
May 4:
"Feral Cities"
The Real Real Estate State and Artificial Scarcity, Technology and Planning
"Money and trust. Amsterdam moneylenders and the rise of the modern state..."
"The only way to rein in big tech is to treat them as a public service"
