If we were to summarise the main principles of the first model villages and company towns, they would conform to three main genotypes. First, they are planned rather than ‘organic’ forms of urban evolution, with the built form involving close, if regimented, community proximity. Second, they are usually provided with public buildings such as schools, some health care facilities and institutions for ‘self-improvement’ or entertainment (including parks, galleries or theatres). Third, they represent sociability but also social stratification of an exclusionary white, male-dominated kind in ‘harmony’ with the norms of social structures and divisions of labour typical of their time. We could hardly expect the discourses and narratives of today to be pronounced in the prospectuses of contemporary ‘smart cities’ aspirations or developments. One characteristic of contemporary heterodox lifestyle that, paradoxically, stresses the present fate of ‘sociability’ but highlights the misogyny of modern male narrative bias is captured in musician David Byrne’s 5 observation:
‘…that human interaction is often perceived, from an engineer’s mind-set, as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something “frictionless” is getting the human part out of the way. The point is not that making a world to accommodate this mind-set is bad, but that when one has as much power over the rest of the world as the tech sector does over folks who might not share that worldview, there is the risk of a strange imbalance. The tech world is predominantly male…with a drive to eliminate as much interaction with real humans as possible for the sake of “simplicity and efficiency”’.
Byrne goes on to highlight how much of ‘smart’ technology and services involve individualistic indulgence, solitude and indeed loneliness, whether consciously or unconsciously felt. He lists numerous consumption goods and services that involve minimal human interaction. Thus, ‘
ordering and home delivery’ (Amazon, Deliveroo, Instacart, etc.) have eliminated most human interaction; ‘
digital music’ (iTunes, Spotify) undermines much of the ‘social glue’ that hitherto focused on social sharing of opinion and enthusiasm; ‘
ride-hailing apps’ (Uber, Lyft), where even the driver has the address in a social media device, obviating the need for conversation; ‘
driverless cars’ (Google; Apple) result in further elimination of stranger drivers; ‘
automated checkouts’ (Amazon Go; Tesco Express) involve zero human contact; ‘
AI’ (Google, IBM, Apple, Facebook Healthcare diagnostics), which are superior to human medical skill; ‘
robot workforce’ (Kuka; ABB, etc.), an automated 24/7 workforce, with no worker overheads; ‘
personal assistants’ (Amazon Echo ‘Alexa’, Google Home, Apple 24me), non-human instructioning; ‘
big data’ (Facebook, Google) pattern recognition, identity harvesting;
gaming and virtual reality (VR) (Microsoft, Oculus, Google, Samsung), interaction that is virtual and anonymous;
high-frequency trading (HFT) pattern recognition algorithms for stock selection and post-human AI decision making; MOOCS (edX, Coursera, FutureLearn), automated higher education lecturing; ‘
social media’ (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple), simulated ‘social’ interaction. Does all this elimination of social interaction correlate with a widely-recognised societal rise in intolerance, ignorance of difference, envy and antagonism by amplification of echo and cognitive bubble effects? Possibly, as the most thorough analysis of digital society’s debt to Skinnerian behaviourism declares [
12]. Yet there is much insouciance and even imperiousness about the purveyors of ‘smart’ technology and services as identified below regarding ‘smart cities’:
‘It goes without saying this is not a matter of merely wanting to do good. These companies are promoting these new cities as fitter, happier, more productive, and convenient places, even as they are envisioning cities with expanded means to monitor our lives, and better market our previously private information to advertisers…Instead of the lower density and relatively affordable post-war suburbs that “smart” planners and progressives have long mocked as cultural wastelands, the tech giants are pushing a 21st century high-tech update of the grim worker housing that dotted the Lancastrian and New England landscapes of the early industrial revolution’.
Accordingly, the remainder of this section investigates six exemplars of the rise to fashionability of the company town phenomenon disguised as the ‘smart city’ discourse. The narrative begins with Google’s Silicon Valley ‘model village’ development in Mountain View, California; then we assess progress on the activities of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of the near-ubiquitous Google that is so central to the design and development of so many of Byrne’s [
10] list of digital innovations. Next, there follows a distinctive implementation of a company town-plus ‘smart city’ development on former industrial land at Warm Springs, Fremomt, California, home of electric car production by Tesla. The fourth instance is Amazon’s ‘smart quarter’ version of the contemporary company town in downtown Seattle. Fifth, this is followed by an update of the Willow Park project of Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg at Menlo Park, Palo Alto, California. Finally, we feature a vignette of plans for a more ‘steampunk’ company town scheme in California as the brainchild of former Microsoft owner Bill Gates.
4.1. Google
The Silicon Valley municipality of Mountain View approved plans in 2017 for Google to build an 18.6 acre expansion of its campus, including a 595,000 square foot building designed by ‘starchitects’ Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG) [
14]. Known as ‘Google Charleston East’, a suburb of Mountain View near Google’s main Googleplex campus, the main structure is a cluster of buildings housed within a tent-like canopy, so that the cover allows in natural light while also serving as one of the largest solar arrays ever built. Its first stage has offices on the second floor and some 300 dwellings on the ground floor mixed with shops, amenities and parking. The canopy design has incited a number of comparisons to a gigantic tent. However, as seen in the aerial design view computer graphic, the rippling roof resembles more the look of the surface of a meringue pie. Google has never before troubled to create a new building with such a distinctive look for itself. However, competitive comparisons to the Norman Foster-designed Apple Park ‘spaceship’ and the Frank Gehry-designed Willow Park Facebook headquarters seem inevitable, as high-profile architecture increasingly becomes a mark of stature in Silicon Valley. Reports said not a single person showed up to the meeting to criticise or oppose the project, suggesting that Google can do little wrong from the residents’ point of view or Mountain View planners bow down to whatever Google wants to do [
15].
To that end, the cladding was developed to provide active shading and allow targeted light to selected portions of the building to enhance biophilic (human–nature interaction) elements. The design also incorporates photovoltaics into the ‘meringue’ skin to generate energy for the scheme to yield net zero emissions. To achieve thermal comfort and air quality while meeting architectural aesthetic demands and future flexibility, an underfloor air system was installed based on detailed thermal simulations of occupant experience. Chilled fabrics and underfloor air were also installed to minimise energy consumption by balancing ‘meringue’ skin air side and waterside cooling temperatures. The development lacks the traditional ‘model village’ amenities and social infrastructure. Notably, no public investment (e.g., an art gallery or community facility) is specified in the East Charleston scheme:
‘…Under the Google tent or inside the Apple circle there is little but googleness or appleness. There is nature but–despite the meticulous selection of native plants–it is of an abstract, managed kind. There is art, but it is drained of the power to shock and subvert, leaving only diversion and reassurance. There is architecture but, notwithstanding the high degree of invention that goes into materials, it finds it hard to shed the quality of computer renderings, the sense that buildings are made of a kind of digistuff, which could as well be one thing or another. Even when the corporations reach out to their communities, to use the preferred PR terminology, the rest of the world is a hazy, ill-defined entity, a mist in the background of the computer-generated images’.
Thus, as architecture critic Moore sees it, ‘social reform’ or ‘self-improvement’ evolve in Apple or Google’s discourse with the provision of toys, food, and fun rather than challenges, except for the superfluity of body rather than brain-honing installations. They create calibrated lands of fun, in which staff offer their lives, body and soul, day and night for work. In return, Google provides gyms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, climbing walls, basketball courts, running tracks and hiking trails, indoor football pitches, massage rooms and hanging gardens, performance venues (notably, Apple’s auditorium for announcing its latest models) decorated with comforting corporate art and lovable graphics. Moore is surprised that Apple’s new Apple Park is oddly reminiscent of a corporate HQ of the 1950s or 1960s, something that IBM or Bell Labs might have built, ‘which you would have thought is exactly the look Apple wouldn’t want’ [
16].
4.2. Alphabet—Sidewalk Labs
Having cut its teeth on the ‘smart annexe’ to Googleplex, the company’s design partner under the Alphabet parent firm, Sidewalk Labs, announced an ambitious ‘smart city’, known as Quayside, in Toronto. The scheme had faced widespread critique since late 2017, when Sidewalk Labs’ plan to create a neighbourhood ‘from the internet up’ was first revealed. For example, the following summarises the concerns of informed digital business journalist and founder of BlackBerry, Jim Balsillie:
‘The 21st-century knowledge-based and data-driven economy is all about IP and data. ‘Smart cities’ are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalizations. ‘Smart cities’ rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool. As Sidewalk Labs’ chief executive Dan Doctoroff said: “We’re in this business to make money.” Sidewalk also wants full autonomy from city regulations so it can build without constraint’.
Other criticisms revealed suspicions about turning part of Toronto into a corporate test bed. These were alerted, at first, by the company’s history of unethical corporate activities like censoring Google’s messaging in China by feeding location, mobility and other positioning data to the Chinese government and illegally tracking movements of Android and iPhone users even when they implement privacy settings to prevent such data harvesting.
So, Quayside is the joint effort by the Canadian government agency Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, owned by Alphabet, to develop 12 acres of valuable waterfront just southeast of downtown Toronto. In April 2019, the managing board (appointed not elected) of Waterfront Toronto made interim recommendations which led Sidewalk Labs’ boss Dan Doctoroff to welcome the determination: ‘We want to be a partner with Waterfront Toronto and governments to build an innovative and inclusive neighbourhood’. This means Sidewalk Labs will continue to develop its proposal, along with Waterfront Toronto’s evaluation of the project after inviting further input from the public. Waterfront Toronto’s board will then make a final decision on 31 March 2020. Among new stipulations are restrictions on Sidewalk Labs’ ability to collect data in Quayside. ‘After two years in Toronto and engaging and planning with over 21,000 Toronto residents, we are looking forward to the next round of public consultations, entering the evaluation process, and continuing to develop a plan to build the most innovative neighbourhood in the world’, Doctoroff added. Sidewalk’s preference was to establish, with the agreement of the partners, an Urban Data Trust. However, social media’s tarnished reputation, based on previous surreptitious activities, like Facebook’s carelessness, or worse, in facilitating Cambridge Analytica’s advertising algorithm and data to influence voter intentions in national elections, counted against this. The agency disallowed such data collection to inform neighbourhood design and resident activities. Even Sidewalk’s promise to anonymise and bar the use of data for advertising or to be used by other Alphabet companies cut no ice with Waterfront Toronto. Their determination was for the team to follow existing and future privacy legislation, regulations and policy frameworks in Canada. Thus, Waterfront Toronto will manage the data collection and be responsible for proposing any amendments to the City of Toronto. In a major climb down in accepting this,
‘Sidewalk Labs agrees to work with Waterfront Toronto and governments to ensure proposed solutions do not impede accessibility, freedom of association, freedom of expression, equitable treatment of marginalised groups, and public engagement’.
The specific condition that had so exercised the agency into curtailing Sidewalk Labs’ and CEO Dan Doctoroff’s ambitions was as follows: Sidewalk Labs had proposed the up-front creation of an Innovative Design and Economic Acceleration (IDEA) district covering a much greater area (190 acres) than even Quayside’s 12 acres. Waterfront Toronto told Sidewalk Labs that this was ‘premature’ and that they needed to see goals achieved for Quayside before collaborating on other schemes: government ‘performance payments’ to Sidewalk Labs depend on this. Even then, the City of Toronto would need to be supportive, especially as it owned the development land in question. Sidewalk Labs was also required to use established language, which bans it from terms such as ‘Urban Data’. Commenting on Toronto’s freezing winters (‘colder than Mars’; [
19]) as a site for a putative ‘smart’ city, Sidewalk Labs designer, Rohit Aggarwala, referred to the planned innovations to ‘disrupt’ normal city functioning by installing ‘building raincoats’ which are voluminous tetrahedrons of thick ethylene see-through plastic meant to protect Quayside’s timber architecture, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, from harsh winter weather. Further, folding door ‘fanshells’ that, contrastingly, open up the building frontages, curbless street design, wider sidewalks, wayfinding beacons and heated pavements are other novelties. Heatherwick Studio’s computer graphics of these show no art in the lobby or on its stairwells, despite copious space. Questions of sustainability and practicality were issues of controversy for the ‘Block Sidewalk’ protest movement that sought to stop the proposal to use a ‘tech company’ to develop a neighbourhood [
20]. This led to the prospectus adjustment promising to use a central square flexibly to house occasional public installation art with a side-square ‘sculpture garden’ [
21]. However, many such ‘innovations’ are core to the thinking of Sidewalk Labs’ leadership as testified to below:
‘…ubiquitous connectivity; incredible computing power including artificial intelligence and machine learning; the ability to display data; sensing, including cameras and location data…then target ads to people in proximity, and then obviously over time track them through things like beacons and location services as well as their browsing activity’.
This is both the mantra and the intention of surveillance capitalism after Zuboff (2019) [
12] but as we have seen the overwhelming ambition of Alphabet to make money out of the beacons, location services and people tracking has for the moment been somewhat thwarted. City and agency stipulations against articulating terms like ‘Urban Data’ to mystify neighbourhood users and likely infringing Canadian data privacy laws have ‘curbed’ Sidewalk’s ambitions. Without the profits from any as-yet-to-be-invented new business model, it is hard to see a glowing beacon for Quayside’s ‘future city’. A
$13 billion splurge announced in 2019 on property development in low-cost locations suitable for building huge data centres to support cloud computing requirements may be a signpost of the company’s next step as it seeks to keep up with Amazon’s supremacy in that market [
23].
4.3. Warm Springs, Fremont
This mega-development is different in ethos from Alphabet’s ‘smart city’ approach, first by being planned by the Californian city of Fremont, centred on a new branch of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. However, comparably, it also recycles former industrial land (site of the GM-Toyota NUMMI joint venture that closed in 2010) and is anchored by an iconic Silicon Valley company, this time the electric vehicle (EV) automotive firm, Tesla, on a site four times that of the IDEA proposal. Breaking the automotive industry’s ‘lean production’ model of industry organisation, Tesla built its own supplier park on the Warm Springs doorstep, temporarily located next to Tesla in the old NUMMI plant but nowadays occupying an old Chrysler parts plant at Lathrop, California. Here, TAI, Eclipse, Futuris and Asteelflash were pioneer first movers from Fremont to Lathrop. More recently, some of Tesla’s own suppliers (e.g., seats) also relocated alongside Eclipse and SAS (dashboards), making a total of approximately fifty in California, with ten in the San Francisco Bay Area. Construction at the 850 acre Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
Warm Springs station of a new Fremont ‘Innovation District’ features a ‘Tesla Campus’. This comprises an advanced manufacturing plant, an ‘innovation cultivator’ for technology startups, and thousands of new homes, offices, various plants and retail outlets. The different industry plant mix includes Tesla Motors, Lam Research, Delta Products, Seagate, Western Digital, ThermoFisher, Boston Scientific, and startups in clean tech, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing. Presence of the rapid transit station near the Tesla plant is the reason for Tesla’s headquarters, direct manufacturing and suppliers to exploit co-location proximity. Though nowadays central to the rise of electric vehicle automotive manufacturing, Tesla’s owner is nevertheless a pioneer who belongs to the high-tech world. So, having a critical mass of manufacturing, head office and research in and around the Bay Area is essential. Detroit-based industrial consultants, Oliver Wyman, conjectured that if Tesla were headquartered in Ohio or Michigan, would they have the same reception? It is difficult to decouple Tesla for what they stand for and Silicon Valley, where they are located [
24].
The image being promoted for Warm Springs by the ‘Think Fremont’ agency differs unexpectedly in stressing a clean but otherwise not hyperbolic ‘smart city’ in its ‘Warm Springs: A Fresh Outlook on Yesterday’s Innovation District’ prospectus:
‘Here was our strategy: create a mixed-use public realm that prioritizes not just job creation, but also residential neighborhoods, connectivity, open space, urban vibes, and of course, the best food trucks the Bay Area has to offer. We’re dreaming up a place that ticks off all the qualities that people look for in a 21st century workplace. For instance, today’s employees, especially those who fall into a younger demographic, often prefer public transportation over the ‘pleasure’ of driving to work in bumper-to-bumper traffic.’.
As the Bay Area’s urban design critic for the San Francisco Chronicle saw it:
‘In a region where imaginative planning is often constrained by fears of the unknown, it’s startling to see a major city take an open-ended approach…This runs counter to how planning is done in cities like Oakland or San Francisco, which puts every conceivable restriction in place beforehand so that, theoretically, developers will behave. But the Fremont approach grasps a reality that conventional planning tends to deny: We can’t predict the future’.
With the aim to develop 3000 housing units and 40,000 jobs, mobility will clearly be the dominant motif, as shown by centring the scheme upon the BART station. However, although the planning rules are liberal, certain key requirements for building permission include at least one publicly accessible urban plaza per scheme and such plazas are to be linked by streets or pathways that include dedicated bike lanes; areas near rapid transit are to be built to a density of 50 housing units per acre, allowing higher density according to demand; and high rise buildings up to 240 feet are allowed in four of the ten areas at the developer’s discretion. Not so democratic, then, despite being set in a city-regulated jurisdiction. Thus, it is more of a mixed-industry, intentionally high-tech, moderately sustainable city development than either a traditional socially reforming, culturally improving model that predictably leaves much to market forces and neglects the cultural, aesthetic or public institutional spheres except the ‘planning gain’ condition that the selected developers build or pay for a new elementary school.
4.4. Two Kinds of Modern Company Town: Amazon Is One
The two types are a corporate campus with a large footprint on an existing city or corporation-built employee housing and public infrastructure. In 2017, a news file photograph showed Amazon’s campus construction proceeding on three large, glass-covered domes as part of its expansion in downtown Seattle. When challenged by Amazon’s real estate diaspora, Jeff Bezos agreed to the campus idea; the only condition was that Amazon would stay in downtown Seattle—then faced with planning the reversal of a decades-long outflow to the suburbs. By staying in the urban core, Amazon would attract members of the ‘hip creative class’ [
27].
Amazon had earlier announced that it would spend more than
$5 billion to build a second headquarters in North America to house as many as 50,000 employees (subsequently selected as Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia, after opposition from Long Island City, New York). It, nevertheless, planned to stay in its sprawling Seattle headquarters and the new space would be ‘a full equal’ of its current home according to the Amazon founder Bezos (Jacobs, 2018) 17. Seattle’s business community complained that the city’s left-leaning ‘anti-business’ politics drove Bezos out. However, many ordinary Seattle residents expressed relief. For despite the extraordinary prosperity that Amazon had brought to Seattle since it arrived as a startup in 1994, they were also conscious of the associated costs, not least the fastest-rising house prices in the US, congested traffic and an uncomfortable loss of urban identity. What was once an amiable, if contrarian, middle-class city had become more anxious and segmented with a narrow stratum of wealthy younger engineers elevated above a mass of precarious wage workers [
28]. In recent times, a number of corporations, including IBM, Google, Amazon and GM built such campuses with large footprints in towns and cities across the US and particularly in London, UK. These companies often became its host’s largest local employer, changing people, flows and infrastructures. Amazon now occupies 19 percent of all prime office space in Seattle—the most for any employer in a major U.S. city. For example, in the South Lake Union area that Amazon dominates ‘like a private city’ [
29], with 33 offices and 40,000 employees, it is not unusual to have pedestrian privacy invaded by security personnel photographing anyone presumed to be from the media. Needless to say, the firm has not been particularly swift with donations to charity or other public goods associated with philanthropy in company towns. Even charitable intent by the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was refused for his planned public park, which then reverted to him and became the development land for ‘Amazonia’ [
27]. Only in 2018 did Bezos enter the US ‘Philanthropy Fund’ with his first Bezos Day One Fund for homeless families and low-income pre-school education [
30].
4.5. Willow Village: Facebook’s New Home in Menlo Park
‘Housing costs in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area have skyrocketed. If tech companies want to attract skilled workers they may have no choice but to build good, affordable housing for these workers, who of course have lots of alternatives’ [
31]. Facebook is building 1500 housing units, aimed largely at its employees, in its new Willow Village campus in Palo Alto. As we saw earlier, in late 2017, Google signed an agreement with the city of Mountain View, where it is headquartered, eventually to build close to 10,000 homes and apartments. Both developments will be situated conveniently close to Facebook and Google’s offices. The office-sharing startup, WeWork, for its part, until its 2019 near-bankruptcy, was intent upon expanding with WeLive, providing studios and communal areas in the same building as WeWork office space. As one resident puts it, ‘You just roll out of bed, go down the elevator and get to work’ [
32].
Critics fear erosion of work–life balance. Naturally, when your employer is your landlord, and possibly providing you with transport, food, and other amenities too, the lines between work and time off become blurred. ‘You can work from home, you can work in your bus, you can work in the public space that’s also in the campus designed by Google. So you’re not working eight hours a day any more. Basically every part of your life is part of work’; to some, this is an unwelcome trend. ‘If your employer is also your landlord and maybe even your social-services provider, an employee may be thankful — or may have multiple reasons to be unhappy’ [
33].
A Facebook spokesman’s response to request for comment was to provide a list of local and legislative measures he said Facebook supports, including efforts to provide housing at below market rates in Menlo Park. The Facebook spokesman said: ‘On 7 July 2017, Facebook announced our next phase of expansion with the Willow Village, which will bring community benefits such as new affordable housing and retail to the Belle Haven neighbourhood of Menlo Park. The Willow Village will include 1500 units of housing with 15% offered below market rate’ [
34].
4.6. Bill Gates and the Belmont, Arizona Project
Finally, in Phoenix, Arizona is the Belmont development, a partnership between billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates with local real estate investors, which will plan a ‘smart city’ designed around emerging technologies. It is an idea rather than a realised ambition. From the 1990s to the 2000s, lack of growth had hindered development in Phoenix’s West Valley. Then in the mid-2000s, developers proposed Douglas Ranch, a long-term scheme that would house over 290,000 people on a nearby site (comparable in size to the Phoenix ‘edge city’ campus city of Tempe). Bill Gates’ involvement in the planned community was announced on November 8, 2017. His company, Cascade Investment, purchased an
$80 million stake in the project [
35]. Belmont will be aimed at creating an enlightened community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centres, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs according to Belmont Partners, the developers. Arguments against Belmont include the fact that Arizona is in the middle of an ongoing water crisis. Adding another city would clearly further strain the state’s dwindling water resources. There is not much that is smart about trying to land even more people on the deep suburban edge in the desert—with or without distractions like driverless cars. ‘In a land-use sense, that’s trying to put high-tech makeup on an unsustainable pig’ [
36].
This is by no means the first intentional community built to optimise urban life in the area. Approximately an hour north of Phoenix, the experimental town Arcosanti was built by architect Paolo Soleri in the 1970s. The retro-futurist site followed Soleri’s philosophy of arcology, an integration of architecture and ecology. Yet, by its very nature, a ready-made city seldom allows neighbourhoods to grow organically. Other sceptics point to Arcosanti as an Arizona ready-made neighbourhood. However, since being built in the 1970s, it has underperformed compared to the original vision of a city with self-sustaining agriculture, thousands of residents, and 100% renewable energy. The town is now mainly celebrated as one of the inspirations for the architecture of Star Wars’ Tatooine. It is unlikely that Gates’ new city will be as ambitious or aesthetically sublime as Soleri’s project. However, it also remains to be seen whether it can deal with the sustainability critique that Belmont brings to the honourable tradition of utopian ideas for planned communities or end up being mostly abandoned alongside the twenty-first-century’s fashion for so-called ‘smart cities’.