Above photo: Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data by Ali Fard. University of Minnesota Press.
An architect and urban theorist argues that the techno-colonialism bred in Silicon Valley’s tech campuses is now being applied to cities.
And the data center boom is its latest frontier.
The fall of 2017 was a watershed moment in the evolving relationship between urbanism and technology corporations.
In September, Amazon announced a request for proposals for cities to bid to host its new North American headquarters, Amazon HQ2. In October, a new partnership was announced between Sidewalk Labs — an Alphabet/Google subsidiary — and Waterfront Toronto — a public organization charged with the administration of the redevelopment and revitalization of Toronto’s postindustrial waterfront — to develop an “innovation and development plan” for Quayside, a 12-acre site on the city’s waterfront. The partnership was called “Sidewalk Toronto.”
These two cases and their evolution represent a new and troubling dimension in the increasing dominance of cloud companies within processes of urbanization.
From Tech Campus To Urban Enclave
Physically and spatially, the urban projects of tech platforms follow strategies that have been incubated in countless campus development projects. In these projects, resources, talent, and any infrastructural bounty that may come with them are separated from the larger context of the city. This separationist ideal is coded into the physical and urban DNA of tech corporations.
In advancing their neoliberal agendas, the type of urbanism promoted by the cloud seamlessly combines utopian imaginaries, frontier ideologies, and “extrastatecraft” strategies (a la Keller Easterling) to generate enclaves of privilege separated from the larger urban realm. This cloud urbanism carries with it the escapist and separationist ideals coded into the campus morphology.
The core urban strategies of the cloud first take shape in the spatial experimentations of the campuses and headquarters of tech companies. Designed by “starchitects” like Norman Foster (Apple), Frank Gehry (Facebook), or Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick (Google), these corporate campuses have become the horizontal monuments of the contemporary information economy.
Coupled with the culturally integrated products they produce and the libertarian ideologies they advance, contemporary technology companies have transformed from corporations to pseudo-cultural institutions. Yet, the environments in which these ideals develop are increasingly inward-looking.
As the architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange maintains, the urbanism of tech campuses — while borrowing from urban and suburban tropes to recreate the idealized image of lively, accessible, green urban environments — produces isolated islands securitized behind fences and corporate badges.
This smoothing of space within tech campuses has extended beyond their walls, where social and political tensions are at their highest in decades. Formed within the relative vacuum of enclaves, the “best practice” models and foundational ideologies of tech campuses are subsequently exported globally and seep into the general psyche, masquerading as innovative and novel spatial forms that produce equally innovative results.
Often packaged as developmental strategies, the continual paraphrasing of the most pronounced urban morphologies of Silicon Valley (such as the campus or the techno-industrial park) in the contested geographies of Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East has produced emerging forms of territorial expansion for tech platforms.
The highly repeatable nature of this enclave urbanism, which is mostly devoid of contextual relationships, and its deployment in multiple contexts with varied cultural, social, and environmental dynamics, effectively generates a capsular geography of information.
Similar to the Disneyfication of suburban environments and the emergence of gated communities in the second half of the 20th century, the capsular urban logic of the informational enclave can be representative of the type of development we can expect over the next few decades at the intersection of data, communication technologies, and urban processes.
This condition places the majority of emphasis on the increasingly interwoven global networks of information, communication, capital, and commerce on the one hand, and the capsular logic of enclaves of high infrastructural and technological accessibility and exclusionary zones of leisure, business, and living on the other hand, leading to a “smoothing” or “pacification” of whatever lies in between.
In this framework, the enclave emerges as less a space of exception and more the norm. The separationist ideals of the enclave are increasingly informing the urban strategies of tech platforms as they radically expand their territorial claim over space and geography.
City as a platform
These ideals were clearly at work in Sidewalk Toronto. Even before any plans were presented, critics and social activists were concerned about the overreach this kind of partnership would entail.
Sidewalk Toronto released its long-awaited Master Innovation and Development Plan in May 2019. On the surface, it would appear that through notions of flexibility, spatial dynamism, and adaptability, mediated through a “digital layer” of sensors and enabled by inexpensive prefabricated materials, Sidewalk was essentially promoting the democratization of urban space.
However, the kind of spatial democratization proposed was more likely to mean freedom from regulatory burdens imposed by zoning and oversight, rather than the democratization of ownership and control. Sidewalk’s strategies tended to follow typical neoliberal trends in privatizing urban spaces and the public realm.
Even though no land may have actually changed hands between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, the data extractive apparatus and the mechanisms of control embedded within the “digital layer” of the project would ensure a high level of exclusivity and surveillance for the real-estate investments that would ultimately fund the neighborhood’s technological experimentations in applied behavioral modeling and management.
Even Dan Doctoroff, the then CEO of Sidewalk Labs, had repeatedly said that their Toronto venture was “primarily a real estate play.” Hence, even the underlying business model of Sidewalk’s proposal was essentially based on tried-and-true strategies of neoliberal urbanism, manifested in the extraction of resources (in this case, urban and personal data) and grounding of the dynamism of capital within exclusionary zones of real estate investment
In a sort of cybernetic feedback loop, one ensures and catalyzes the other, securitized by a set of extractive surveillance technologies masquerading as urban services. This was clear in Sidewalk’s plan, which offered to fund many of the infrastructural components of the plan and its expansion into the rest of the Port Lands through the “patient capital” of its parent company, Alphabet.
This would beholden the city and its public infrastructure to a tech company with a proven record of ignoring or downplaying regulatory frames as long as it could generate value from its data extractive operations.
Its corporate structure means that it is ultimately responsible to its shareholders, not the public for which it was planning the city of the future. The funding schemes and the flexible proposals of the development plan, in addition to providing a proving ground for the company to test out the applicability of its products and services, were clearly directed toward market dynamics.
Steeped in neoliberal urbanism, Sidewalk’s spatial frames would “remain flexible over the course of its lifecycle, accommodating a radical mix of uses (such as residential, retail, making, office, hospitality and parking) that can respond quickly to market demand.”
As the writer Evgeny Morozov has observed in The Guardian, in cities around the world, one-dimensional responses to “market demand” have increasingly catalyzed the privatization of public space and have bolstered neoliberal processes of urbanization: “Decisions are no longer taken in the political realm but are delegated to asset managers, private equity groups, and investment banks that flock to real estate and infrastructure searching for stable and decent returns. Google Urbanism would not reverse this trend, it would accelerate it.”
In the face of mounting criticism around the project, Toronto was hesitant to hand over a larger portion of the city’s eastern waterfront to Sidewalk. This, coupled with the dwindling influence of Larry Page on the day-to-day operations of Alphabet after stepping down as CEO at the end of 2019 and the subsequent tightening of the company’s fiscal commitments, meant that Alphabet was less interested in the Quayside project if it couldn’t guarantee a return on its investment through an increasing stake in the development of the Port Lands.
On May 7, 2020, amid the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Quayside project was canceled. At the time, Doctoroff cited the “unprecedented economic uncertainty” of the pandemic as the main reason for their decision not to pursue the project any further. Ironically, this is perhaps the clearest case against this kind of partnership. Sidewalk’s reason for abandoning the project, fiscal uncertainty due to the pandemic, is precisely the type of increasingly common dynamic that makes large, risk-averse tech corporations that are only responsible to their shareholders the worst stewards of the public good and the least trustworthy managers of public urban systems.
As the case of Sidewalk Toronto makes it abundantly clear, the “test-bed urbanism” of tech platforms is extremely one-dimensional. The smooth and frictionless version of urbanism that tech espouses externalizes the multitude of forces that contribute to urban environments.
Instead of embracing friction, tension, difference, transgression, and messiness as constitutive elements of urbanization, in Sidewalk’s plans they are treated as wrinkles in the system that need to be ironed out. In understanding and acting on the city as a platform, the strategies of cloud urbanism perpetuate techno-positivist ideals of technology and the centralized management and control of public assets and systems. Urbanism mediated by the cloud entails uniformity and conformity.
Urban techno-colonization
In various literature and marketing material, and indeed within the development plan, Sidewalk Labs presented the bridging of “the divide between urbanists and technologists” as one of its most radical aims. Here, a selective line of thinking seems to conveniently bypass the various moments in history in which such a merger took place between the ideals of technologists and urbanists.
The disciplinary agency of urban planning was initially formed and then opportunistically sustained at the turn of the 20th century through a similar convergence of interest between technologists and urban thinkers. Often packaged as reformist calls to arms aimed at alleviating the ills of the city, these convergences have effectively left their mark on cities and the practices of urban planning and management, but not always positively.
Rather than a radical new convergence, Sidewalk’s project and other urban projects of tech should be understood as increasingly hostile colonization of urbanization through technology.
Amazon and Google’s urban moves represent a simultaneous evolution of neo-cybernetic urbanism and the dissolution of public city planning, management, and discourse. The agency of the new breed of cloud urbanists manifests in the ultimate privatization, control, and management of cities bit by bit.
Softer at first but increasingly forceful, the centralizing ethos of the cloud inflicts communities, neighborhoods, cities, and regions and reorganizes them through its controlled, exclusionary, and extractive logic. In parallel, the separatist turn in Silicon Valley represents a new wave of ideologically aligned techno-colonizers in search of new frontiers, away from government scrutiny and democratic oversight.
The marriage between these secessionist ideologies and the incentivized urbanism of tech enclaves will likely result in more exclusive zones of “innovation,” further separation from the context they are so dependent upon, and partial freedom from regulatory mechanisms of oversight, taxation, and democratic governance.
From outer space to oceans, the tech elite has formed a renewed interest in the libertarian potential of new colonies outside the reach of the limiting bounds of terrestrial regulatory mechanisms.
While the frontier status of outer space and the largely uninhabited oceans is perhaps clearer, cities and urbanization, now faced with a renewed sense of crisis, are beginning to emerge as frontiers for technological colonization once again.
If the “smart city” represents the discursive translation of the tech’s dream of commanding frictionless urban environments, cloud urbanism represents its ultimate aim. Cloud urbanism, extending on the neoliberal logic of platform capitalism, internalizes notions of enclosure, centralization, and monopolization.
Evolving beyond the initial aims of smart cities, through cloud urbanism, the city — or urbanism in general — is bounded, standardized, packaged, controlled, branded, marketed, and entirely commoditized.
Adapted from Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data by Ali Fard. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
