INURA reflects on Luxembourg - Results of a feedback session with INURA

in INURA Bulletin (2023), 33

Imagining post-war reconstruction fro resilience Kyiv with INURA

Report (2023)

Vertical (sub)urbanization in Zurich’s northeast: The Valley along the Glatt as both a metaphor and mediating structural element

in Aguiar, Luis; Senese, Donna; French, Diana (Eds.) The Elgar Companion to Valleys: Social, Economic and Cultural Perspectives (2023)

The visible showcase and the hidden back end of urban development led by Amazon and Google

Presentation (2022)

Policy failure revisited: The post-political urban development strategies of large digital corporations

Presentation (2022)

Introducing Luxembourg and reflecting on framework conditions and contradictions in urban governance

Presentation (2022)

Four reasons why data centers matter, five implications of their social spatial distribution, one graphic to visualize them

in Environment and Planning A (2022)

Data centers constitute a new kind of telecommunications infrastructure that demands attention for four reasons. Data centers are under-examined in the social sciences literature, urban studies, in ... [more ▼]

Data centers constitute a new kind of telecommunications infrastructure that demands attention for four reasons. Data centers are under-examined in the social sciences literature, urban studies, in particular. Data centers present an under explored geography of cyberworlds. Large digital corporations such as Amazon or Google are expanding their role in urban infrastructural development (such as data centers), and it is necessary to research and explain this phenomenon. Data centers present challenges of urban governance. The graphic provided here visualizes the social spatial distribution of data centers in the Washington Metropolitan Area. There are four implications of their social spatial distribution. Data centers are concentrated in metropolitan areas. Data centers have a high demand for energy and water, competing with local residents for these resources. The DC industry is a state-led niche economy. The uneven distribution of data centers can invoke inter-county competition for tax revenue, in addition to access to the water, power, and land resources that data centers require. The scale of the problem is unknown because the input needs of many data centers are not publicly available. [less ▲]

The post-political urban governance of smart city development in Toronto: Looking at Sidewalk Labs

Presentation (2021)

Background on Urban and Regional Planning

in Brinkmann, R. (Ed.) . In: Brinkmann R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability (2021)

Sustainable development has been a subject of urban planning for three decades now. Planners and practitioners now have a wealth of materials, catalogues, readers, and textbooks at their disposal that ... [more ▼]

Sustainable development has been a subject of urban planning for three decades now. Planners and practitioners now have a wealth of materials, catalogues, readers, and textbooks at their disposal that discuss local problems and practices. The problem, however, is that sustainable development is a very broad and often contradictory concept that is difficult to implement, and has since become a vector for market-led, exclusionary, urban development and planning. Little progress has been achieved, especially in regard to social equality. At the time of this writing, the global pandemic was also unfolding, which demanded priorities in health care on one hand and opened up new questions about sustainable development on the other. If sustainability and post-pandemic planning (for sustainability) is to be taken seriously, it is imperative to identify, reassert, and re-center social injustices in the productive processes that generate urban and regional spaces. There is a risk that social polarization will widen further still and that it too will be market-led as governments struggle with the crisis. Practitioners need to be careful about how people are included and can benefit from planning practice. There is inspiration from planning theory. Knowledge of public interest, differing epistemologies and ontologies, problems of racism and class, and a revival of kindness in political democratic are some ideas that publicly funded urban and regional planning offices can promote and assert – in the interests of sustainability. [less ▲]

Policy failure in urban governance: the case of large digital corporations

Presentation (2021)

This paper draws upon the branch of urban studies literature known as policy mobilities (McCann 2011) and, particularly, policy failure (Temenos & Lauermann 2020) to understand the strategic practices of ... [more ▼]

This paper draws upon the branch of urban studies literature known as policy mobilities (McCann 2011) and, particularly, policy failure (Temenos & Lauermann 2020) to understand the strategic practices of large digital corporations (LDCs) in urban development. While it is a relatively new phenomenon that LDCs are appearing as important actors in the field of urban development, their role has moved beyond being simply the producers of new technological products that supposedly make cities more efficient, green and smart. They are, for example, in the background, forging their central position in the functioning of cities by taking up space (land, water, bodies) for so-called essential urban infrastructures such as data centers (Carr 2021) needed to support their technologies. At the same time, they are also driving the production of what we refer to as their symbolic spaces of LDC-style digital cities. These are Amazon’s HQ2 and the digital city that was proposed by Sidewalk Labs Toronto (daughter firm of Alphabet Inc.), projects that epitomised both their importance in the field and the height of their technological innovation. Yet, striking about these cases is that, with the exception of the HQ2 in Arlington, these projects never materialized. In this paper, we argue that this was not a coincidence. Rather, both Amazon and Alphabet effectively mobilized a strategy of policy-making that has recently received attention in the urban studies literature: policy failure (Lovell 2017; Temenos & Lauermann 2020). Viewing these cases through the lens of policy failure shows that LDC-led digital cities is not so much about producing flashy cities equipped with avant-garde technologies as it is about endorsing a post-political mode of urban governance that drains public institutions of time and resources and reconfigures state-society relations. This is a cautionary tale for practitioners, who need to understand and watch out for the flags of this disingenuous behaviour. [less ▲]