Very pleased to announce that Dr Constance Carr and Prof Markus Hesse have been awarded the Best Paper Award 2020 for the RSA eZine Regions for their paper ‘Sidewalk Labs closed down – whither Google’s smart city?’. Congratulations!
Summary of the articleSidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., claimed it would the best digital city the world had ever seen, along Toronto’s waterfront on a property that became known as Quayside. However, they set up shop in a city whose politics they barely understood and land use procedures even less. Apparently, Alphabet believed that if you make deals with big government, local politics just fall in line. No one warned them about the idiosyncrasies of urban development in general and the nitty-gritty details of land-use development and planning in Toronto in particular. Meanwhile, the Canadian government appeared to have no idea what they were getting into, and seem to spend much of its time scrambling to both profit from the deal and save face. In the end, Alphabet Inc. abandoned the project because Toronto was not a priority in times of Corona, nor was the project resilient against crises. The sociopolitical dimensions of tech-cities, smart cities and/or digital cities thus need better understanding and critical reflection. Smart cities are not simply about developing gadgets to set free across urban landscapes. Tech alone cannot save cities.
Read more about the paper here.
About the authors
Constance Carr is a Senior Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg, a Visiting Scholar at the CITY Institute, York University, and Invited Faculty at Sciences Po. Her research focusses on the contradictions of market-led sustainable development practices with respect to infrastructure, digitalization and corporatization of cities. She has published in Regional Studies, Planning Theory & Practice, European Planning Studies, Journal of Transport Geography, and Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.
Markus Hesse is a professor of urban studies at the University of Luxembourg, with an academic background in geography and spatial planning. A particular subject of his research interest has been the interplay of spaces and flows (for example in what is called ‘relational cities’), questions of urban and city-regional governance, and also the science-policy interface.
About the prize
The Editorial Board of Regional Studies acknowledge the achievements of its authors with the annual Best Paper Award. The purpose of this award program is to identify innovative research in city, community, urban or regional planning that is relevant to questions related to entrepreneurs and their firms as well as to relevant practitioners and policymakers. The award is sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.