Digital Real Estate

To name a few: the London Legacy Development Corporation appointed iCity, a 2012 joint venture between real estate investor Delancey and data center operator Infinity to redevelop a part of the Olympic Park into the UK’s largest Technology Center and Smart district; the 2016 TMRW Technology Hub in the borough of Croydon which was born supported by dedicated Regeneration and Enterprise Funding, tax reliefs and a rent and rate free period from the local council; City Hall’s 2010 London Datastore, a web portal run by the GLA for sharing free open data and statistics about London with the public, businesses and academia leading to the creation of more than 200 apps and many other data driven enterprises such as the public funded Open Data Institute (ODI); the 2013 “London Infrastructure Plan 2050” and the birth of the Smart London Board, through which a group of leading academics, businesses and entrepreneurs currently consult with and assist the Mayor on how to fully integrate smart technologies within the city’s infrastructure; the 2016 “Data for London. A City Data Strategy” publication in which the GLA essentially calls for a radical process of data liberalization, not only of open data (as had occurred in 2010) but also private, commercial, sensory and crowd-sourced data to foster further innovation in both the business sector and in city governance. This latter strategy is underway of implementation in the current Opportunity Area (OA) and former industrial site of Old Oak and Park Royal where, by commission of the homonymous Development Corporation, a preliminary “Smart Strategy” was delineated by the Hypercat consortium to “embed smart city technology and approaches within the very DNA of the forthcoming neighborhood.”

According to a report commissioned from SQW and Trampoline Systems, there are 90,000 science and technology (S&T) businesses in London that employ approximately 700,000 people. The report also highlights the capital's fifty incubators, accelerators and innovation centers that have developed over recent years. It also identifies the significance of London's universities and the presence of major teaching hospitals and academic health science centers.

By fiber we mean the metropolitan fiber optic networks through which data travels.

Andrew Blum, Tubes (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2012), 189-197.

For instance, Mayor B. Johnson submitted the order that any “development which comprises or includes the erection of a building or buildings ... (c) ... outside Central London and with a total floorspace of more than 15,000 square meters,” and any “development which comprises or includes the erection of a building of...(c)...more than 30 meters high and is outside the City of London” should be submitted to the GLA for assessment.

“The London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP) is the local enterprise partnership for London. The LEAP brings entrepreneurs and business together with the Mayoralty and London Councils to identify strategic actions to support and lead economic growth and job creation in the capital.” See ➝.

While residential property values in East London have exponentially risen, market pressures to develop London’s stock of land have radically modified the urban ecosystem into a residential mono-culture, polarized between high growth areas in inner London and sprawling warehouse development in outer boroughs. An attempt by the GLA to challenge this monoculture affirming the growing demands in data storage and logistics is its consideration to implement land use categories dedicated to “Storage and Distribution” upon Strategic Industrial Land sites. In the Town and Country Planning use classes, ‘storage and distribution’ falls under the category B8 which includes clean-tech processes such as data storage facilities and “mid-tech” buildings—i.e. hybrid warehouses and office space.

This is currently one of the largest regeneration projects in the whole of the UK counting a total of over 650 hectares in footprint, the provision of 55,000 jobs and an expected development of 24,000 homes. It also amounts to the largest industrial land in greater London and the only site HS2 and Crossrail intersect. The OPDC board includes bodies as disparate as the Ealing Council, Network Rail, Brent Council, Hammersmith and Fulham Council, Park Royal Business Group, Imperial College London, Outer London Commission, High Speed 2, Residents Association. The area’s Smart Strategy has been drafted by the Development Corporation in collaboration with Hypercat, a not for profit organization driving secure and interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) for industry and cities. See ➝. In both instances, Long Haul and Dark Fiber networks have been designed to loop within their boundaries, ensuring high speed connectivity to future businesses and data storage facilities.[footnote Within London, Long Haul Networks refer to dedicated bandwidth services across Pan European fibre cables offered from network owners and operators (such as EUnetworks, Venus, Interoute) to businesses in need of exchanging data across Europe at low latency and with reliable connectivity (ie finance and media). Metro Dark Fibre Networks refer to metropolitan “dark” or “unlit” fibre cables networks (ie not yet occupied) that can be leased in their entirety to a single business or organisation to guarantee full control, speed and scalability of their private data network.

SQW “Mapping London’s Science and Technology Sectors” (2015), ➝, highlights how the processes of clustering (co-location of similar businesses) and agglomeration (spatial proximity of different factors such as connectivity, access to finance and cross-sectoral fertilization) at the very foundation of London’s successful integration of the digital economy within its city-space is further increasing the capital’s chronic issues of high housing costs, transport congestion and inequality, in turn described as key limits to future growth and socio-economic integration. This dilemma is further exemplified by two key findings extracted from the SQW report: the first one relates to employment throughout London across the last ten years and shows that while jobs in “digital technologies” increased by 29%, the number in “other scientific/technological manufacture” decreased by 45% signaling the decline of urban manufacturing sectors and the consolidation of digitally enabled businesses with a skilled workforce. The second one considers employment distribution by sector across London’s geography and shows that while technology jobs increased by 29% in Inner London, employment within the same sectors decreased by 6% in Outer London Boroughs. Geographical differences within London’s boundaries are even spikier if considering the “digital technologies” sector, which saw a 53% increase in Inner London (City of London, Camden, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth, and Westminster) and a fall of 4% in Outer London (Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Brent, Bromley, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Redbridge, Richmond upon Thames, Sutton and Waltham Forest).

Addressing London’s future City Data Market, the Greater London Authority’s lead officer on the Smart Cities Agenda Andrew Collinge has declared: “We want to make it abundantly clear that this City Hall does not have the expertise and indeed resources to tackle the issues – from data security to privacy to monetization and harmonization – thrown up by our City Data Strategy. We doubt anyone does. Finding those answers means adopting a collaborative and wholly open approach with business, academia and Londoners – anyone who possesses data talent. We firmly believe though that we are taking a step in the right direction. We are innovating by giving a deterministic focus on using city data to pursue (market) opportunities that equate to more than the demand we can induce through plain procurement. In a new definition of City Data, we are giving extra focus to what sort of data, and whose data should be used – either open if we can but in a secure shared environment if needs be – in pursuit of answering city challenges. Our work on city data and ‘smart’ is changing the way that London’s government sees technology as part of the solution for the city’s challenges. There is a high likelihood that the new Mayor will appoint a Chief Digital Officer to promote new technology solutions and to make data work to maximum effect across the critical policy areas of housing, transport, cybercrime, and the environment.” See ➝.

If one were to extend the concept of splintering urbanism—described by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, in Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001) as “the fragmentation of the social and material fabric of cities caused by the relegation of urban infrastructure networks and the mobilities they support”—to today’s data deluge we would notice how the multiplication of ubiquitous information devices (smart phones, Internet of Things) and wireless connectivity (4G, 5G) is contributing to the creation of a new form of infrastructure that corresponds to the continuous and unstructured flow of data emitted by cities at all times.

Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners, London Stansted Cambridge Corridor Growth Commission: Understanding Potential (London: 2016).

cf. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class and What We Can Do about It (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2016).

See the work of Mara Balestrini (Ideas for Change) as technology strategist for the city of Barcelona, ➝.