Digital Real Estate

I.

London’s recent success as a global tech mecca clustered around internet giants’ headquarters, world-class research institutions, and start-up hotspots has been no secret in recent years. It is, in fact, regarded as an exemplar of how the suburban corporate campus model that has largely dominated the global landscape of scientific and technological innovation for the last five decades can be internalized and enmeshed within existing urban fabrics to foster economic growth and employment. Given the importance of these latter as indicators of urban success, it is no surprise that in the UK capital, and particularly since the global financial crisis of 2008, politicians, real estate developers and urban professionals alike have unequivocally embraced the shift from the suburban to the urban tech ecosystem aiding it with all kinds of incentives and reliefs (e.g. tax cuts, privileged planning procedures, etc.). Starting with former Prime Minister David Cameron’s endorsement of the Tech City Investment Organisation in 2010 (now Tech City UK) to turn a fraction of East London into a “world-leading technology cluster,” a vast quantity of initiatives led by both the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the Central government alike have been deliberately put in place to foster digital economies as primers for urban regeneration and infrastructural overhaul.1

As an industrial sector whose assets are predominantly immaterial, the impact of the so-called digital economy on governmental policy and city planning is as vast as it is overlooked—both in terms of the peculiar model of aggregation it nurtures and the infrastructural requirements it carries. This obliviousness is in part due to the heterogeneity of the sector, of which the definition is inherently fuzzy. While one may be inclined to strictly link the digital economy to tech industries and information technologies, at a governmental level the category includes components as varied as e-commerce and e-businesses (the trading of goods or services over computer networks such as the internet and its supporting infrastructure—hardware, software, telecoms) as well as life sciences and publishing and broadcasting businesses.2 Further, while we are very well accustomed to the spatial resolution of most of its constituent subsections (such as Silicon Roundabout in Old Street, the glass towers of London’s two Financial Districts, or the corporate citadels in White City and Knowledge Quarter), the powering facilities, telecommunication/storage systems and networks that make its presence in the urban fabric even possible are mostly inconspicuous. And yet, one need only to look at London’s recent urban developments and regeneration schemes to see how policy and fiber not only run parallel to one another, but also at commensurate speed.3

Ever since the 1980s, governmental measures have supported the prolific grounding of networked economies within the capital’s undersoil. As Andrew Blum explains, the establishment of Canary Wharf as one of the world’s leading clusters for global finance and the subsequent establishment of London’s Internet Exchange within the nearby Telehouse (“the Heathrow of Internet buildings”) are both contingent upon not just the government’s “zonification” processes and policies of economic deregulation, but their proximity to London’s main communications trunks beneath the nearby A13 motorway.4 This principle remains valid up until this day, such that to understand how the aforementioned, data-driven, processes are making their way within the city, it is necessary to place under scrutiny the governmental structures within which they have been bred.

Map of London’s 37 Opportunity Areas (turquoise) and Industrial Lands (yellow), as designated by the Greater London Authority.

Map of London’s designated Opportunity Areas (turquoise), Enterprise Zones (blue), Long Haul Fiber Network (black), Metro Dark Fiber Network (dashed), and major data center hubs (green). Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (2015–present), London Legacy Development Corporation (2012–present), and London Docklands Development Corporation (1981–1998) are also demarcated in red, orange, and yellow, respectively.

Map of London’s 37 Opportunity Areas (turquoise) and Industrial Lands (yellow), as designated by the Greater London Authority.

II.

Since the 2011 Localism Act and the consequent abolition of UK-wide Regional Strategies, London’s governance was subject to a series of rather seminal transformations in its mode of operation which would prove highly instrumental to the nurturing of a new urban economic model. Amongst these, the dissolution of the London Development Agency (LDA) was particularly significant in that the requirements of establishing London’s Economic Development and Environment Strategies now fell entirely in the hands of the Mayor. But the measures announced in the Localism Act had even greater implications in matters of planning, where the dissolution of regional frameworks meant that the decision making process would now be entirely subsumed in the relation between the Greater London Authority and its thirty-three local boroughs (including The City of London Corporation). In this, the GLA—a top-tier administrative body consisting of an elected mayor and assembly—would be responsible for coordinating land use planning through a strategic plan (the “London Plan”) which the boroughs—local authority districts governed by a homonymous council—would be legally bound to.

Although boroughs would have full control over submitted planning applications within their perimeters, the GLA retained power to override planning decisions made by democratically elected boroughs if they were believed to be against the interests of London as a whole.5 In essence, the GLA was given power to act as an inter-borough level of authority working within and between boroughs to drive integrated strategic planning policies through London’s fragmented and often conflictual governmental structure. Moreover, this newly gained power was buttressed by a whole other series of post-financial-crisis centralizing measures of exquisitely Thatcherite flavor. Amongst others, these provided City Hall with the possibility to define strategic “Opportunity Areas” (OAs) to drive policy and cross-borough issues that may prove contentious during the early stages of the planning processes (and thus risky for investors); the right to create trans-borough Mayoral Development Corporations run by (unelected) boards made-up of representatives from key political and business stakeholders that de facto replace local authorities for all planning matters (a revival of the 1980 Local Government Act); and the right to form Local Enterprise Partnerships between businesses, the Mayor and representatives of the boroughs to determine local economic priorities and lead economic growth.6 While sanctioning the further penetration of private interests into London’s political milieus, Local Enterprise Partnerships are all the more significant in that they can bid to create “Enterprise Zones,” wherein simplified planning procedures and business rate discounts are put in place to attract new, often international businesses.

London Legacy Development Corporation, Here East Campus, 2012–present

The strategic nature of the areas, zones and corporations formed since 2012 in relation to the growing digitization of London’s economy is rendered all the more evident when measured against two further factors: the location of Strategic Industrial Land and the city’s data infrastructure. As far as the former is concerned, the 2015 London Industrial Land Supply & Economy Study highlights a clear correlation between the localization of Opportunity Areas, the establishment of Mayoral Development Corporations and the allocation of London’s residual industrial land for non-industrial uses (a reverberation of Thatcherite policy).7 Even more interesting though is the coincidental relation between the Long Haul and Metro Dark Fiber Networks trajectories and the location of major data storage facilities and the aforementioned areas, zones and corporations, the proximity between which essentially a) affirms their instrumentality as the very veins through which the industry’s blood flows, and b) demonstrates the indispensability of data infrastructure for contemporary real estate operations. Take, for instance, two recent Mayoral Development corporations: the London Legacy Development Corporation LLDC, which crosses the East London’s boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest, has drafted a legacy plan for the site of London’s 2012 Summer Olympics, within which the Technology Cluster and Smart District is being developed by iCity, a joint venture between real estate investor Delancey and data center operator Infinity. West London’s Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation OPDC, which spans across Ealing, Brent, and Hammersmith & Fulham, is being given infrastructural carte blanche to develop ground-up strategies of smart-city technologies “within the very DNA of the forthcoming neighborhood.”8

III.

What we see with the privately managed data-driven governance apparatuses of London’s digital enclosures is the smart city standing within a line of development that began during the liberal agendas of the early 1980s. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine how, in this Thatcherism 2.0, or “smart Thatcherism,” we are already assisting in the rise of even sharper inequalities than with its analogue predecessor—inequalities determined by proximity to data infrastructure just as much as transport infrastructure.9 In parallel, recent City Hall initiatives have pointed to an increasing reliance and politicization of big data and smart systems as urban decision making proxies. 2010 saw the launch of London Datastore—a web portal run by the GLA for sharing free open data and statistics about London to the public, businesses and academia—which led to the creation of more than 200 apps and many other data driven enterprises such as the public funded Open Data Institute (ODI). In 2013, “London Infrastructure Plan 2050” sanctioned 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 saw the GLA essentially call 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. With the progressive undoing of England’s Welfare State, the implementation of these initiatives and the likely machine-aided modes of government driven by quantifiable performance values which will arise from their implementation,10 are likely to cause further splintering of local authorities’ regulatory powers over the development of the contemporary productive landscape and of the civic space more broadly.11

Map of Key Life Science Locations along the London-Stansted-Cambridge corridor. Source: LSCC

Moreover, key players in the Science and Technology sectors as much as larger political bodies are already tending to similar overarching powers of authority at the regional scale. The London Stansted Cambridge Consortium (LSCC) Growth Commission was recently established “in order to provide independent analysis and advice to raise economic potential … and set out a vision for transformational change” in a corridor spanning from Central London, through Stansted, up to Cambridge. Views of active investors in the LSCC have identified “the slow progress of Local Plans being prepared and adopted by the respective local authorities comprising the Corridor” as a key barrier to growth, “resulting in lower levels of confidence to invest in an area without an adopted strategy for future growth.”12 The challenge ahead, they argue, relies on an integrated planning framework enabling the region to compete at a global scale with established and upcoming innovation ecosystems. With reference to other areas of London where larger development corporations have superseded local planning authorities for planning matters, such as those aforementioned, the LSCC Growth Commission invokes the critical integration of metropolitan and regional planning powers to influence the concentration and distribution of growth and innovation between inner city areas and out-of-town development. If their visions were to be fulfilled, the agency of local authorities (and thus of local voters) would find itself even further weakened.

While typical top-down planning policies may not be sufficient to disrupt the polarization of growth and production given the current environment of “market realism,” what is clear is that, whether deliberately or not, the global “winner-takes-all urbanism” in its latest tech-based reincarnation is failing to confront itself with the economic and political consequences of the agglomerative and exclusive character of its spatial configurations.13 Furthermore, the case of London allows us to gauge with almost crystalline clarity the degree to which the revolutionary and democratic promises engendered by the digital “online” are, in fact, tightly knitted into the monetary frameworks, governmental means of sovereignty and infrastructural inequalities that characterized the urbanization of the free-market in the 1970s and 80s. As city administrators worldwide continue to cut long-term deals with global technology providers, it is unlikely that this model might be subverted in the long run. Open source softwares, the multiplication of ubiquitous information devices, wireless connectivity and the opportunity for city administrations to harness the potential of the continuous flow of data emitted by both citizens and cities at all times without recurring to proprietary technologies, might indeed offer concurrent solutions to the despotism of private companies in determining their and our future.14 Yet the true challenges we face today are ultimately political much more than they are technological, and that the problems brought about by the digitization of our urban landscapes cannot but be addressed without reforming the governmental and legal structures within which they are brought to bear. Whether London’s current Labor mayorship will come to terms with this reality, remains an open question.