#ciites

“Sidewalk Toronto is a joint effort by Waterfront Toronto and Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs to create a new kind of mixed-use, complete community on Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront, beginning with the creation of Quayside.

Sidewalk Toronto will combine forward-thinking urban design and new digital technology to create people-centred neighbourhoods that achieve precedent-setting levels of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.”

 —sidewalk toronto’s website

“A year ago, Canadians were treated to an announcement involving the leaders of all three levels of government gushing and fawning about an enlightened urban partnership with a foreign company whose business model is built exclusively on the principle of mass surveillance.

The most insightful comments during the public announcement came when Eric Schmidt, Google’s former executive chair, said they had realized their long-running dream for “someone to give us a city and put us in charge.” He also thanked Canadian taxpayers for paying, creating and transferring the core artificial-intelligence technology he credits for Alphabet’s success, making it the world’s third most valuable corporation. The Google parent’s past and future growth are based on the intellectual property (IP) they own and the data they control.

located just southeast of downtown toronto, the eastern waterfront contains more than 325 hectares (800 acres) of land subject to future revitalization, including quayside and the port lands.

“The 21st-century knowledge-based and data-driven economy is all about IP and data. “Smart cities” are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalizations. “Smart cities” rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool. As Sidewalk Labs’ chief executive Dan Doctoroff said: “We’re in this business to make money.” Sidewalk also wants full autonomy from city regulations so it can build without constraint.

A privately controlled “smart city” infrastructure upends traditional models of citizenship because you cannot opt out of a city or a society that practises mass surveillance. Foreign corporate interests tout new technocratic efficiencies while shrewdly occluding their unprecedented power grab. As the renowned technologist Evgeny Morozov said: “That the city is also the primary target of big tech is no accident: If these firms succeed in controlling its infrastructure, they need not to worry about much else.””

the blueprint for autonomous urbanism. by nacto, 11.2017. [pdf] 

chad and jt go to la city council to fight for house parties, 06.12.17.

“With Trump in the White House and GOP majorities in the House and Senate, we must look to cities to protect civil liberties and build progressive alternatives from the bottom up.

In Spain... in 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts in the US today: how to harness the power of new social and political movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local elections; the so-called “municipalist wager”. The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015, their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the general elections in December later that same year.

In Spain, this network of ‘rebel cities’ has been putting up some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves ‘refuge cities’ and remunicipalizing public services. US cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over the coming years.

Rebel cities in the USA

In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the US. One hundred years ago, the “sewer socialists” took over the city government of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and ran it for almost 50 years. They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the wealthy and well-connected.

More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities have introduced protections against employment discrimination based on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local minimum wages after local “Fight for 15” campaigns.

By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect. Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.

What next?

First we must push our allies who are already in office at local level, including self-identified ‘Sanders Democrats’, to use all available means to act against any attempt by the federal government to roll back civil liberties, cut services or sow division among communities...

But we also need a new generation of local leaders, particularly women and people of color, who are prepared to take the leap from protest to electoral politics. The recent announcement by Black Lives Matter activist, Nekima Levy-Pounds, that she will be standing for election as mayor of Minneapolis is an inspiring example of the kind of candidate that is needed; someone with real-world experience and an insider’s understanding of social movement politics. But the search for new local leaders needs to be scaled up so that there is a pipeline of candidates to stand for school boards, zoning boards and local councils in 2017 and beyond...

Finally, we must undertake new ways of doing politics at the local level to prove that there is an alternative to corporate lobbying, secret donors and career politics... Local candidates should open up their policy platforms to public participation, integrating demands from social movements and local residents. There is also no reason why elected officials should use only the most generous interpretation of the law to guide their conduct. In Spain, the citizen platforms drew up their own codes of ethics for their elected representatives, including salary and term limits and strict transparency requirements. By leading by example, local movements can send a very powerful message: there is another way.”