#kubrak

ON VERTICAL ZONING / Anastasia Kubrak + Sander Manse

Today, technologies are mainly implemented / instrumentalized by platform economies (serving the big capital of tech) → acquiring a tight grip on the way our cities work. The main strategy here is to capitalize on the information that is being generated by the augmented city. (They capitalize on patterns of our movements, monetizing the extracted data, or the so-called ‘behavior surplus’ generated by mechanisms of surveillance.)

Over the past few years the city has quickly become a mesh of hectic laws and virtual borders.

Notion that one physical location → virtually occupied by multiple zones, different actors on a vertical axis.

The process of urban zoning → traditionally defined as dividing topographically defined areas into zones (e.g. residential, industrial) in which certain land uses are permitted or prohibited by a political body. → As a result of technological augmentation, zoning today is not limited to regulations on building heights, but extends to new, intangible spaces.

New types of Zones, or vertical spaces → allow digital behemoth corporations to quickly exploit them as new markets and colonize the virtual ground outside of traditional jurisdictions, taking advantage of grey areas in the law.

The business model of the platform is based on: 

the principles of militant growth over profit

extraction and aggravation of free user data, 

and a hostile approach towards laws and legislation. 

By implementing new services without consent, by default, platforms leave citizens and governments to opt out or object their effects retrospectively.

But what is life like in the privatized city, structured by this new urban zoning? →  How can we benefit as citizens from the increase in sensing technologies, remote data-crunching algorithms, leaching geolocation trackers and parasite mapping interfaces?

Main question → Can the imposed verticality of platform capitalism by some means enrich the surface of the city, and not just exploit it?

Maybe our cities deserve a truly augmented reality → reality in which value generated within urban space actually benefits its inhabitants, and is therefore ‘augmented’ in the sense of increased / made greater...

Is it possible to consider the extension of zoning not only as an issue, but also as a solution, a way to create room for fairer, more social alternatives? Can we imagine the sprawling of augmented zones today, still of accidental nature, being utilized or artificially designed for purposes other than serving capital?

Free Trade Zones → Originally developed for purposes of warehousing and shipping, the early free trade zones, sprawling between 1500 and 1930s, were located along major trade routes. Further spreading around airports, manufacturing centers and container ports from the 1950s to 1970s, or offshore financial districts and office parks in the 90s, zones eventually formed mini-cities and even developed into megapolises on their own, as was the case with Shenzhen (established as China’s first SEZ in 1980, growing from 30.000 to an estimated 18 million inhabitants in the following decades).

The EPZ was initiated in the mid-twentieth-century as an economical accelerator that could help developing countries to enter the global market. But ‘rather than dissolving into the domestic economy, as was originally intended, the EPZ absorbed more and more of that economy into the enclave’. Today these zone-projects are increasingly built from scratch outside of existing cities, on the outskirts of state territories and even on reclaimed isles off the mainland. The Zone as an island provides an ideal blank canvas, clean slates for extralegal experiments.

The Zone → does not necessarily encapsulate an existing part of a city or a social community, it prefers to create new land, and to bring in new citizens to populate it.

Notion that from door handles to sensors, this ‘city in a box’ can be purchased as one singular item and reproduced anywhere in the world, becoming a spatial product on its own. Prime example of this type of city is Songdo. 

The technologically enhanced city promises a life of luxury, while simultaneously turning the zone into a gated community. In a place devised for economic activity and designed to generate capital, its inhabitants might be assessed on their added value to the city. This brand new city of the future, in a box, won’t be for everyone. 

“When new Zones are created as clean slates, tech companies quickly move in to develop the city’s infrastructure, introducing hardware and software that circumstantially pushes certain people out and helps to enforce the borders.”

Gated urban enclaves also proliferate within our ‘normal’ cities, perforating through the existing social fabric. Privatization of urban landscape affects our spatial rights, such as simply the right of passage. But how do these acts of exclusion happen in cities dominated by the logic of platform capitalism? What happens when more tools become available to scan, analyze and reject citizens on the basis of their citizenship or credit score? Accurate user profiles come in handy when security is automated in urban space: surveillance induced by smart technologies, from electronic checkpoints to geofencing, can amplify more exclusion.

“This tendency becomes clearly visible with Facebook being able to allow for indirect urban discrimination through targeted advertising. This is triggered by Facebook’s ability to exclude entire social groups from seeing certain ads based on their user profile, so that upscale housing-related ads might be hidden from them, making it harder for them to leave poorer neighborhoods. Meanwhile Uber is charging customers based on the prediction of their wealth, varying prices for rides between richer and poorer areas. This speculation on value enabled by the aggregation of massive amounts of data crystallizes new forms of information inequality in which platforms observe users through a one-way mirror.”

The Zone emerges from special legislation for finance, and subsequently also attracts tech giants for reasons other than merely tax holiday. This is not surprising → Silicon Valley has long been nurturing the libertarian dream of a lawless laboratory, an island outside of territorial waters, beyond the traditional nation-state jurisdiction. A Burning Man-like environment for new technologies, “a safe place to try out new things and figure out the effect on society”, as recurrently articulated by Larry Page... 

Notion that the principle or promise of flexible citizenship is that there is a Zone for each of us, without exception

So if Seasteading is the ultimate liberal, capitalist utopia, what could be its social and more inclusive counterpart? And if there could be a test-site not for the rich technological libertarians, but for a more inclusive society, could that also be mapped onto existing cities instead of having to seek liberation in endless variations of offshore enclaves?

Vertical zoning → allows such exceptions to be located anywhere, granting users access to different regimes inside existing cities, without the requirement to physically move to a different location.

We need to imagine a type of counter-spaces that could be mapped on top of actual cities and profit from the temporary nature of new spatial zoning. The vertical aspect of this other sort of zone could enhance its elasticity, allowing it to change its shape and size according to circumstances. Elastic zones: fleeting, flexible and stackable → Could a meta-economic level of planning strategically transform the city, reinforcing governmental control and enabling measures against a Cisco, Amazon or Google monopoly on the digital infrastructure?

This ethereal urban density of Kijkduin relied on legal action and adjustments in the geo-spatial coding in the software: the creation of a No-Pokémon Go-Zone.

If platform economies take the city as a hostage, governmental bodies of the city can seek how to counter privatization on material grounds. The notorious Kremlin’s GPS spoofing fence sends false coordinates to any navigational app within the city center, thereby also disrupting the operation of Uber and Google Maps.

Following the example of Free Economic Zones, democratic bodies could gain control over the city again by artificially constructing such spaces of exception. Imagine rigorous cases of hard-line zoning such as geofenced Uber-free Zones, concealed neighborhoods on Airbnb, areas secured from data-mining or user-profile-extraction.

Can we think of more subtle examples of zoning that do not trigger new partitions in public space? Verticality can provide multiple options and platforms for one geolocation. Zones can be stacked on top of other zones, truly augmenting reality – adding onto what is already there. 

“The platform economy extracts capital from the behavioral patterns of citizens in public space. What if physical zoning could allow citizens to gain agency over the systems of data extraction? GoogleUrbanism proposes a model which makes the added platform value, produced by – in this case – Google, flow back into the public space where the value is ‘mined’. This happens through exclusive licenses sold by the municipalities that allow companies to extract data from certain locations, forcing them to reinvest part of their profits in the maintenance of public space. Cities currently may not have a leverage to enforce such a platform/citizen partnership with Google, but they might get hold of their streets again by implementing and testing different kinds of legislation that bring forth new mechanisms of value creation.” (GU)

To prevent a total Songdo-like smart technology takeover, new urban zoning might enable citizens to self-organize and provide services themselves. The ideal utopian platform would be owned and controlled by its users, serving as a cooperative service where everyone is able to invest and everybody benefits. But building such a model from the ground up can be problematic (see platform co-ops such as the Green Taxi Cooperative), and gaining leverage through user numbers is difficult due to a lack of resources and the network effect. After all, the platform is only valuable to its users if enough people join in. Therefore we can think about a more practical, middle ground approach, utilizing existing corporate platforms and the network they provide. Even though the platform still profits off the user’s activity, the user begins to extract new, unintended value from its operation, exploring alternative social functions of augmented urbanity.

What characterizes this self-regulated hybrid space is that it offers entrance and exit by choice

Notion of “Vertical Futures”

In the future, we can imagine this soft zoning might offer counter-mechanisms that enable citizens to take action, utilizing the same tools and methods that generate so much value for the tech giants.

Taking action within the context of vertical zoning can be translated as a shift:

... from being approached as a user – one who benefits from the easiness and luxuries of the platform (and surrenders to its monopolistic tendencies) 

...to being approached as a citizen – one who is politically empowered and bears legal rights to demand alternative models. 

Political bodies can enhance citizenship through vertical zoning, repelling the current smart-city dogma based on information exploitation and the uneven nature of the user-platform relationship.