The Smooth City, The Smart City and the Capture of the Urban Commons by Big Tech

For a long time, cities like Berlin have been refuges for the vulnerable, oppressed and excluded in society. Whether you were someone who felt like a misfit in a small town, left your home country for economic or political reasons, or simply wanted some combination of anonymity and community, the city gave you a place to be yourself.

But this quality of cities that we once took for granted, the way that they are fundamentally open and democratic spaces, is now under threat. Not by so-called terrorists, but by an unholy union of real estate developers and tech bros.

The agenda? Capturing the urban commons. It’s happening through a pincer movement of cultural flattening on one hand along with an AI-boosted form of command and control on the other. Just as the community-managed spaces of the countryside were taken over by private landowners ahead of the industrial revolution, so too are the most diverse parts of cities now being land-grabbed for the purposes of king-making and capital.

Why is this happening? And what can we do about it? In part 1 of this essay, we’ll look at the pincer movement of urban capture. In part 2, we’ll consider some possible modes of response.

The first half of the pincer movement is the smooth city: Dutch architect Rene Boer’s term for the cultural flattening he has observed in Amsterdam and London in recent years, turning once-vibrant parts of those cities into consumer dead zones. Here’s how it works: As wealthy residents and investors increasingly discover cities as canvases for their own self-expression, they demand the city adapt to them, rather than the other way around. In particular, they require that the basic X-factor of encountering other people be made safe and predictable through a limited range of interaction. Though these interactions are usually scripted forms of consumption —the flattery of shopping, the selfie-soliloquy of social media, or app-based food delivery or transportation — the larger purpose is to ensure the privileged person’s comfort. No graffiti or trash must be visible; no homeless people, poor people or indeed any people whose bodies do not conform to dominant norms of gender or class; no political messaging allowed; and certainly nothing “ethnic” unless it adds a token pop of colour. The urban space becomes a carefully curated stage-set for the fantasy of a perfect professional life.

Boer uses the phrase smooth city as an umbrella term for the way all of these trends come together. First, the smooth city is characterised by its repellent and/or shiny surfaces, along with its preponderance of windows and glowing screens. Second, it is smooth by virtue of being sealed off and resistant to influence or intervention by ordinary citizens — unlike the porosity of the traditional city. Finally, the smooth city represents a landscape devoid of social frictions. It is the urban counterpart to the permanent pursuit of seamless processes in tech.

And this shared obsession with removing friction is not a coincidence. The pursuit of seamless processes is part of what has given rise to the so-called “smart city”. The standard narrative around the smart city is hand-waving about modernising infrastructure and helping citizens access public services, but in practice it is the other half of the pincer movement aimed at enclosing the urban commons.

The smart city’s mechanisms of large-scale data harvesting and AI-driven surveillance underpin the rise of the smooth city (especially through the disproportional targeting of people of colour, political dissidents and the poor), and yet its agenda is broader. The smart city turns the physical city, its inhabitants and their lives into data. This is the long-term play for AI. Whereas algorithms and machine learning are already being used for facial recognition in many countries, including Germany, the real promise of AI for total political control is its ability to world-model every aspect of a society, from its geographical footprint to the inner lives of its citizens. (Berlin uses the term “digital twin” for its version of the city rendered as data.) This allows for forms of algorithmic governance that already have probabilities of resistance baked in. In other words, the old democratic conversation of government action->citizen reaction won’t happen in the same way anymore, or maybe not at all. Those in power won’t have to wait to see what their opponents do; they will be able to neutralise them swiftly, predictively – before they step foot outside or even post a tweet.

This shift to stealth mode is not only one of the goals of urban capture, but already its modus operandi. Whereas the struggle over the rural commons happened in public over several centuries, stirring collective protests small and large from the displaced, the capture of the urban commons in our time is happening under the radar. It’s happening inside conference rooms, among technocrats, and doesn’t register as a violent takeover. The smart city is marketed like a software upgrade. The smooth city claims we need safe spaces to shop. Both are part of the larger narrative of inevitability, a story woven around political choices which are often technologically determined. The narrative of inevitability says “this is the natural order of things, they cannot be otherwise”.

But this is just a story. The smooth city and the smart city are not destiny. And in a city like Berlin that has so much friction and porosity, so much that makes it both a refuge as well as a laboratory of social experimentation, we can certainly come up with better alternatives. In part 2 of this essay, we’ll look at some of these.