Perhaps it is impossible to decide who is at fault in the “Amazon Tells New York: Drop Dead “ melodrama. Depending on what pole you face, it’s either damnable buccaneering capitalists or empty-headed college Marxists who don’t want to help New York’s withering working class.
More instructive to UrbanTools is a story from Toronto where neither politics nor ideology can win. Not satisfied with Amazon’s place atop of the big jerks heap, Google’s parent company Alphabet is ramping up its plans for Sidewalk Labs, one of its subsidiaries that concerns itself with reimagining and re-creating cities to provide the kind of world you didn’t even know you wanted.
On the eastern waterfront of Toronto, Alphabet is setting up a city within the city, except this one will have data collection and surveillance capabilities that would put Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner” to shame.
All that Sidewalk Labs asks of Toronto for this blessing is not just data from human beings but also its perceived rightful share to future taxes and the diversion of increased land values away from the community into the pockets of Sidewalk Labs!
Perhaps I’ve read too much history, but it’s not too hard to link the society that emerged from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire – feudalism with its series of obligations by town and peasants to a lord – to what’s happening in Toronto.
Happily, citizens of Toronto are starting to realize that this is a bad deal on many levels. Taking over the functions of government, and confiscating what is created by the government (the economic rent of the land) is causing lots of backpedaling and pushback. One of the dangers that cities in places over the globe have fallen victim to the past 50 years are the demands of nearly faceless corporations that steadily work to usurp civic sovereignty and empty the public purse of the commonweal.
Awareness of the existence of economic rent of land is imperative for everyone who lives, works creates, and saves. We must prepare for many more onslaughts from shadowy entities that place the good of the community far below their stark greed.