Siliconized Cities: Who Is Running Your City Now?

Siliconized cities are those transformed by technology platforms that never needed to build a single building in the neighbourhood to change it completely: the moment tech companies became the operating system of capitalism, they began to devour cities from the inside, and the pattern has one formula, the city provides the infrastructure and the company captures the value.

San Francisco is the laboratory. For decades the city of poets, hippies and immigrants, it became the place where an engineer at a large tech firm earns four or five times the average salary and tens of thousands of such people compete for the same homes, until the teacher, the nurse and the firefighter can no longer afford to live in the city they serve. The iconic image of that tech gentrification is Google's private buses with tinted windows picking up employees at public bus stops.

Platforms do not compete in the city; they compete to be the city

The key is that platforms do not compete inside the city; they compete to be the city. Uber is a private layer on top of public transport, Airbnb a private layer on top of housing, Deliveroo or DoorDash a private layer on top of neighbourhood commerce, Amazon a private layer on top of the entire shopping street. None of them owns taxis, hotels, restaurants or shops; they own the intermediation, the digital tollbooth urban life now has to pass through. Academics such as Sarah Barns call it platform urbanism; it is a city with a digital landlord, where you still live in the same place but every move pays rent to someone in California.

Housing, logistics and work: the effects on physical space

The effects on physical space are concrete. First, housing stops being housing: when a flat in central Barcelona, Lisbon or Mexico City earns three times more on Airbnb than with a long-term tenant, the whole building changes function without changing form, neighbours are replaced by rolling suitcases and the hardware store becomes a souvenir shop. Second, the street becomes logistics: every online purchase generates a trip, and cities fill with double-parked vans, riders pedalling against an algorithm's stopwatch, dark stores and ghost kitchens, storefronts closed to the public that are warehouses in disguise. The neighbourhood is no longer a place to be but the last mile of a global supply chain.

Data centres and Sidewalk Labs: the geography of siliconization

Third, and most invisible, work dissolves into the city. The platform economy created a new urban working class with no factory, no office, no schedule and almost no rights: the rider waiting for orders on the kerb, the driver sleeping in the car between trips. The whole city became their workplace, yet no place in the city belongs to them. It is the perfect paradox: there has never been so much economic activity on the street, and never has that activity left so little behind on the street. Regulation has followed slowly, from Spain's rider law to the European platform work directive of 2024.

Who owns the city's data: the real business

Siliconization also builds its own geography. The cloud is not a cloud but concrete hangars full of servers that consume electricity like mid-sized cities and enough water each day to fill Olympic pools just to stay cool; Ireland, Northern Virginia, Querétaro and Aragón compete to attract data centres with cheap land, energy and tax breaks, and the most important infrastructure of the twenty-first century is decided almost always without the neighbours finding out. When tech companies tried to design cities outright, as Google's Sidewalk Labs did in Toronto with sensors on every corner and streets that reconfigure themselves, the project collapsed in 2020 amid citizen protests over a question nobody could answer: who owns a city's data.

That question is the dark heart of the matter, because the real business of urban siliconization is not the rides, the rentals or the deliveries but the knowledge they generate: where people live, move, eat and spend, a map of the city more precise than any municipal survey, held by private companies and sold back as services. The lesson is that a city that does not govern its data, its platforms and its land is governed by them, and that the tools exist, from open data obligations and licence conditions to limits on tourist rentals and public control of digital infrastructure. Toronto said no; the answer remains open in every city where the operating system of daily life is written elsewhere.