Amazon HQ2 brought out huge concessions from cities?and little effort to rein in tech?s power 2018 was the year that big tech firms lost our trust?if they ever truly had it in the first place. From Google?s debate over building a search engine for China to Facebook?s cascading series of scandals, data breaches, and opposition research against critics, any notion that the giants of Silicon Valley were somehow different than past corporate titans has been obliterated.
So why won?t cities stop doing everything they can to gain their favor" In short: jobs. Despite important developments in transportation, climate change policy, and equity that potentially have far greater long-term consequences, this year?s biggest event in urbanism, by far, was Amazon?s beauty pageant of a corporate location search. Alternately called an ?urbanist Super Bowl? and a ?contest of debasement,? the Amazon HQ2 contest found mayors across the country eager to play along in a campaign that extracted billions in subsidies for an already colossal company. The contest reached its apex in New York City, one of the two so-called winners. Governor Andrew ?Amazon? Cuomo, who promised to rename a body of water the Amazon River, courted the trillion-dollar company with a bid document that bastardized one of the city?s most proud graphic symbols.
If ?I Amazon New York City? is the response that arguably the country?s most economically diverse city has when a tech titan comes looking for new office s...