The Smart City in a Digital World by Vincent Mosco;

Author:Vincent Mosco;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787691377
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2019-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

5

WHO GOVERNS? PRIVATE SMART CITIES

Just give us a city and put us in charge.1

—Eric Schmidt, Founder and Former CEO, Google; CEO of Alphabet

BUT FIRST, A WORD ABOUT DISNEY

Long before Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) began to spread throughout America’s cities, giving companies significant control over neighbourhoods, there was Disney, the Florida Project and the Reedy Creek Improvement District. This section begins with Disney because it pioneered in creating private governance of public space giving the company that gave the world Micky Mouse many of the powers traditionally reserved for cities, counties and the elected officials chosen to preside over them. The Florida Project was the original name for what would become Disney World and the Reedy Creek Improvement District was the name for the territory that the State of Florida handed over to Disney. It took spectacular political magic, worthy of a magic kingdom, to pave the way for private, technology-rich, smart cities.

In his thoroughly researched book Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, Steve Mannheim describes how on 12 May 1967, Florida’s governor signed three bills into law that sped through legislative approval with just one dissenting vote to create the first multifunction, multicity, and multicounty special district in the United States.2 Florida and, to a lesser degree, California had pioneered in the creation of single-purpose special districts. This was something new because the legislation approved an arrangement whereby a private corporation would carry out multiple governance functions, across more than one city and county. Specifically, the state ceded to Disney a number of significant powers including:

Sovereignty over its own roads.

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