Our first story of real data center resistance begins with Marina Otero Verzier, a Spanish architect, researcher, and Harvard GSD lecturer. In her search for more eco-social data centers in Chile and Spain, Marina pushed the voice of local communities up to the level of government at a moment when hyperscale companies wanted to be louder, and helped develop Chile's first National Data Center Plan with those communities' concerns in mind.

But information asymmetry, timing, and bureaucratic pressures on small municipalities turn out to be among the most decisive factors shaping the tactics of protest communities – regionally and globally. Local communities in Cerrillos and Quilicura (Chile) faced exactly these obstacles as they countered hyperscale developments threatening their water supply and a fragile wetland ecosystem.

A different story unfolds in Aragón, Spain, where Marina helped form a strategic-litigation group to file the first lawsuit in Spain against hyperscale infrastructure. Rather than going after a data center itself, Marina (together with several civil society organizations, neighborhood movements, and others) challenged the enabling legal mechanism: the strategic-project (PIGA) status that let Amazon fast-track its developments.

And what would an alternative vision for data centers look like? In Marina’s words, perhaps as an infrastructure that is "not only public, but in the hands of the people." And what would change if we treated it not as a source of always-on abundance, but as something attuned to the rhythms of our bodies and our planet? Is a data center really so different from a bank, a library, or a school?

—

Where the Cloud Touches the Ground is a special podcast series under the podcast Paradigms, produced by Leitmotiv – an independent think-and-do tank working toward an alternative digital economy.

If this conversation brought you something meaningful, let us know!

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.