When a Berlin Neighborhood Went to War With Google
In an excerpt from Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, author Josh O’Kane recounts the tech giant’s plans to create a startup campus in Berlin in 2018.
In 2018, protesters gathered outside the Umspannwerk building in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, where Google planned to open a startup hub.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe
As a technology reporter with Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Josh O’Kane spent more than two years covering Toronto’s Quayside project — a “neighborhood built from the internet up” devised by Google’s urban innovation arm, Sidewalk Labs. Proposed in 2017, the waterfront development was scuttled in 2020 after intense community resistance.
To tell that story, O’Kane also went to Germany, to explore a precursor to that showdown: In 2018, Berlin residents squared-off with Google, a unit of Alphabet, Inc., over plans to build a tech campus in the city’s bohemian Kreuzberg neighborhood. His book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy was published by Penguin Random House in September. In this excerpt, O’Kane recounts how a small group of activists launched an occupation of the 1920s industrial building that would have housed the company’s startup hub.