Self-financed research

Since fall 2024

In an era where digital infrastructure is as vital as roads and power lines, data centers—the physical backbone of the cloud—are reshaping our city-regional landscapes. The self-funded research project Clouds and Grounds explores how these high-tech facilities meet the grounded realities of land use planning, energy systems, and spatial development. Data centers cluster in specific places such as Northern Virginia, greater Amsterdam, Dublin or Frankfurt/Rhein-Main and are highly land- and energy-intensive, often located in urban or peri-urban areas with limited land availability, conflicting land use priorities, and growing concerns around sustainability and spatial equity. Spatial planners are increasingly required to balance the infrastructural demands of data centers with broader urban development goals, such as housing, green spaces, climate mitigation and structural change. Yet, there is limited research on how data centers are integrated into spatial planning frameworks, and how different governance models address their development.

As one of the data centre industry’s core regions, the Rhine-Main region in Germany presents an interesting case that received limited academic attention so far. Since the late 2010s, the city of Frankfurt experienced a steep increase in the number of data centers, not least because DE-CIX, the world’s largest internet exchange node, is located there. The increasing number of requests for planning permissions in the city and the wider city-region resulted in a dilemma situation for planning authorities. On the one hand, concerns were raised due to high energy consumption and lack of space, evoking civic protest. On the other hand, increasing local computing capacity in Germany and the EU is key to digital policy aims for AI and digital sovereignty and overall economic prosperity. So, what are the dilemmas arising from data center agglomeration in the Rhine-Main region and what are coping responses from a planning perspective? In order to answer this question, we frame the phenomenon of regional data center agglomeration as infrastructuring (Turner 2020). We assess the dimensions of control and governance, security, integration, development/growth and sustainability in order to showcase the challenges and the relevance of the city-regional level for strategic spatial coordination.