By Paolo Testolini, Global Director of Masterplanning;
Atakan Guven, Director of Urban Analytics &
Dr. Nicolas Palominos, Associate Data Scientist — ERA-co

The rise of artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape cities with an intensity reminiscent of the industrial revolution, when warehouses and factories surged across the landscape and rewrote the very script of urban life. Today, the new engines of progress hum quietly and glow softly rather than clang and smoke, yet their influence is no less profound. The factories of our own era are data centres—vast, energy-hungry chambers where computation replaces coal and code replaces steam. In their hidden interiors, millions of decisions are made each second, decisions that guide mobility systems, economic flows, medical diagnostics, and the rhythms of daily life. 

For now, these buildings tend to sit on the margins, sealed and opaque, humming behind blank facades. But as the demand for instantaneous computation grows, the city will no longer be able to keep them at arm’s length. Smaller, faster “edge” facilities will move inward—toward transit nodes, toward dense neighborhoods, toward the places where digital and physical lives converge. This migration invites a profound design question: must these new structures repeat the mistakes of industrial infrastructure, standing apart from the city like mute machines, or can they become something more human, more transparent, more generous? 

Urban designers have a rare opportunity to guide this evolution. Underused spaces—airport parking lots, aging garages, big-box stores, forgotten logistics sites—can become platforms for a new kind of architecture. These are places already threaded with power lines and mobility systems, places waiting for reinvention. Folding data centres into such sites can create hybrid buildings that serve not only servers but people: mobility hubs for autonomous fleets, educational spaces that illuminate the hidden workings of AI, rooftops that gather gardens or parks, and public foyers where the pulse of computation becomes part of civic life. 

Even the heat generated by these centres—once seen only as a nuisance—can become an urban resource. It can warm winter streets and greenhouses, feed district heating networks, or sustain public baths and pools, transforming the waste of computation into a new form of environmental abundance. The city, in turn, begins to glow with the warmth of its own digital metabolism. 

In this vision, data centres cease to be blind industrial boxes and instead become civic monuments to our shared digital future. They evolve into “urban data commons”—buildings where the flow of information intersects with the flow of people, where cold machines give rise to warm spaces, and where the invisible infrastructures of AI are woven into the everyday poetry of the city. Here, computation becomes not just a technical necessity but a cultural presence, shaping a future in which the technological and the human no longer stand apart, but grow together. 

The global demand for data centres is surging in tandem with the growth of cloud computing, as well as the expansion of IoT and AI workloads. Yet this need for data centers comes with heavy environmental costs: energy-intensive cooling, substantial water usage, and the dominance of vast, unappealing warehouse-style buildings that communities often resist. But it doesn’t have to stay this way. — 

Emerging cooling innovations and evolving architectural thinking offer a pathway to downsize data centres and integrate them meaningfully into urban fabrics. In many ways, data centres are following a familiar urban trajectory; infrastructure that begins purely functional often becomes symbolic, spatially embedded, and culturally reinterpreted over time.  

The difference today is that we have the foresight and technology to build that narrative from the beginning. This moment challenges designers and urban strategists to balance functionality, visibility, and placemaking for a new technological era and its impact on our cities. 

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Growing demand and community pushback 

In the UK, plans for new data centres frequently trigger NIMBY resistance. Communities see industrial-scale structure and hear alarm bells around carbon emissions and resource strain. One Guardian investigation even flagged that proposed AI data centre developments could emit emissions equivalent to five times those of a major airport, “including from take-offs and landings.”  

Across regions, resistance stems not just from environmental concerns but also from purely aesthetic and spatial impacts — bland mega-warehouses with stringent requirements for 24/7 surveillance and security guards aren’t something most communities view with excitement. Additionally, data centres may be subject to zoning requirements, depending on the region or country in which they are constructed. 

This backlash is particularly strong in cities where space is already contested, such as the UK, where demand for housing remains at an all-time high. Even at the edges of urban conurbations, these developments are frequently perceived (and, in some cases, evidenced) to lack adequate community facilities, further exacerbating negative connotations when a data centre is built. As a result, larger-scale data centers remain on the outskirts of cities or industrial zones, while smaller facilities are increasingly appearing in city centers. 

Local authorities are often caught between digital infrastructure mandates and community concerns about a degraded quality of life. Without architectural clarity or integration into broader urban planning efforts, data centres risk becoming both invisible in their intent and hyper-visible in their disruption.  

Rebuilding trust and securing long-term support requires a more transparent design and engagement process from day one. 

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Innovation: shrinking and greening infrastructure

Our sector is not idle. Technological innovation is enabling both smaller facilities and cleaner operations.  

For example, Cambridge spin-out Terracotta Cooling utilizes locally produced terracotta “beehive” structures to passively reduce cooling energy by approximately 30 percent, particularly effective in hot, humid climates. Complementing these advances, facilities have begun adopting airside or waterside economizers and liquid cooling to slash power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water usage, shifting toward more efficient cooling regimes with minimal fossil fuel dependency. Meanwhile, smaller “edge” data centres are proliferating, tailored to urban energy hubs, drastically reducing spatial impact and bringing computation closer to users. 

Beyond technical performance, the spatial rethinking of these structures is promising. Modular units, adaptive reuse, and vertical integration are enabling data centres to occupy footprints that would have been inconceivable a decade ago.  

This shift opens the door to more flexible zoning, co-location with community-serving programs, and innovative site selection (e.g., underground quarries or rooftops of industrial buildings) where their presence doesn’t dominate but instead complements the city around them. 

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A new typology: Designing data centres as community assets

This moment reveals a design opportunity: what if data centres became the next architectural archetype (i.e., like Victorian gas storage or canal warehouses), repurposed over time and echoing cultural identity? Rather than imposing a monolithic structure on the landscape, a thoughtfully designed building could house computation while offering mixed-use ground floors, such as innovation labs, public exhibition spaces, or green facades that support biodiversity and passive cooling. Urban designers can embed these installations with programming that encourages community access and symbolic value. 

At the same time, these design ambitions must coexist with the fundamental need for security. Data centres, as critical infrastructure, require strict protection of digital and physical assets. Yet, thoughtful design can secure the critical while still engaging the public. Through layered boundaries, controlled transparency, and curated edges, architects can create facades and ground-level zones that communicate civic presence without compromising protection. This might take the form of public art, interactive displays, or landscape forecourts that act as both buffer and interface, places where the infrastructure quietly meets the community.  

Projects like the Lefdal Mine Data Centre in Norway, while geographically remote and primarily responding to its natural context rather than an urban one, demonstrate the viability of combining context-sensitive siting with sustainability. In urban contexts, examples such as the B2 Brisbane Data Centre (designed to minimize visual impact while enhancing its streetscape presence) or Telehouse TN2 in London (whose microchip-inspired cladding offers a design accent within a dense business district) hint at the potential for aesthetic and civic integration even within secure parameters.  

In dense cities like Amsterdam or Tokyo, new vertical micro-centres are being designed with architectural character, even hosting rooftop greenhouses and education labs, suggesting a path forward of facilities that balance accessibility, symbolism, and safety.  

By treating data infrastructure as civic infrastructure, we can begin shifting the public’s perception of it from a nuisance to a necessity and, eventually, to a source of neighborhood pride. 

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Programming for places 

Architecture is only one side of the coin. The other side is placemaking.  

Activating adjacent uses (coworking innovation zones, training hubs, or even localized cooling gardens) anchors the facility in civic life. This approach to placemaking prevents isolation and promotes transparency, inviting local voices into the design process and future-proofing operations through community support. 

Community engagement should begin early, not as a checkbox, but as a guiding principle. When local culture is reflected in the physical form, naming, and purpose of a data centre, communities are far more likely to accept and even celebrate their presence. Programming can also be adaptive over time, evolving alongside the neighborhood’s own needs, interests, and values. 

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Reimagining what data centres can be 

Data centres may often feel unavoidable — and, until recently, unavoidable in a bland form —  but the convergence of cooling innovation, edge scaling, and community-centric placemaking presents a new horizon. Architects and urban designers, guided by analytics and data-driven insight, can craft facilities that are not just tolerated but valued by communities. The challenge doesn’t lie in resisting data centres; it lies in reimagining them. 

As AI and digital services expand, we will need more of these structures, not fewer. But if they’re going to be part of our urban future, we have a responsibility to make them worthy of that future. That means considering not just their performance metrics but also their cultural presence, ecological footprint, and long-term spatial legacy.