Seeing like a city: how tech became urban

Abstract

The emergence of urban tech economies calls attention to the multidimensional spatiality of ecosystems made up of people and organizations that produce new digital technology. Since the economic crisis of 2008, city governments have aggressively pursued economic growth by nurturing these ecosystems. Elected officials create public-private-nonprofit partnerships to build an "innovation complex" of discursive, organizational, and geographical spaces; they aim not only to jump-start economic growth but to remake the city for a new modernity. But it is difficult to insert tech production space into the complicated urban matrix. Embedded industries and social communities want protection from expanding tech companies and the real estate developers who build for them. City council members, state legislators, and community organizations oppose the city government's attempts to satisfy Big Tech companies. While the city's density magnifies conflicts of interest over land-use and labor issues, the covid-19 pandemic raises serious questions about the city's ability to both oppose Big Tech and keep creating tech jobs.

Accelerator niches in an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem: New York city

“…We conduct an exploratory case study of the emergence of one ESO type in one city over time: accelerator programs in New York City (NYC) from 2008 to 2019. NYC is an ideal setting because it is a large global city and has worked concertedly across recent mayoral administrations to develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem (Zukin, 2020b(Zukin, , 2020c. The dynamic history of the NYC ecosystem, described in the next section, and the active engagement of various stakeholders provides a testbed to study the dynamics of evolving organizational forms like the accelerator in an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem.…”

“…The city’s efforts after the bubble burst helped achieve entrepreneurial legitimacy through continued investment in local entrepreneurial capacity (Wolf-Powers et al, 2017). NYC attracted a variety of entrepreneurial talents and risk capital, becoming a global hotspot (Zukin, 2020c) with success stories such as Foursquare, Etsy, and Tumblr. In 2011, the Bloomberg administration launched a large competition, “Applied Sciences NYC”, for a technology campus on Roosevelt Island provided by the city government.…”

Platformization of Urban Life

“…The promises of the networked smart city moved infrastructure systems and their control and surveillance apparatuses into the focus of digital capitalism Zukin 2020). City governments started to invest in digital tools and platforms, making the digital transformation of urban infrastructures and services a rewarding long-term business for hardware-and software vendors.…”

Methods for Uncovering Discourses That Shape the Urban Imaginary in Helsinki's Smart City

“…As a critical theoretical framework for understanding urban spaces, Lindner and Meissner refer to the urban imaginary as a concept which acknowledges how space is "simultaneously material, conceptual, experienced, and practiced" (Lindner and Meissner, 2018, p. 2), building upon a general conceptualization of imaginaries that "at once describe attainable futures and prescribe futures that states believe ought to be attained" (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009, p. 120). Imaginaries about what the (smart) city is and what it can become in the future are reproduced and legitimized in multiple sites and by multiple authors (Wiig, 2016;Glass, 2018;Zukin, 2020). As Jasanoff crucially hints toward, the interrelationships between urban imaginaries and entities of power are an important entry point for examining how spaces and discourses mediate behavior (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009;Lindner and Meissner, 2018).…”