The environmentalization of urban entrepreneurialism: From technopolis to start-up city

Abstract

This paper investigates two trends in contemporary forms of urban entrepreneurialism: (a) an increasing focus on cultivating entrepreneurship, and (b) the promotion of entrepreneurial ecosystems that leverage culture and sustainability to attract and support entrepreneurs. We argue that these trends signify a shift from the entrepreneurial city to new strategies that shape cities for entrepreneurs. Underpinning this development is a broad normalization and valorization of entrepreneurship as the dominant pathway for urban economic growth. Additionally, we show how sustainability and greening are enrolled in these economic development strategies, promising to bolster the environmental image of the city. We highlight these two changes by focusing on the intellectual foundations of the technopolis concept in Austin, Texas, and the development of a cleantech entrepreneurial ecosystem that has increasingly been leveraged in Austin’s entrepreneurial growth efforts. We offer insights into how the growing trend of “making cities for entrepreneurs” is reshaping urban entrepreneurial governance, potentially exacerbating inequalities in urban development.

Municipal Statecraft For The Smart City: Retooling The Smart Entrepreneurial City?

“…Third, and important to our argument, is that while some new work on municipal statecraft draws out the 'intrapreneurialism' and inventiveness inherent in recrafting municipal capacities (Phelps and Miao, 2020: 305), dominant interpretations of emergent smart urban entrepreneurialism have tended to focus on municipalities' roles in urbanising the knowledge/tech-based economy, securing cities ranking in inter-city competition, harnessing urbanism's qualities to nurture start-up entrepreneurship and so on (see Clark, 2020;Levenda and Tretter, 2020;Mosio and Rossi, 2020). In doing so, even as they draw attention to constitutive and experimental practices, they prioritise revealing municipal states' roles in enabling the smart city as a technical fix for urbanised accumulation.…”

“…A suite of broadly Marxian accounts highlights municipal involvement in positioning the city for the extraction of value from high-tech urban economies (Levenda and Tretter, 2020;Clark, 2020), including through shaping what Zukin (2020) terms real estate 'habitats' for smart innovation. Clark (2020) notes an additional key shift from municipal speculation towards crafting material and political permissiveness of tech experimentation in place, weaving smart city experimental innovation into the competitive selling of the city.…”

“…Considered together, these accounts highlight an array of municipal practices that collectively seek to manage the uncertain potentials of tech innovation in shaping urban economic development pathways, cultivate local entrepreneurship amongst tech start-ups and shape smart urbanism in the context of knowledge-intensive capitalism (Barns et al, 2017;Rossi and Di Bella, 2017;McNeill, 2017). Constituting the city for entrepreneurs, then, draws together municipalities' spatial, financial, regulatory and institutional practices to constitute new institutions and practices around smart city experimentation and providing the foundations for smart city entrepreneurship (Levenda and Tretter, 2020).…”

“…Drawing on diverse scholarship that is rethinking urban entrepreneurialism (Chang et al, 2021;Lauermann, 2018;Levenda and Tretter, 2020;Mosio and Rossi, 2020;Phelps and Miao, 2020;Thompson et al, 2020), we argue that established interpretations of urban entrepreneurial state's roles as reactive and enacted via enabling and speculative practices need to be recast in light of smart city governance. In this context, entrepreneurial municipal roles and practices are being extended to include more active and directive roles, enacted through constitutive and experimental practices.…”

Urban entrepreneurialism 2.0 or the becoming south of the urban world

“…They thus offer an exploration from below of Austin's technopolis strategy and particularly of its 'cleantech' ecosystem (start-ups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital, new kinds of private-public coalitions) nourished by a wide array of mundane tactics that include 'support systems, educational programs, metrics, standards, and encouragement for people to become entrepreneurs'. This governmental approach makes Austin, they conclude, illustrative of a 'new form of urban entrepreneurial governance, which concentrates less on attracting specific companies and more on diffused ways to cultivate entrepreneurship by creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem' (Levenda and Tretter, 2019).…”