Overview

"You hear a lot these days about ""innovation and entrepreneurship"" and about how ""good jobs"" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as ""superstar cities."" In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up.Zukin explores the people and plans that have literally rooted digital technology in the city. That in turn has shaped a workforce, molded a mindset, and generated an archipelago of tech spaces, which in combination have produced a now-hegemonic ""innovation"" culture and geography. She begins with the subculture of hackathons and meetups, introduces startup founders and venture capitalists, and explores the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to ""innovation coastline."" She shows how, far beyond Silicon Valley, cities like New York are shaped by an influential ""triple helix"" of business, government, and university leaders--an alliance that joins C. Wright Mills's ""power elite,"" real estate developers, and ambitious avatars of ""academic capitalism."" As a result, cities around the world are caught between the demands of the tech economy and communities' desires for growth--a massive and often--insurmountable challenge for those who hope to reap the rewards of innovation's success."

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9780190083830

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Reviews

Sharon Zukin deftly argues in The Innovation Complex that tech capitals do not simply bubble up from a primordial soup of young entrepreneurs' inventions. They are made through ideas, norms, and narratives as well as by policies and investments. Zukin takes us on a tour of the specific places and activities that make up the New York City innovation complex-hackathons, meetups, innovation districts, tech campuses, boot camps, and co-working spaces. What we come to see is the political process of innovation itself and how this process reconfigures cities. The result is a nuanced and critical look at the costs that a tech boom exacts on cities and citizens. * Gina Neff, University of Oxford, author of Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries * In The Innovation Complex, Sharon Zukin masterfully reveals how New York City-of all places-pivoted to tech and established an ecosystem rivaling Silicon Valley.In the process, she helps us understand cities, the startup world, and the economic tensions that come with progress. * Steven Levy, author In the Plex and Facebook: TheInside Story * With a keen eye and a sly sense of irony, Sharon Zukin takes us behind the doors of the startups, venture capital firms, business incubators, co-working spaces, and coding camps that have made New Yorka major hub of what she aptly dubs 'The Innovation Complex.' Beneath the technical wizardry and relentless boosterism of this new world, Zukin sees reasons to be skeptical about its promises to deliver a better life for us all. * Joshua B. Freeman, author of Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World? * Sharon Zukin's Innovation Complex proves once again that she is one of the most astuteobservers of American cities. For decades, innovation and the tech industry were thought to be the province of the suburbs. But Zukin shows how and why innovation and startup companies have come back to the city en masse and the economic contradictions that the rise of the urban innovation complex brings. * Richard Florida, author ofThe Rise of the Creative Class *

Author Information

Sharon Zukin is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books, including Loft Living, The Cultures of Cities, and Naked City (Oxford), profile change in New York from the 1970s to the 2020s.

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