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.

The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy

Business & Money

Zukin, Sharon

Economics

Oxford University Press

As cities have gentrified, educated urbanites have come to prize what they regard as "authentic" urban life: aging buildings, art galleries, small boutiques, upscale food markets, neighborhood old-timers, funky ethnic restaurants, and old, family-owned shops. These signify a place's authenticity, in contrast to the bland standardization of the suburbs and exurbs. But as Sharon Zukin shows in Naked City, the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity--evident in escalating real estate prices, expensive stores, and closely monitored urban streetscapes--has helped drive out the very people who first lent a neighborhood its authentic aura: immigrants, the working class, and artists. Zukin traces this economic and social evolution in six archetypal New York areas--Williamsburg, Harlem, the East Village, Union Square, Red Hook, and the city's community gardens--and travels to both the city's first IKEA store and the World Trade Center site. She shows that for followers of Jane Jacobs, this transformation is a perversion of what was supposed to happen. Indeed, Naked City is a sobering update of Jacobs' legendary 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Like Jacobs, Zukin looks at what gives neighborhoods a sense of place, but argues that over time, the emphasis on neighborhood distinctiveness has become a tool of economic elites to drive up real estate values and effectively force out the neighborhood "characters" that Jacobs so evocatively idealized.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

An in-depth look at how New York adopted "innovation" and became a destination for startups and large tech companies.\nIn recent years, the language of "innovation" has spurred visions of urban economic revival led by digital technology. Investors, mayors, and tech evangelists transform the city into an "innovation complex" that expands the tech industry while struggling to control its power. No city has been more ambitious in this pursuit than New York. In The Innovation Complex, Sharon Zukin looks to the people who created New York's tech economy and the places where it took root. She traces its origins to the city's response to the 2008 financial crisis and the aggressive leveraging of wealth from the US and overseas. Through interviews with venture capitalists, startup founders, and economic development officials, she explores the spaces where the rules of the new economy are made--transforming the city but increasing dependence on Big Tech firms, siphoning public subsidies, and enabling the rise of a new meritocratic elite. Updated with a preface on the effects of Covid-19, Zukin's provocative 
interpretation of the innovation complex is a warning to cities around the world.

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Point of purchase

This accessible, smart, and expansive book on shopping's impact on American life is in part historical, stretching back to the mid-19th century, yet also has a contemporary focus, with material on recent trends in shopping from the internet to Zagat's guides. Drawing inspiration from both Pierre Bourdieu's work and Walter Benjamin's seminal essay on the shopping arcades of 19th-century Paris, Zukin explores the forces that have made shopping so central to our lives: the rise of consumer culture, the never-ending quest for better value, and shopping's ability to help us improve our social status and attain new social identities.

Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture

Routledge

Examines locations ranging from industrial complexes to theme parks in Florida and California to examine how the creative destruction of landscape reflects changes in American economic and social life

Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

Univ. Of California Pr.

The momentous changes which are transforming American life call for a new exploration of the economic and cultural landscape. In this book Sharon Zukin links our ever-expanding need to consume with two fundamental shifts: places of production have given way to spaces for services and paperwork, and the competitive edge has moved from industrial to cultural capital. From the steel mills of the Rust Belt, to the sterile malls of suburbia, to the gentrified urban centers of our largest cities, the "creative destruction" of our economy--a process by which a way of life is both lost and gained--results in a dramatically different landscape of economic power. Sharon Zukin probes the depth and diversity of this restructuring in a series of portraits of changed or changing American places. Beginning at River Rouge, Henry Ford's industrial complex in Dearborn, Michigan, and ending at Disney World, Zukin demonstrates how powerful interests shape the spaces we inhabit. Among the landscapes she examines are steeltowns in West Virginia and Michigan, affluent corporate suburbs in Westchester County, gentrified areas of lower Manhattan, and theme parks in Florida and California. In each of these case studies, new strategies of investment and employment are filtered through existing institutions, experience in both production and consumption, and represented in material products, aesthetic forms, and new perceptions of space and time. The current transformation differs from those of the past in that individuals and institutions now have far greater power to alter the course of change, making the creative destruction of landscape the most important cultural product of our time. Zukin's eclectic inquiry into the parameters of social action and the emergence of new cultural forms defines the interdisciplinary frontier where sociology, geography, economics, and urban and cultural studies meet.

University of California Press

Beyond Marx and Tito: Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism

In this study Dr Zukin combines the approaches of a political scientist and a sociologist to examine the distance between theory and practice in the lives of ordinary Yugoslavs living under socialist self-management. Going beyond previous work on socialist societies, she asks how Yugoslavs - as workers, as citizens and as a society - have benefited from the form of socialism that they have pioneered. She also considers the relevance of the official ideology of self-management, institutions like workers' councils and communes, and political and economic controls to post-industrial as well as industrializing societies. The book includes long passages from intensive, in-depth interviews with members of ten Belgrade families. The families, which are described in terms of their place in the Yugoslav social structure, indicate their political and socialist ideology through telling their life stories, interpreting their own place in social changes, and reacting to these changes and pressures. Participant-observation of local voters meetings provides an examination of give-and-take in Yugoslav grass-roots politics.

History

World

Cambridge University Press

In this study Dr Zukin combines the approaches of a political scientist and a sociologist to examine the distance between theory and practice in the lives of ordinary Yugoslavs living under socialist self-management. Going beyond previous work on socialist societies, she asks how Yugoslavs - as workers, as citizens and as a society - have benefited from the form of socialism that they have pioneered. She also considers the relevance of the official ideology of self-management, institutions like workers' councils and communes, and political and economic controls to post-industrial as well as industrializing societies. The book includes long passages from intensive, in-depth interviews with members of ten Belgrade families. The families, which are described in terms of their place in the Yugoslav social structure, indicate their political and socialist ideology through telling their life stories, interpreting their own place in social changes, and reacting to these changes and pressures. Participant-observation of local voters meetings provides an examination of give-and-take in Yugoslav grass-roots politics.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zukin, Sharon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Zukin, Sharon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zukin, Sharon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture

Point of purchase

Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

Beyond Marx and Tito: Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism

Beyond Marx and Tito: Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism