Abstract
Tech companies have become some of the most profitable corporations through surveillance and personal data collection, exploiting workers, and, in some cases, simply breaking local laws meant to protect consumers and regulate traditional service industries. Sharon Zukin’s latest book, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy, explores not simply the culture of tech or a particular company’s effect on an industry, but the convergence of political and economic forces fostering the growth of the tech sector in New York City since the 2008 financial crisis. Such an analysis is welcome since the tech industry has come to affect all aspects of our lives, including, as the book shows, local economic development and the built environment.
The book draws on 57 interviews with venture capitalists, start-up founders, technology and engineering program directors at universities, and officials at industry groups and public-private development corporations, as well as observations of hackathons, meetups, and physical locales related to tech and an immense amount of reportage on the tech industry. The prologue and the first, introductory, chapter describe The Innovation Complex as a “polemical vision” (p. ix) as well as an “archaeology of the tech ecosystem as it has evolved in the recent past” and a “sociology of the city as it will emerge in the not-too-distant future” (p. 21). Noting that cities such as Shenzhen and Copenhagen have undergone similar transformations in their tech landscapes over the same period, Zukin brackets global economic forces in order to focus on whether or not a new tech power elite has emerged in New York City. Her conclusions are mixed.
She finds that tech has indeed captured local government. Larger economic trends may have pressured any given mayoral administration to promote the industry, but there is little difference across Bloomberg and de Blasio in terms of their support for growing the number of tech businesses and jobs in the city. While Bloomberg emphasized collaboration between tech and existing elite actors and de Blasio worked with tech companies to diversify their hiring pipelines, they were largely in agreement in two key areas that increased tech’s size and spatial footprint. First, both mayors have been incredibly supportive of efforts to educate more engineers in New York. Second, both administrations happily rezoned swaths of land away from light manufacturing and toward mixed commercial use. This fostered the growth of the tech industry beyond “silicon alley” in the Flatiron District and into neighborhoods like the Garment District in Manhattan and DUMBO in Brooklyn.
Despite the tech industry’s ability win local officials to its cause, The Innovation Complex argues that its power still pales in comparison to the city’s core FIRE sector. In fact, since commercial rents are higher than light manufacturing ones, the largest beneficiary of the growth in tech in NYC is perhaps the real estate industry. Investment firms have also reaped rewards with access to a wider and better trained pool of engineering labor. Moreover, the battle over Amazon’s HQ2 development in Queens—detailed in Chapter Eight—where a coalition of local residents, labor unions, and politicians backed by the Democratic Socialists of America defeated the company’s plan to build a giant campus in the gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City, revealed that the industry is not all-powerful. Zukin also takes the fact that Jeff Bezos himself did not come to New York to fight for HQ2 as evidence of the tech industry’s less-than-fervent commitment to the city and concludes that a cohesive and durable tech power elite has yet to be formed in New York.
The book is at its best when it’s mapping the connections between the tech industry, actions by the city government, and other local institutions like universities that provide space and produce labor. Chapter Three, for example, focuses on meetups: industry-run events where startups present new products, venture capitalists find new investments, and local political actors come to ingratiate themselves. Chapter Seven looks at how the city has incentivized labor pipelines from schools to tech businesses and how a new academic capitalism practiced by the city’s prominent higher education institutions drives further growth. Other parts of the book feel less vital. Chapters Four and Five, which analyze accelerators for startups and venture capitalists respectively, offer multiple portraits of individual company founders and investors that are too detailed without great analytic payoff. However, Zukin does point out that New York City’s venture capital is flowing out of the city at a higher rate than before. In other words, NYC investors are putting more and more of their money in companies based outside the city—mostly in California—supporting the overall argument that tech has not yet become inextricably intertwined with the city’s economy.
Chapter Six is a gem and is probably the most illuminating for urbanists and class warriors alike. It follows the development of a new “innovation district” along Brooklyn’s northern shore, outlining how multiple public-private partnerships and “entrepreneurial nonprofits” like the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation rely on leveraging schemes in proposing new tech hubs and the conversion of existing buildings into subsidized office space for tech companies. Honed over decades of researching how capital and culture intersect in place, Zukin has a great knack for following the money as well as the rhetoric used to reinvent neighborhoods. She writes of the long-term plan to turn three adjacent Brooklyn neighborhoods into a dense network of tech company campuses as well as housing and consumption spaces for their highly paid workers such that workers will never have to leave (and never stop working): “It was as if the social critique of the mid-twentieth-century urbanist Jane Jacobs were fused to the early twentieth-century work ethic of Bell Labs” (p. 155).
While the book’s stated goal is to understand the origins and describe the current conditions of the tech industry in New York, I couldn’t help but wonder about the consequences of its expansion over the past ten-plus years detailed in The Innovation Complex. Since FIRE seemed to still hold its own, which industries might falter in their share of the economy or influence over city politics as tech continues to rise? Is tech’s growth quickening the pace of demographic change or the decline of mom-and-pop-owned local businesses in particular neighborhoods relative to others? I also wanted more engagement with scholarship on growth coalitions—a framework that explains the overlapping interests of the real estate industry, local politicians, and institutions like universities—since the theory seems tailor-made for the book’s analysis.
Yet The Innovation Complex is already proving prophetic. During the pandemic, big tech has gobbled up space despite the general uncertainty of the future of office work. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google have all leased or bought millions of additional feet of office space in New York City, enough to support hiring more than 15,000 new workers (Haag 2020). The next mayor could be a former venture capitalist—an impressive achievement for the city’s fledgling tech power elite. Don’t say Sharon Zukin didn’t warn us.