Digital Space Meets Urban Place: Updating the Growth Machine Model in New York

• In Event: 4162 - Redefining Place

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges to a sociological understanding of both space and place is the need to acknowledge their geographical fluidity, temporal impermanence, and basic epistemological fuzziness. Urban sociologists lag behind other disciplines in this regard, partly because of the limited way they define their object of study and partly because of the delay in updating and expanding their most influential paradigm: the city as a growth machine. Using Amazon’s recent decision to create one of two new national “headquarters” in New York City as an entry point, we consider whether the Growth Machine model enables or constrains our ability to understand the “multi-scalar” processes of tech-led urban growth. We divide our analysis by the three material coordinates of “place”: land, labor, and capital. Within each of these analytic categories, we look at zoning decisions, locational subsidies (including subsidies to Amazon), the development of tech-oriented universities, and the geographical distribution of New York-based venture capital investment, to determine how the growth machine really works in an era of tech-led growth. We find enhanced roles for the local state and entrepreneurial universities and a disturbing mobility of venture capital. These findings suggest both a crucial updating of the Growth Machine model and an important research agenda.

Authors

• Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College and City Univ of New York Graduate Ctr

• Joanna Dressel, City University of New York-Graduate Center