The start-up state: Governing urbanised capitalism

Abstract

This paper assesses the mutating role of the state in today’s flourishing technology hubs in major cities and metropolitan areas across the globe through a comparative lens. Conventional wisdom associates the contemporary phenomenon of high-tech urbanism with minimum state intervention. In public as well as in scholarly debates, technology-intensive urban economies are customarily portrayed as a phenomenon whose formative creativity and ethos stems from an essentially post-political nature. As these economies emerge, thanks to the cooperative dynamism of urban societies, political governments are considered merely as coordinators of inter-actor relationships, particularly as managers or orchestrators of innovative ‘business ecosystems’ and ‘platforms’. We, in turn, suggest that today’s emergence of technology-based economies in a selected circle of major cities and metropolitan areas is an inherently political phenomenon, as it is closely linked to what we call the strategic urbanisation of the state. Looking at the trajectories of Finland and Italy during the post-recession decade of the 2010s, we disclose the state-driven selective mobilisation of urban economies as a response to the low-growth present of national political economies. In doing so, we argue that the entrepreneurialisation of selected urban locations cannot be understood without considering the qualitatively transformed roles of the local and national states. The coming together of entrepreneurialist and urbanising state strategies disclose a shift towards a start-up state whose distinctive features differ qualitatively from those of both the investment-oriented late-Keynesian entrepreneurial state and the decentralised local economic governance envisaged by today’s city-innovation theorists.

Complex Control and the Governmentality of Digital Platforms

“…Just like ants, this society rises from the bottom-up interaction of individuals, coalescing into a highly functional social organization. This vision has empowered a range of initiatives, from urban gardening (Mattijssen et al, 2018) via technology hubs (Moisio and Rossi, 2019) to childcare facilities and makerspaces (Chiappini and Törnberg, 2018). Digital platforms are seen as hubs for coordinating and meeting, disintermediated and leaderless, to solve collective problems.…”

Changing geographies of the state: themes, challenges and futures

“…In addition to targeting natural resources, in some contexts, the neoliberalization of the state has been marked by 'strategic urbanisation' (Moisio and Rossi 2020). In these cases, city-regions and innovative urban spaces emerge as key sites of economic development, spatial planning and the territorial management of the state.…”

Seeing like a city: how tech became urban

“…The spatiality, then, of innovation districts, embeds these cultural effects in the urban landscape while camouflaging their institutional supports. They help cities to become, as the geographers Sami Moisio and Ugo Rossi ( 2020 , p. 535) say, “state-orchestrated platforms for experimental governance and creative business activity.” But they do this within a complicated urban matrix of political commitments to the city’s social communities and power struggles to control land use.…”

“…In the United States in recent years, the federal government has stepped back from investing in cities’ economic base. But Moisio and Rossi ( 2020 ) argue that in Europe, at least, national states place cities at the forefront of “new economy” strategies. Looking at Italy and Finland, they see national governments focusing resources on urban champions—Milan and Helsinki—to recover from the 2008 financial crisis and combat the loss of domestic industries’ competitive edge.…”