Building Cities Like Startups: Innovation Districts, Rent Extraction, and the Remaking of Public Space

Abstract

Across the globe, economic developers and policymakers are building “innovation districts” –master planned developments with the aim of concentrating the actors, entities, inputs, and physical infrastructure considered essential to process and product innovation. Promoters have repeatedly hailed Barcelona’s “22@bcn” (est. 2000) and Boston’s “Seaport Innovation District” (est. 2010) for their success in attracting talent, increasing jobs, scaling startups, and transitioning regions into a high-tech economy. Built within the city and the urban-periphery alike, innovation districts point to a new spatial layout for capitalist production.

This dissertation is an in-depth comparative case study of five innovation districts: Boston, Detroit, Park Center (North Carolina), St. Louis, and Dublin (Ireland). I engage a qualitative approach that includes on-site observations and semi-structured interviews with over 100 key supporters of innovation districts–from residents and workers to the university affiliates, developers, incubator owners, venture capitalists, non-profit managers, private executives, elected officials, and consultants driving growth decisions. In developing a more robust definition of innovation districts than the strategy mobilized by growth coalitions, I situate the emergence of innovation districts and their extractive logics along a historic trajectory of capitalist production from manufacturing material goods to new forms of immaterial production. Relying on content analysis of primary documents, maps, legal statues, and architectural renditions, I document how the planning process for each innovation district encloses public space and lived experience within that space, relinquishing it for private profit.

Through detailed case studies I argue that economic developers and policymakers opportunistically used innovation district strategy to trigger real estate development after the 2008/2009 global financial crisis. The allure of the innovation district concept –that of an entrepreneurial haven for science and design breakthroughs and the acceleration of discoveries to the market—succeeded in selling the innovation district strategy for financial, political, and popular backing during a time period of complete construction standstill. However, in places with robust entrepreneurial ecosystems, supporters lost sight of the benefits of the innovation district as a support for startups and entrepreneurs in favor of more established companies seeking proximity to talent. Using census data, I trace the changing demographic makeup of each innovation district from its date of inception to its current state to demonstrate how innovation district strategy contributes to the splintering of resources. Lastly, I conclude the dissertation with a theoretical discussion gesturing how innovation districts might exacerbate issues of precarity for the entrepreneur who sits at the center of this experimentation and is increasingly interpellated by a state-led ideology that eagerly encourages self-provisioning.