The Urban Field
Capital and Governmentality in the Age of Techno-Monopoly
We live in an era of techno-monopoly power in which technocapitalism - through ubiquitous digital platforms - has colonized both the internet and key aspects of our everyday lives. Cities and larger urban and metropolitan environments have provided a fertile ground for the rise and rapid growth of this power. In The Urban Field, Moisio and Rossi reveal an urban monopoly capitalism supported by the “corporatized state”. They critically examine the relationship between capital and the state, and the generation of an urban governmentality centred on the economization of knowledge and technology in four key sites: labour, human capital, startups and forms of life. Moisio and Rossi contend that, ultimately, the urban field is a constitutively political construct that can be enacted in a different way, no longer as a value-extraction machine but as a collective endeavour aiming at redefining established modes of economic value creation.
Introduction: Neo-feudalism or new monopoly capital?
Part I Macro-political economy of the urban field
1 The rise of the corporatized state Introduction The urban technological paradigm The competition state The corporatized state Conclusion
2 The urban field and the strategic urbanization of the state Introduction The urban field On the “national” urban field The urban field in the age of national competitiveness Designing the Finnish nation-state as a digital space Conclusion
Part II Micro-political economy of the urban field
3 Labour Introduction Labour as source of economic value Exploiting labour power in techno-capitalism The blurring of rent and profit The contested control of the urban field Conclusion
4 Human capital Introduction The rise and rise of human capital theory The early stages of human capital theory Redefining the role of the state Human capital’s new clothes: endogenous growth theory Human capital and the housing crisis The human capital dystopia is yet to come Conclusion
5 Startups Introduction The world of startups Startup economy as a constituent of the urban field Extracting economic value through the urban field The corporatized state in the startup world The story of Wolt as an urban startup company The implicit role of the state in the valuation process Conclusion
6 Forms of life Introduction Constituting the urban experience economy Naples: Becoming a mass-tourism city Sophia Loren and the politics of the event Staging the open city The cult of Maradona Conclusion
Coda: The value of the urban field
Combining innovative theorizing with radical critique, Sami Moisio and Ugo Rossi rethink the strategic role of cities, the stakes in transformative politics, and the meaning of the urban field in the era of technocapitalism.
In a much needed critique of techno-monopoly capitalism and its urban ramifications, The Urban Field offers an astute political economy that parses out the role of tech companies and the state upon an array of affective social and political worlds. Drawing upon an array of theoretical interventions around the devastating powers of technocapitalism, Moisio and Rossi also offer their own unique perspectives to the urban field – a space which encompasses a range of domains including labour, human capital, startup economies and governmentality. Not only does this book illuminate how techno-monopolism functions in the day-to-day, but it also importantly helps us understand how particular moments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have led us to this contemporary conjuncture.
In this sharp and critical intervention into both political economy and urban geography, Moisio and Rossi argue that our age of techno-monopoly capitalism hinges on a mode of governmentality engineered to extract value from vital urban processes and forms of life. Rather than a devolution to techno-feudalism, The Urban Field reveals an intensification, diversification, and (re)urbanization of capital accumulation, coordinated not just by monopolist corporations or venture capital investors but by a corporatized state whose logics mirror that of a tech startup.
In this fascinating and timely book, Moisio and Rossi articulate an original political-economic framework for understanding the interpenetration of techno-monopoly capitalism and cities. Reminiscent of key contributions (such as those of Storper & Walker, Scott, Jessop) which described and deciphered economic geographic transitions away from Fordist regulation towards neoliberal competition-driven systems, Moisio and Rossi take stock of how state-sanctioned digital monopolies are conceptualizing, creating and extracting value from (and across) the urban field – a relational space characterized by the juxtaposition of data, labour, institutions, governments, capital, and power. Broad in theoretical scope, precise and succinct in empirical exemplification, this short book masterfully makes sense of how the discourses and materialities of techno-monopoly capitalism are reconfiguring the urban field of the 2020s.
Moisio and Rossi offer a detailed view of states’ dependence on the giants of the tech industry for visions of progress and promises of jobs while subjecting workers and users to ever greater control. They reveal the urban field to be a strategic site of value creation through tourism, monetization and precarious work – a crucial critique for both urban scholars and theorists of innovation.
Sami Moisio and Ugo Rossi’s The Urban Field presents a cutting-edge analysis of urban political economy in the digital era. Shifting analysis away from techno-feudalism and examining the impacts of techno-monopoly capitalism on urban governance, the authors make a strong case for the corporatization of urban life and the state beginning with the first boom of digital start-ups at the end of the twentieth century. The book indicates the many ways in which national state and city governments prop up the tech firms to enable the creation and extraction of economic value to achieve the entrepreneurialization of living and privatization of governance.
If you like your theory hot and your writing pithy, look no further. Moisio and Rossi deliver a trenchant account of how technology has become a tool of value extraction from cities. They tread a careful path, picking apart notions of techno-feudalism and avoiding all-too-easy fingerpointing, to instead deliver a fine-grained analysis of some of the less visible workings of the state–business nexus.
By describing techno-monopoly capitalism, The Urban Field provides a brilliant guide-map to the current political economy of cities, which is, on the one hand, dominated by technology companies and, at the same time, inherently connected to state power. Offering an intellectual tour between a series of illuminating cases, such as the digitization of the Finnish nation-state, the labour dynamics of food couriers and delivery workers, and the transformation of Naples into a mass tourism site, the book unravels how, in the contemporary urban field, economic extraction of value goes far beyond the built environment and permeates essential aspects of everyday life. It skillfully elucidates the processes of capital accumulation from space, particularly in an era where the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds are increasingly blurred.
