The value of the urban field in technology-driven knowledge economies: The role of the state

Abstract

This article shows how the market valuation of start-up companies and the corporate-designed creation of human capital reveal some of the material and more intangible ways in which the economisation of the urban field plays out in the contemporary knowledge economy. The proposed analysis seeks to make visible how both direct and indirect state action enables the different dimensions of the urban field to come together, become valuable and jointly constitute what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called the ‘metropolis’. In so doing, the article underlines that the different dimensions of the urban field figure prominently albeit differently partake in processes of extraction of knowledge value in monetised or sociocultural form. At the conceptual level, we critically engage with the existing literature on emergent forms of state capitalism by putting forward a governmental analytic on state power in contemporary urbanised knowledge capitalism. Empirically, we develop our arguments through two case studies. First, we examine the start-up unicorn Wolt, often considered as one of the national champion start-ups in Finland (together with a handful of mobile game developers). Second, we scrutinise the arrival of the Apple software developer Academy in Naples, a widely celebrated state-capital interaction in an economically struggling urban context in southern Italy. These cases are among the many that motivate one to re-think the entanglement of urban space, state governmentality and value extraction as it unfolds today in urbanised knowledge economies.