As design centers, these cities attracted app developers.
#Venture towns city style software
Although the software was universal, its adoption enhanced the social and cultural capital of local places in dense urban environments.
Apps benefited from big cities as both platforms for conceptualizing and launching new products and markets connecting capital, labor, and design. The development and rapid diffusion of smart phones in the early 2000s led to a profusion of “apps,” applications of digital technology that were accessed electronically and directed to both businesses and consumers. Three things changed around 2010 to bring big cities, especially national capitals of finance and media, to the forefront of the tech economy. Cities, it seemed, were not designed to produce the same quality or quantity of innovation as Silicon Valley. By 2001, however, a drastic decline in dot-com stock values strongly suggested that a city’s tech industry would never be robust enough to power the urban economy. Dot-com offices’ playful aesthetics and recreational amenities got media buzz the industry’s quick success and “cool” reputation drew financial investors hoping to profit if the startup was acquired by a larger company or got a high valuation in a lucrative IPO (initial public offering of stock). Yet the urban clusters that they formed bore nicknames that deferred to the hegemonic original: New York’s Silicon Alley and Multimedia Gulch in San Francisco (Indergaard 2004 Wolfe 1999). These “dot-com” startups and the “new media producers” who worked for them congregated in cities, notably New York and San Francisco, where they connected to strong advertising, publishing, and marketing industries. While the city’s density magnifies conflicts of interest over land-use and labor issues, the covid-19 pandemic raises serious questions about the city’s ability to both oppose Big Tech and keep creating tech jobs.Ĭities flared briefly in the tech narrative during the 1990s, when a new kind of tech company appeared that produced content for the fledgling World Wide Web. City council members, state legislators, and community organizations oppose the city government’s attempts to satisfy Big Tech companies. Embedded industries and social communities want protection from expanding tech companies and the real estate developers who build for them. But it is difficult to insert tech production space into the complicated urban matrix. Elected officials create public-private-nonprofit partnerships to build an “innovation complex” of discursive, organizational, and geographical spaces they aim not only to jump-start economic growth but to remake the city for a new modernity. Since the economic crisis of 2008, city governments have aggressively pursued economic growth by nurturing these ecosystems. The emergence of urban tech economies calls attention to the multidimensional spatiality of ecosystems made up of people and organizations that produce new digital technology.
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