Seminar of Ugo Rossi

THE RETURN OF THE URBAN STATE: THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN ECONOMIES

With Ugo Rossi, Professor of Political and Economic Geography, Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy

Discussant: Tommaso Vitale, Associate Professor of Sociology, CEE, Dean of the Urban School, Sciences Po

Abstract

Within current debates on the ‘return of the state’, the state is regarded as an almost absent actor in contemporary capitalism. In these debates, the state intervenes in the economy as an agent of regulation in a context of purported crisis of the neoliberal order, while its multiple role (direct and indirect) in tech-based urbanised economies remains overlooked. In this paper, I analyse the key role of the state in tech-driven economies. Drawing on my research, I explore the actually existing role of the state in urbanised knowledge economies, highlighting that the state does not intervene in a traditional Keynesian sense of regional economic planning, but through a ‘strategic urbanisation’ of its conduct. In recent years, mainstream urban economists have highlighted place-specific endowments such as cultural diversity, environmental amenities, and the clustering of talent as the main factors attracting competitive businesses and highly skilled human capital in one place rather than in another. In my paper, I attempt to show how entrepreneurial urban economies are strategically constructed through a complex ‘politics of operations’ (financial, cultural, logistics) enacted by both the local and the national states. In the concluding part of my talk, I discuss the implications of my conceptual perspective for the analysis of the French Tech Initiative.

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