Crypto-urban statecraft: post-pandemic urban governance experiments in Miami

ABSTRACT

In this Urban Pulse essay, we explore post-COVID-19 pandemic experiments with integrating cryptocurrency into urban governance. Drawing on the case of the City of Miami, we draw attention to practices and imaginaries of crypto-urban statecraft. This concept signals the recalibration of urban governance using cryptographic technologies. In Miami, crypto-urban statecraft has emerged as a response to multiple layers of crisis associated with COVID-19 and the Anthropocene: the pandemic's impact on the region's tourism and real estate sectors, and growing fears over the threats climate change poses to the region's real estate markets. In response to these conditions, crypto-urban statecraft leverages fantasies of blockchain-mediated transformations of social and political life to advance two distinct but related strategies: the first, a “hostile takeover” of urban space and territory via elite tech investment and real estate speculation; the second, an attempt to deterritorialize urban government from that same volatile urban space, via an increasingly abstracted “third nature” of an informationalized political economy. Crypto-urban statecraft, we argue, signals ongoing changes in urban governance that may increasingly define the terrain of post-pandemic urban politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Cryptocurrency
• blockchain
• urban governance
• pandemic
• anthropocene

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the audiences at the “Urban governance under pandemic urbanism: what next for cities?” session at the virtual 2022 AAG meeting, two anonymous reviewers, and Pablo Bose for valuable feedback on previous versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1511743745837998083?s=20&t=Q-5tsavfk7BR18y4FcH2aw. Accessed 24 May 2022.

2 https://www.miamigov.com/My-Government/City-Officials/Mayor-Francis-Suarez/Bitcoin-White-Paper. Accessed 24 May 2022.

3 https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1489009285447262211?s=20&t=2iQmS_ukQKwYl0evEB6-5w. Accessed 24 May 2022.

4 Sarah Molinari and Kevin Grove are employed at Florida International University but did not participate in this mine-a-thon.

5 Here we might note that other cities have begun their own crypto experiments, including Fort Worth, Texas, which recently built its own Bitcoin mining farm at City Hall, and is now the first government in the country to mine Bitcoin. New York City is also attempting to become a US crypto hub. NYCCoin was the second CityCoin launched after MiamiCoin.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Race, Risk and Resilience: Building a Local-to-Global “Commons for Justice” project (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 2008-09004).