Visionary Politics: Technologies of Government in the Capital of Innovation

ABSTRACT

Taking up experiments in “civic innovation” as windows into the making of new urban worlds, I attempt in this essay to map out the parameters of a novel framework for municipal rule and account for the conditions underlying its ascendance in San Francisco, CA. I explore how productions of urban space and nature today serve as the means and objects of an emerging mode of government premised on yoking all forms of urban activity to the dictates of innovation. When proponents of civic innovation pursue particular forms of intervention in the built environment to constitute urban subjects as human capital, they imbibe, reproduce, and enact normative notions about the nature of the city as a problem to manage. Though the project of civic innovation is neither complete nor inevitable, the political vision animating it entails the subsumption of urban life as such within a rubric of decision making modeled on the market.

KEYWORDS:

• Cities
• civic innovation
• nature
• San Francisco
• technology
• urban politics

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Erik Jönsson, Wim Carton, and Beatriz Bustos as well as three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

My account of this scene is drawn from informal interviews with participants and a livestream of the Urban Data Canvas Hackathon Morning Presentation posted online by Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (2014). This essay draws from and extends an earlier piece on the politics of civic innovation in San Francisco (Elrick and Payne 2016).

In publicizing the event, organizers deployed a conception of metabolism that emphasized the homeostatic and biophysical dimensions of urban nature. Urban political ecologists, by way of contrast, have mobilized notions of metabolism to highlight sociomaterial transformations and the historical production of urban space. For a neat unpacking of divergent formulations of urban metabolism and a broader discussion of the use of metabolic metaphors, see Gandy (2004).

As opposed to the classical liberal capitalist subject of the free worker who sells his or her labor power on the market as a commodity, the figure of human capital—popularized by Gary Becker of the Chicago School—denotes a self-investing subject who perpetually seeks to enhance his or her value and attract investors across all spheres of life, including those not previously qualified in economic terms (Foucault 2008, 215–233; Brown 2015, 30–42). Feher (2009) suggests that human capital designates a “type of subjectivity” that is “simultaneously presupposed and targeted by neoliberal policies” (23).

An exception to this silence occurred when one city supervisor lambasted the Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program as an example of “corporate welfare” (Lamb 2014). Yet even this appraisal neglected the project’s more radical dimension: Not only does it mobilize public resources on behalf of private interests, but it sets out to reconstitute the public itself on the model of a startup.

This general formulation animates urban discourse and cuts across a variety of academic, political, and theoretical affiliations. For a brief but indicative survey, see Scott and Storper (2015), Bettencourt (n.d.), Glaeser (2011), and Florida (2002).

Jacobs’s account of cities as “problems in organized complexity” drew extensively from an essay by Warren Weaver (1958), long-time director of life sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. For a discussion of how Weaver and the foundation influenced her approach to cities and planning, see Laurence (2016).

The private appropriation of surplus value undoubtedly animates civic innovation as both a potential effect of the project and an aim of some of its supporters. But as a governing agenda, civic innovation at root works to promote a form of economization that need not necessarily involve outright monetization. Brown’s (2015) discussion of the character of neoliberalism as a governing rationality is instructive here: “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (31).