This chapter focuses on the justice of sharing voices and stories, using case studies from my qualitative research. This always partial and challenging process of storytelling will be viewed through performative timespaces of encounter as a means to reflect on the potential for transformative research from the perspective of researchers and participants. Work by Coddington (2017) and others (for example, Koch, 2020) has stressed the need to unpack and critique the relationships between participant voice, authenticity and empowerment in light of feminist and anti- colonial work. Montero- Sieburth (2020), for example, stresses the need to acknowledge that researchers do not ‘speak for the other’ and that allowing participant voices ‘to appear’ does not necessarily bring about justice, change or transformation. To help counter this, Montero-Sieburth stresses the need for researchers to discover their own voices, which forms an important aspect of what this chapter attempts to do.

This body of work therefore discusses the need for critical interpretations of representation and the value and purpose of academic research in terms of how social and political justice is achieved and for whom. I aim to add to such work by viewing interviews I have been involved in as encounters through which voices can be shared, brought to a different audience and potentially be empowering. By doing so, the chapter will engage with the notion of performative timespace (Mavroudi, 2019) in order to highlight how research encounters may be seen as part of an ethical but also emotional project of justice and care. Through this, I stress the need for active reflection and negotiation of power imbalances as we navigate our own positionality as individuals and as part of a research team (Fertaly and Fluri, 2019), the positionality of our participants but also the wider frameworks of universities and ethics committees.

I argue that justice needs to be framed in broad and flexible ways and not just in terms of impact or outcome, but also through the very materiality of doing empirical research and communicating with people in mundane and ‘gentle’ ways (Pottinger, 2020). It is through such communication, ‘deep listening’ (Koch, 2020) and embodied encounters that difference is articulated and grappled with so that we can potentially learn about/ from one another through timespaces.

There is an urgent need to pluralize knowledge inquiry and production in the research about Rwanda. Conceptualized as a form of epistemicide (or, killing of knowledge), the systemic biases and highly partisan nature of Western epistemologies continues to deny the diverse ways that Rwandans make sense of their lives (Rutazibwa, 2014). Undoing epistemic injustice requires enabling individuals whose knowledge has been historically invalidated to assert their rights to contribute to, and derive benefits from, the shared knowledge pool (de Sousa Santos, 2015). In the Rwandan context, alongside including more Rwandan academic voices, epistemic justice requires reimagining research approaches, methodologies and practices so as to include and value Rwandan's lived experiences, expertise and insights as legitimate sources of knowledge (Ndahinda et al, 2022). Making such transformations to research practice is more important than ever, in the context of wider calls to dismantle epistemic injustice in Africa- centred research more widely (Ogone, 2017) and the reformulations of scholarly activity in the service of decoloniality (Esson et al, 2017; Barker and Pickerill, 2020; for example, Daley and Murrey, 2022).

This chapter reflects on our efforts to create community- centred spaces for collaborative research, as a tool for including Rwanda's multiple epistemic contributors as part of a critical and pluralized academic landscape. Destabilizing notions of ‘the field’ in academic research (Radcliffe, 2022), community- centric research using methods that are participatory and collaborative can facilitate the types of dialogue necessary for the urgent work of undoing academic knowledge hierarchies (Zavala, 2013; Barker and Pickerill, 2020). However, inherently intersubjective (Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021), the researcher identities, positions, time pressures and funding deadlines that are brought to such spaces generate the power dynamics and hierarchies suffusing the practice of community- centred research. Focusing on our navigations of the competing practicalities and ethics around creating spaces for epistemic inclusion, in this chapter we surface the compromises that play out. We suggest that the potential of community- centred research for working towards epistemic justice can remain unfulfilled because of the relational nature of research spaces, where the inclusion and valuing of diverse knowledge contributions become subsumed to the pressures of academic expectations and project deadlines.

I sometimes wonder if there is any emptier word in the geographer's lexicon than justice. Those of us who style ourselves as critical or radical geographers, as I do, use the term all the time. We use it for a lot of reasons. It is a marker of our politics. It is a sign of our solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed. It is an orientation for our research (against the bad, in favour of the good; against the technocratic and the irrelevant, in favour of the social and the pertinent). It is a dog whistle, only to the left rather than the right. It is a noun that just sounds good when modified by geography's key concepts: spatial, environmental, landscape, climate …. It is just so bloody obvious: we all know what justice is and we want it now.

But of course, it is not at all obvious, no more obvious than those other famously intuitive and remarkably complex terms so central to the geographer's lexicon, like nature and culture (Williams, 1976). Yet unlike nature and culture, justice has not accreted the same volume of theoretical debate and attention these two have. There is a bit, of course: David Harvey's (1973; 1996) significant explorations of liberal and radical justice theory; David Smith's (1994) spatializations of the (primarily) liberal tradition; Laura Pulido's (1996) exploration of environmental justice movements in New Mexico and California; Clive Barnett's (2017) dismissal of justice as such as an organizing principle and his argument instead for prioritizing injustice in geographical theorizing; and to a much lesser extent Edward Soja's (2010) promotion of spatial justice. And there is significant work by fellow travellers, such as Susan Fainstein's arguments for a Just City (2007). But on the whole, justice theorizing – especially engaging deeply with the extensive literatures on justice in political philosophy and critical theory – is quite thin on the ground within academic geography. There is, I think, a good reason for this. But there is also good reason for why justice theorizing ought to become a priority among critical, radical geographers and other theorists interested in space and spatiality.

The terms ‘energy justice’ and ‘climate justice’ are increasingly prevalent in scholarly, government and activist debates on the environment, and readers of this volume have likely encountered them in contemporary conversations about tackling climate change. The energy sector contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions (US EPA, nd). The production of energy is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions; in 2010 the energy supply sector accounted for 35 per cent of global emissions (Bruckner et al, 2014). Transforming the energy sector is of paramount importance to taking action on climate change. One of the main imperatives of climate action is to decarbonize the energy sector such that as a society we derive energy services from sources that do not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The energy sector is crucial for providing much- needed energy services to humanity, such as lighting, cooking, heating, cooling, communications, transportation and powering most livelihood activities, for the benefit of people all over the world. These benefits are not evenly distributed, however, as we have tremendous inequalities in the quality and quantity of energy access, such that one in ten of the global population does not have access to electricity, and 2.6 billion people rely on biomass energy sources for their subsistence needs in ways that cause premature death and disease in the most marginalized populations in the world (SEforALL, nd). The geographic and social spread of energy injustices follows a predictable pattern of other inequalities in the world such that low- and middle- income countries have a larger percentage of their populations without access to reliable and safe energy services. Furthermore, within any country or region, historically marginalized groups such as Tribes or rural populations tend to be provided fewer energy services than wealthier or more privileged groups.

Energy and climate justice are relatively new terms that emerged in the late 2000s and can mean a variety of different kinds of research and work. Scholars from various disciplines working on energy have articulated how energy, climate and justice are, or should be, related. At the outset of this chapter I provide a brief literature review for the reader to feel situated in the literature. However, this is not a chapter about the intellectual, philosophical or political history of the concept of justice and how that theoretically applies to scholarly work on energy and climate.

The three chapters in this section, written by Corine Wood- Donnelly, the Vegan Geography Collective (VGC) and Don Mitchell, reflect on the impact, opportunities and issues of working with justice in their respective fields. Throughout it is clear that justice needs constant engagement, both theoretically and materially, in order to ‘refill’ it as a concept and prevent the dangers that could arise from leaving it as an empty signifier. There is therefore a need for justice to be materialized through marginal and exploited agents, spaces and relations with engaging with the more- than- human acting as one route to challenge hegemonic constructions of justice. For the VGC, just research needs to challenge anthropocentric ideals through foregrounding a fluid and embodied multispecies justice. Wood- Donnelly highlights the need for a space itself to have voice, reflecting on the necessary challenge that justice theories present to the common conceptual frameworks in International Relations, arguing that it poses critical questions of the who, why and what in a discipline where, ordinarily, the state is the unit of analysis.

Nonetheless, how justice is operationalized in these arenas is less explicit and, from their reflections, it is apparent that the practice of just research in different disciplines and epistemologies requires further consideration to continue responding to the challenge that justice does, and should, pose to us as reflexive researchers.

INTRODUCTION

The extraction of economic value from urban space is a long-term feature of capitalist societies, particularly in relation to the relentless production and reproduction of land rent. The long tradition of understanding economic value and economic growth in the context of urban space as the economic value of land characterized urban studies and cognate fields during high Fordism and Keynesianism – and it remains a key aspect in the present conjuncture of heightened commodification of the housing sector. Economic value extraction from urban spaces and urban living, however, has expanded during the last few decades, in the globalized era dominated by ICT. Urban value extraction and the emergence of algorithmic spaces have become two sides of the same coin. In more recent times, the advent of digital platforms has diversified the extraction of economic value from cities and urban environments, not only from their built environment but from a variety of sectors related to the essential foundations of everyday life, such as infrastructure, mobility, leisure, education. As such, the expansion of the “urban field” (Friedmann & Miller 1965) as it unfolds today can be understood as an intensification and diversification of the urbanization of capital and as a significant response to the various global crises that have taken place since the 1990s in the world economy.

Over the last few decades, the urban field has been closely connected to the urban technological paradigm. In other words, cities and wider urban environments have become primary sites involved in the creation and extraction of economic value in the techno-capitalism era. The last four decades, in particular, have seen the succession of different manifestations of the urban predominance in the economization of knowledge and the technology sector: informational cities, science parks and technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s, smart cities in the 2000s and the 2010s, startup ecosystems, innovation districts, innovation complexes and the platform economy in the 2010s and the 2020s. By following the logic of Sharon Zukin (2020), we comprehend these spaces as discursive, organizational/ institutional and physical.

Urban environments have become primary sites in the creation and extraction of economic value in the age of techno-monopoly capitalism. We have suggested in the previous chapters that, given the osmosis between the dominant pattern of capitalist companies and urban environments, technology corporations and digital platforms have become significant constituents of the contemporary urban field. This has resulted in the technology-driven colonization of key aspects of urban life. Importantly, the contemporary condition has been made possible by the corporatized state that is closely implicated with the operations of today's techno-monopolists. In short, the control of the urban field and its human logistics – as a reservoir of entrepreneurship, labour, human capital and forms of life – is crucial for techno-monopoly capitalism.

This book has intended to offer a conceptually situated critique of the theorization of innovation-oriented urban economies in mainstream economics, particularly exemplified by the work of “superstar” economists such as Paul Romer, Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser and Enrico Moretti. Our critique has drawn attention to their elitist conceptions of agglomeration economies, human capital and economic growth, exposing how these conceptions have the effect of drawing a veil over the knowledge value of the urban labour force at large and, in doing so, of justifying social and spatial inequalities in contemporary societies.

At the same time, we have also engaged with ideas that are closer to our perspective, but from which we maintain a critical distance, namely the techno-or digital-feudalism and rentierism theses that have gained wide currency within the academic left and the public sphere in recent years, proposed by highly mediatized theorists such as Yanis Varoufakis and Mariana Mazzucato. Rather than the advent of an allegedly pre-capitalist, neo-feudalist era forged by the power of a new tech oligarchy, we in turn understand the contemporary age of techno-monopoly as an intensification of the capitalist logic of surplus value extraction in the context of post-Fordist cognitive capitalism. Despite their evident differences, it seems to us that what both the mainstream urban economists and the techno-feudal critics have in common is a kind of idealization of a lost “good capitalism” – identified with urban innovative entrepreneurs and the state-led entrepreneurial economy, respectively – whose potential in their view is today obfuscated by the power of Big Tech corporations.

INTRODUCTION

The politics of urban revival has characterized neoliberal societal and political regimes and experimentations since the late 1970s and the early 1980s. This process has taken place in several nation-states across the globe, and it has been marked by an intensive technologization and monopolization of the urban field in the operations of capital. In this chapter we first discuss the concept of the urban field. Second, we go on to argue that the urban field is a phenomenon that should be approached through an analysis of the changing relationship between the nation-state, the local state (cities) and capital. In so doing, we highlight the conjunctural nature of the urban field and its character as an open, politically constructed and connective societal phenomenon. In short, this is not only a strategic-relational field of struggle through which different social actors and factions of capital seek to operate, but also a field of action that reconstitutes the urban fabric at a given historical conjuncture in a specific manner. In the third part of the chapter we discuss the fluctuating essence of the urban field.

The nationalization of the urban field during the twentieth century indicated a specific coming together of capital, the local state and the nation-state. During the past few decades, the urban field has been increasingly constituted in the strategic urbanization of the state, a process that ties transnational capital, the nation-state and the local state tightly together in the name of innovation, technology and economic growth (see Moisio & Rossi 2020). In this process, the nation-state has been a constitutive force, as our discussion on the digitalization of the Finnish nation-state demonstrates in this chapter. Here, digitalization has emerged as “a method of government that can procure the nation's prosperity” (Foucault 2008: 13). We believe that the Finnish case is relevant in disclosing some of the key processes of the corporatized state, not least because the “neoliberal revolution in Finland” (Patomäki 2007: 13) has been characteristically a technocratic process whereby technological knowledge, and the whole techno-industrial complex, has assumed a pivotal role.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores how place-specific forms of life have become a key site for economic value generation in today's techno-monopoly capitalism. It does so by investigating Naples’ pathway to becoming a mass-tourism city and, more particularly, a laboratory for experiential tourism. We argue that the analysis of Naples effectively discloses some of the ways in which the so-called experience economy is constituted as a crucial component of the urban field and its economic value extraction processes in the age of techno-monopoly capitalism. In this particular instance, the urban field brings together technology monopoly capital through the operations of digital platforms, the corporatized state, social polarization and the commodification and monetization of urban symbols and forms of life.

The conceptualization of the experience economy originated with management theorists who were the first to explore in the late 1990s the marketization of human living and local forms of life in post-Fordist economies (Pine II & Gilmore 1998). The emergence of the experience economy, therefore, occurred well before the advent of corporate-owned digital platforms and online social networks, which have significantly contributed to the recent reconfiguring of the experience economy as a crucial component of the urban field in the age of techno-monopoly. Through the analysis of Naples, the chapter makes visible the recent economization of human living and place-specific forms of urban life, as well as the negative outcomes that this economization and the related urban regeneration brings about: a new housing shortage, displacement of longtime urban dwellers and the exploitation of living labour, to mention but a few. In doing so, we continue to examine the dynamics and contradictions of the urban field in the age of techno-monopoly and the role played by the contemporary corporatized state in the orchestration of urban economies that are designed to extract value from place-specific urban forms of life.

The previous three chapters in particular have looked at the way in which the urban field has become a key site for observing the transformations of startup entrepreneurship, labour and the invention as well as utilization of human capital and the related mechanisms of economic value creation and extraction in contemporary techno-monopoly capitalism.

This is the era of techno-monopoly power in which techno-capitalism has colonized not only the internet, as critics signalled in the early stages of this era (McChesney 2013; Morozov 2013), but increasingly also key aspects of everyday life, with the advent of ubiquitous digital platforms. Cities and larger urban and metropolitan environments have provided fertile ground – or what this book conceptualizes as the urban field – for the rise and fast growth of techno-monopoly power.

What is the techno-monopoly we are talking about? Notions such as “Big Tech”, “tech giants”, “tech behemoths”, “tech titans” and the like, have become customarily used in the public sphere to refer to the rise of a narrow set of technology corporations – operating in the sphere of circulation rather than that of production – that have acquired a monopolistic position in terms of market power. The phenomenon of giant tech monopolies has led a growing number of authors on the academic left and beyond to signal the emergence of a new era of “neo-feudalism”, variously defined as “digital feudalism” or “techno-feudalism”, characterized by the dominance of rentierism over capitalist profit-making and the rise of a new high-tech oligarchy (Christophers 2022; Dean 2020; Kotkin 2020; Mazzucato 2019; Varoufakis 2023). The techno-feudalism thesis stems from a pre-existing tendency within critical social thought that interprets neoliberal globalization as a kind of neo-medieval order in which transnational technocrats act as novel princes supported by vassals who are subjected to their unaccountable power (Ziegler 2005). Amongst the proponents of the techno-feudalism thesis, Varoufakis (2023) has argued that a historic mutation of capital into “cloud capital” has taken place through the development of technology, the increasing power of tech companies and the ways in which technology and algorithms, for instance, are currently being used by finance corporations and governments. Accordingly, in his view, we are moving from capitalism to feudalism, the way of governing land that prevailed in Europe in the Middle Ages. For Varoufakis, during the past two to three decades, barriers have emerged in the digital space of the internet.

INTRODUCTION

The advent of the platform economy with the eruption and rapid growth of digital platforms and related technology-based economic forms since the early 2010s has revived the political and scholarly interest in cities and urban areas as reservoirs of an economically undervalued service workforce. Despite their devaluation, service workers provide goods and services that are crucial to the pursuit of individual and societal well-being in today's capitalist societies. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the multiple crises that have followed it have further deepened the perception that contemporary societies increasingly depend on a reserve of low-paid, overworked “essential workers”, or “key workers”, as they have been variously defined during the emergency phases of lockdowns and sanitary restrictions. These workers not only provide crucial goods and services, but their presence is ubiquitous across the economic sectors, starting with health, food, transport, environmental services and education.

The notion of gig workers and that of essential or key workers are distinct but complementary in significant manners. The term “gig workers” refers to people working on a part-time basis for online platforms and other tech-based economic entities. These labourers are characterized by the fact of being in a variety of casual employment relationships, as they can be recruited as independent contractors, as temporary staff or in other mixed arrangements such as freelance and on-call workers. In terms of income, gig workers are among the worst-paid service workers, as several analyses have shown (e.g. Zipperer et al. 2022). For their part, essential workers, and the sub-group of “essential critical infrastructure workers”, as they have been defined by the Federal Government in the US during the pandemic, are “those who conduct a range of operations and services in industries that are essential to ensure the continuity of critical functions” (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/categories-essential-workers.html).

Gig workers and many of the essential/ key workers are frontline workers, which means that their work entails continuous interaction with the general public as either customers or recipients of their services.

INTRODUCTION

This book builds on the argument that the urban field provides today's techno-monopoly capitalism, as it has been defined here, with key sites for economic value generation: namely, labour, human capital, startups and forms of life. The third of these sites is, therefore, technology startup companies, a particular form of early-stage entrepreneurship that has come to dominate the business ecosystems of a growing number of cities and urban areas across the world after the advent of the information technology era.

This chapter shows how the urban startup economy should be primarily understood as an utterly speculative process aimed at creating and manipulating the market value of startup companies. Indeed, in our register, the startup economy is one of the key constituents of the urban field in the age of techno-monopoly capitalism. The basic idea is to demonstrate that the actual appearance of the startup economy as a capitalist formation effectively conceals its essence. In such a view, the startup economy appears as an ecosystem comprising high-skill labour and firms, digital technologies and dense urban environments expected to function as innovation machines. This appearance has been consolidated also by mainstream scholarship on startup economies and startup urban ecosystems. We, in turn, go on to argue that to understand the essence of this economy one needs to examine the ways in which the speculative process of valuation, the contributions by the state, and social polarization, actually constitute the startup economy.

In a mainstream scholarly view, the techno-capitalist economy signals the increasing significance of knowledge and innovation in the generation of profits. In such a view, the techno-capitalist economy is characterized by a strong legacy of what one may call a novelty tradition. This is a perspective that draws either explicitly or implicitly from Marshallian economics and underlines the role of agglomeration economies in creating economic value through a combination of knowledge spillovers resulting from spatial proximity, scale economies allowing input sharing among firms, and dynamics of labour pooling associated with urbanization or more generally with industrial concentrations (Rosenthal & Strange 2004).