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).

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter has shown how the capitalist imperative on cities that dictates to attract an elite of high-skilled workers as a way to boost their economies ends up devaluing the majority of workers who are supposed to be low-skilled according to conventional parameters of labour-value measurement. This conventional view stems from the so-called “skill-biased technical change” thesis, an economic theory that has become commonsensical in mainstream analyses of the impact of the information technology “revolution” on labour and the economy. This view is premised on the assumption that the influx of highly skilled workers is crucial to a local economy and therefore also to local labour markets. Accordingly, the increase of highly paid knowledge workers is thought to be functional to the development of the consumption-based service economy.

The emphasis that is placed today on the measurement of knowledge and skills as an alleged parameter for the productivity of labour is derived from the economic theory of human capital, which traces its origins back to the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when it was first proposed by the Chicago School economists. Since then, human capital has become one of the most influential concepts in economics and the wider social sci-ences concerned with education, learning and more generally with the investigation of knowledge-based societies, such as sociology, pedagogy and management studies. Simultaneously, the human capital approach has become highly influential in policy-making in both the Global North and the Global South. However, compared with policy ideas and recipes commonly associated with neoliberalism and its more distinctive eco-nomic policies (such as monetarism, tax cuts and tariff rebates, labour flexibility, privatization of state-owned enterprises, attraction of foreign direct investment, export-led growth), the theory of human capital has not received equal attention from a critical standpoint in urban studies, human geography and cognate fields.

This chapter, therefore, aims to explore in more depth the trajectory of human capital theory and its political and intellectual reception since the Second World War years up to now, as its influence has been decisive in the transitioning to today's techno-monopoly capitalism.

It is difficult to find people who do not like trees. Trees have cheerleaders across the social classes; young and old, rich and poor, left and right. There is a vocal minority who believe that trees should be left well alone. What, they ask, is the environmental gain of chopping them down and bringing them out of the forest? Well, the answer is that when it comes to tackling climate change our forests are only half the story – and hence only half the answer. We can build with wood, wood that stores carbon and substitutes for much more carbon-intensive building materials. Without doubt wood is special. As one of the champions of building with wood, Vancouver-based architect Michael Green, has put it: “Wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent on it and we are not comfortable with that. But that's the way it should be: nature's fingerprints in the built environment”.

We have been building houses from wood for thousands of years. Most European cities still have a few timber-framed buildings dating back 300 years or more. York in the UK is a good example. Here you will find The Shambles – a street of medieval timber-framed buildings with a strong Harry Potter feel to them. Strasbourg, home of one of the two seats of the European Parliament – and somewhere I travelled to every month for five years as an MEP – has some fine examples of old timber-framed buildings (Figure 2.1). Some of these were carefully rebuilt after the Second World War but to the untrained eye look as old as those that were not damaged.

When these buildings were erected, they had only one purpose – that of providing shelter, a home. However, although unknown at the time, they were also safely storing the carbon that the timber had sequestrated (soaked up) when it was growing as a tree in the forest.

Let us recap. The climate crisis we face necessitates two vital responses that are both equally critical and need to be enacted in tandem: an end to nearly all greenhouse gas emissions including CO2 into the atmosphere and the removal from the atmosphere of existing greenhouse gases including CO2. A major contribution to the first of these tasks can be achieved by substituting the numerous carbon-intensive materials that we currently use in our built environment, including concrete, steel, plaster board, plastic, brick and block, and replacing them with timber-based products that store carbon (see Chapters 1–4). The second task can be tackled in part by planting trees in as many settings and configurations as possible. This will involve improving our sustainable forest management techniques, extending our existing forest cover as and where appropriate, moving closer to harvesting the net annual increment across all European countries (see Chapter 7) and redeploying abandoned farmland for afforestation (see Chapter 9). Together, these steps will increase the amount of CO2 that is sequestered.

Having increased our tree cover we also need to increase our use of timber as this demand is key to driving the “forest pump”, which we discussed in Chapter 2. Ideally as much timber should go into long-life harvested construction materials as possible so that we can store as much carbon as possible in the built environment and reduce the use of carbon-intensive materials. The felled trees are then replaced with new growth enabling the “forest pump” to continue its vital work of sequestering more carbon and then moving it via the timber to be stored in the built environment.

As George Orwell noted, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle”, hence it is not surprising that although timber offers a significant solution to climate change very few people realize this. As I have argued, timber is the material we must use to replace our main carbon-intensive construction materials, especially concrete and steel. It can both substitute for these materials and safely store carbon. To help us understand timber, and why it has such potential to help us, we should visit the forest. This book is pro-timber, but also very much pro-forest.

Almost a third of the world's land surface is covered by forests. Europe's forest cover is 35 per cent – over a third of the continent. UK forest cover stands at 13 per cent. Within the EU Finland (74 per cent of total land area) and Sweden (69 per cent) are the most heavily forested countries, followed by Slovenia (61 per cent), Estonia (57 per cent) and Latvia (55 per cent). The Netherlands (11 per cent), Ireland (11 per cent) and Malta (1 per cent) are the least forested countries. If we consider things at a European level – which brings in the Russian Federation, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. – then forest cover is around 1,000 million hectares, which is about 30 times the size of Poland (see Figure 6.1). The largest forest area in this wider geography is located in the Russian Federation.

All trees – big or small, deciduous or coniferous, on their own or with other trees in a forest – have the ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and exhale oxygen in return, which is why forests are often rightly referred to as “the lungs of the earth”. However, as Harald Mauser of the European Forest Institute points out, “This is reversed when trees are dead and decay. This releases almost all the CO2 they stored except a very small part that was transferred to the soil via litter and roots”.

As the apartheid regime in South Africa entered its death throes the octogenarian president of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, became increasingly worried that he would die before Mandela was freed, apartheid was vanquished and a new democratic South Africa was born via the ballot box. He therefore took to haranguing, and only in a semi-friendly way, the staff of the AAM when he visited us at the movement's headquarters in an old piano workshop in Mandela Street, Camden, London. To help reinforce his key message that we all needed to work harder he always told us the same, short, humorous tale. On a “recent” visit to his spiritual home – the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield near Leeds – he recounted that over breakfast he and his fellow octogenarians had fallen into a conversation about the pros and cons of buying a new suit at such an advanced age, whereupon the oldest member of the community, who was in his nineties, piped up “New suit? New suit? I worry about buying green bananas”.

When it comes to climate breakdown we are without question in “green banana” territory. There really is very little time left. In the words of Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning. It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action”.