Andrea Pollio | Politecnico di Torino (original) (raw)

Papers by Andrea Pollio

Urban Forum

Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of... more Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of “queer infrastructure”. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assumed to be unrelated to studies of sexuality and located in the urban African context. Here we centre questions of becoming, affect, and relationality. As an orientation, we discuss what can be “seen” both when entering the field through queer networks and by seeing urban spaces through queerness. In doing so, we suggest that sexuality is always present in urban research, even when not explicitly so.

Journal of Cultural Economy

Nóesis. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 2016

This article is concerned with the discursive rationality of the smart city, in the context where... more This article is concerned with the discursive rationality of the smart city, in the context where it became a powerful narrative of urban change in crisisridden Italy-right after the first stage of the Euro crisis in 2011-2012. While functioning as a vague signifier that could be used to rebrand anything urban as "smart", the smart city also portrayed cities as actors of change, as "hackers" that could leverage technological innovation to respond to social and economic crises. Starting from this observation, two arguments are explored in the paper. First, those smart city narratives follow a long tradition of biological urbanism, combining techno-utopian imageries with the more mundane question of addressing economic downturns. Secondly, that the depiction of cities as organic growth machines was, at least discursively, an experiment in rethinking the welfare state for an age of austerity.

City, 2013

T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is ... more T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is exemplified empirically by three of the most important protest movements of 2011: the Egyptian uprisings, culminating with the rallies in Tahrir Square, Cairo; the Spanish movement of the Indignados, with the occupation of Puerta del Sol, Madrid; and the American-based Occupy Wall Street movement, with camps in the relatively unknown then Zuccotti Park, a few meters away from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Bearing a critical challenge to the dominant interpretations of these phenomena, Gerbaudo offers the reader a genuinely rich insight into contemporary collective action, on the basis of an ideographic analysis of media practices. The latter is conducted through field research that drew on 80 interviews with activists and sympathizers, and on social media outlets such as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Thus, a very precise account frames the events and the key figures of these three protest movements. On the theoretical side, the book finds its roots in the work of Zygmut Bauman (2000, 2001), Alberto Melucci (1996) and Ernesto Laclau (2005), but it shapes an original interpretative framework to explain the relationship between online action and offline demonstrations. There have been two mainstream tales of the events that transpired in Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. In the first case, many tales of the pundits that commented on the rallies limited the role of social media to their communication opportunities: Facebook was used to organize the events, Twitter to set the real-time logistics and YouTube to share the narrative with the rest of world. The second account is the one that links the recent literature on digital activism to the autobiographical accounts of those who took part in the 2011 protests. It is the chronicle of a leaderless horizontal power structure, the tale of social movements that are enabled by anything but the invisible threads of the Web. Gerbaudo confronts both tales, showing first that the mobilizing role of social media was not only at play in their technological properties, but in a wider acceptance of what a medium means, and second that the movements enabled by social media were not leaderless, horizontal or unbidden organizations. Gerbaudo’s argument is that social media was responsible for the construction of what he calls choreography of assembly, ‘a process of symbolic construction of public space which facilitates and guides the physical assembling of a highly dispersed and individualized constituency’ (5). The author’s claim is that such processes of construction are not at all spontaneous, but require choreographers, liquid leaders that set a digital/physical emotional space for collective action. It is through the metaphor of the choreography of assembly that this book offers an

Urban Geography, 2016

In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice o... more In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise.

This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of it... more This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of its cultural infrastructure through a process of classification and mapping of the City’s cultural venues. Its multi-layered database assists with the design of the most appropriate and effective policies to enhance the cultural and creative life of the city. The report provides: An explanation of the concept of culture that has been operationalised; A detailed rationale of the cultural classification framework adopted; An elaboration of the key methodological issues addressed in the collation of a consolidated database of cultural venues and infrastructure in the City, and the mapping technologies deployed; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribution of 3,106 cultural venues that were mapped and broken down into spatial, cultural industry, and venue types; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribut...

RIVISTA GEOGRAFICA ITALIANA

Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affer... more Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affermate nella ricerca geografica fino a diventarne una componente fondamentale. Eppure ‘fare etnografia' in geografia non è certo né scontato: richiede un adattamento alle esigenze e agli obiettivi della riflessione geografica, ma anche alla complessità del ‘campo' della ricerca nelle scienze sociali contemporanee. In particolare, i tempi, i luoghi e le forme di un'etnografia thick (Geertz, 1973) sembrano inadatte a confrontarsi con le complessità spazio-temporali delle dinamiche socio-spaziali attuali, con le trasformazioni del campo di ricerca, del soggetto che fa ricerca e del contesto in cui si fa ricerca, ma anche, e più radicalmente, con i limiti derivanti dal retaggio coloniale della ricerca etnografica. Attraverso il riferimento a cinque radicalmente diverse esperienze di ricerca sul campo, l'articolo pone la questione del fare etnografia nella ricerca geografica ed ...

First Monday, 2021

Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outc... more Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online game that sought to communicate complex intersections of climate policy and science. We focus here on secondary effects of the workshops and game. On the one hand, outputs such as digital games respond to renewed desires for and from researchers to reach beyond scholarly sanctuaries and engage with real-world issues and communities in ways that question barriers of expertise and institutional entitlement. On the other, such dissolutions expose gaps in competency that can unnerve both researchers and participants, interrogating the expediency of collaborative game design and evaluation, and posing questions about the broader role and scope of ...

City of Sydney and the whole metropolis. Because of the complexity of emerging trends and issues,... more City of Sydney and the whole metropolis. Because of the complexity of emerging trends and issues, the recommendations should not be read as a linear list of isolated solutions. Instead, they should be viewed as a repertoire or toolkit on which the City of Sydney can draw in the difficult task of prioritising multi-layered attention and actions to safeguard and nurture cultural creation and production in the city.

We also would like to extend our thanks to Steve Hillier and Pinar Cabadag from the City of Sydne... more We also would like to extend our thanks to Steve Hillier and Pinar Cabadag from the City of Sydney for the provision of the Floorspace and Employment Survey database and other GIS resources. 6. Case study of Redfern Street Village area…………….………78 6.1. Boundary of Redfern Street Village area 6.2. Cultural venues by spatial type and their characteristics 6.3. Cultural venues by value chain role 6.4. Implications for City of Sydney cultural policy making 6.5. Section summary 7. Mapping of cultural venues by sector………………………….97 7.1. Mapping of the music sector and its distribution 7.2. Mapping of the visual art sector and its distribution 7.3. Mapping the architecture and design sector and its distribution 8. Evaluation of the methodology………………………………….111 8.1. Rationale for the methodology 8.2. Limitations of the classification framework 8.3. Limitations of the data collection 9. Recommendations and future directions for cultural mapping ……...………………………………………………………..….118 10. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………126 11. References……………………………………………………….………..128 11.1. Articles and reports 11.2. Websites

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Technology incubators are one of the infrastructural ends at the urban frontiers of capital. When... more Technology incubators are one of the infrastructural ends at the urban frontiers of capital. When built in areas of poverty in cities of the Global South, these hubs cultivate entrepreneurialism and opportunities for profit at the intersection of development and technological innovation. They promise to address the social challenges of urban marginality with remunerative market solutions. In Cape Town, Africa's so-called Silicon Cape, the largest technology incubator of the city ventured into its most marginal township-Khayelitsha-in 2015, pledging to lay the infrastructural groundwork for fruitful entrepreneurial innovation. This article recollects, ethnographically, an important moment at the outset of this incubator: a fifty-fourhour franchised hackathon, Startup Weekend, which took place in September 2015 as an inaugural event. The argument of this article is that such an incubator was a sociotechnical formation meant to create the conditions for entrepreneurship in a deprived urban area, relying on a web of material and immaterial connections; that it materialized the rationalities of millennial development as well as alternative goals; and that, as infrastructure, it was patched with diverse aspirations and improvised forms of sociality. The article thus contributes to an urban geography of development that acknowledges its uncertainties and singularities as political openings.

Urban Studies, 2020

Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed acro... more Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols and so forth. The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called ‘silicon cape’, is the topic of this article, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work a...

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2019

for their precious help with and support of this research, as well as the three anonymous IJURR r... more for their precious help with and support of this research, as well as the three anonymous IJURR reviewers who helped me improve this article. I would also like to acknowledge the Uber drivers who generously shared their tales with me. Mistakes in representing their stories are solely mine.

Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l&... more Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l'origine della smart city e (ii) quanto le pratiche smart si differenzino o meno dalla maniera tradizionale (e neoliberista) di pensare e trasformare la citta

Journal of International Development, 2016

Can economic growth and social progress be sought at the same time, and how? This question has lo... more Can economic growth and social progress be sought at the same time, and how? This question has long haunted two crucial branches of Economics, welfare and development theories. Having been proved false the trickle-down effect, whereby low-income categories indirectly profit from capital accumulation of the wealthier (Rigney, 2010; Stiglitz, 2012), the relationship between growth and equality remains a theoretical dilemma. To solve this economic puzzle, Stiglitz and Greenwald's Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress does not only attempt to build a new theoretical pillar of Economics but also debunks several assumptions of development doctrines based on the Washington consensus and more generally on neoliberal principles. Creating a Learning Society is the result of a series of keynote lectures to honour Columbia University's graduate Kenneth J. Arrow. Drawing on his work on technological progress and learning by doing (Arrow, 1962a; Arrow, 1962b), the book sets forth an economic theory of 'learning' that provides the basis for understanding growth without neglecting the matter of uneven development. In the first part of the volume, the authors broadly illustrate their key argument: the trigger of social well-being is not to be found in the market but in technological change, phrased here as 'learning'. Markets can laterally function as instruments that foster innovation, but they are not themselves instruments for thoroughly increasing standards of living, as many economists of the invisible hand purport. Even as such, they argue, markets do not hold the stir of innovation, and they are ineffective in promoting change. Allocating resources efficiently and accumulating capital have not been the catalysts of Western prosperity. In economic terms, theories of static efficiency, that is, theories that design models to make labour and capital as efficient as possible, fail to understand that the very source of growth is not entirely economic. Growth depends instead on the creation, the negotiation, the ability to disseminate and boost knowledge, in other words on the degree to which a society is a 'learning society' (p. 9). The authors trace this peculiar 'mind-set' in the very history of modernity and explain, although simplistically, how Enlightenment thinking raised the foundations of welfare societies that could only thrive for the importance that was given to innovation (here, 'learning'), an importance that has never been merely economic. The second part of the book provides the mathematical models for understanding the consequences of the authors' claims. This second section sharpens the idea that innovation is not triggered by the markets themselves, but by policies that promote learning in a broader sense. Hence, questions belonging to various areas of the economic debate (e.g. intellectual property, financial policy, etc.) are reframed as questions of learning determinants. Part three is then dedicated to the policy implications that an innovation-based reading of growth holds for decision-makers, especially in the field of industrial and trade policies. Follows a last section composed by commentaries that place the volume in the context of contemporary Economics. A critique of Creating a Learning Society cannot but start with a consideration on economic thinking itself. As Escobar reminds us, 'the need to compose the world as a picture is central to all theories of economic development' (Escobar, 1995, p.56). In the case of Stiglitz and Greenwald's volume, the picture that sustains their theory is again the picture of a gapa word that often appears throughout the book, not only to describe learning lacunae but also to portray global imbalances between different national economies. Despite the authors' effort to address the question of growth and equality outside the market, the theory of learning that they set forth does not move outside 'the economy'. As Timothy Mitchell argued, 'the role of economics is to help make possible the economy by articulating the rules, understandings, and equivalences out of which the economic is

Urban Forum

Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of... more Drawing on Ahmed’s seminal work on queer phenomenology, this intervention proposes the concept of “queer infrastructure”. Queer infrastructure, as we deploy it, reflects both an object of and orientation towards urban research practice. As an object, we discuss the function, use, and practice of (our) queer networks, specifically for research assumed to be unrelated to studies of sexuality and located in the urban African context. Here we centre questions of becoming, affect, and relationality. As an orientation, we discuss what can be “seen” both when entering the field through queer networks and by seeing urban spaces through queerness. In doing so, we suggest that sexuality is always present in urban research, even when not explicitly so.

Journal of Cultural Economy

Nóesis. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 2016

This article is concerned with the discursive rationality of the smart city, in the context where... more This article is concerned with the discursive rationality of the smart city, in the context where it became a powerful narrative of urban change in crisisridden Italy-right after the first stage of the Euro crisis in 2011-2012. While functioning as a vague signifier that could be used to rebrand anything urban as "smart", the smart city also portrayed cities as actors of change, as "hackers" that could leverage technological innovation to respond to social and economic crises. Starting from this observation, two arguments are explored in the paper. First, those smart city narratives follow a long tradition of biological urbanism, combining techno-utopian imageries with the more mundane question of addressing economic downturns. Secondly, that the depiction of cities as organic growth machines was, at least discursively, an experiment in rethinking the welfare state for an age of austerity.

City, 2013

T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is ... more T weets and the Streets is a book on the role of social media in contemporary activism, which is exemplified empirically by three of the most important protest movements of 2011: the Egyptian uprisings, culminating with the rallies in Tahrir Square, Cairo; the Spanish movement of the Indignados, with the occupation of Puerta del Sol, Madrid; and the American-based Occupy Wall Street movement, with camps in the relatively unknown then Zuccotti Park, a few meters away from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Bearing a critical challenge to the dominant interpretations of these phenomena, Gerbaudo offers the reader a genuinely rich insight into contemporary collective action, on the basis of an ideographic analysis of media practices. The latter is conducted through field research that drew on 80 interviews with activists and sympathizers, and on social media outlets such as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Thus, a very precise account frames the events and the key figures of these three protest movements. On the theoretical side, the book finds its roots in the work of Zygmut Bauman (2000, 2001), Alberto Melucci (1996) and Ernesto Laclau (2005), but it shapes an original interpretative framework to explain the relationship between online action and offline demonstrations. There have been two mainstream tales of the events that transpired in Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. In the first case, many tales of the pundits that commented on the rallies limited the role of social media to their communication opportunities: Facebook was used to organize the events, Twitter to set the real-time logistics and YouTube to share the narrative with the rest of world. The second account is the one that links the recent literature on digital activism to the autobiographical accounts of those who took part in the 2011 protests. It is the chronicle of a leaderless horizontal power structure, the tale of social movements that are enabled by anything but the invisible threads of the Web. Gerbaudo confronts both tales, showing first that the mobilizing role of social media was not only at play in their technological properties, but in a wider acceptance of what a medium means, and second that the movements enabled by social media were not leaderless, horizontal or unbidden organizations. Gerbaudo’s argument is that social media was responsible for the construction of what he calls choreography of assembly, ‘a process of symbolic construction of public space which facilitates and guides the physical assembling of a highly dispersed and individualized constituency’ (5). The author’s claim is that such processes of construction are not at all spontaneous, but require choreographers, liquid leaders that set a digital/physical emotional space for collective action. It is through the metaphor of the choreography of assembly that this book offers an

Urban Geography, 2016

In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice o... more In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise.

This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of it... more This report was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing a greater knowledge of its cultural infrastructure through a process of classification and mapping of the City’s cultural venues. Its multi-layered database assists with the design of the most appropriate and effective policies to enhance the cultural and creative life of the city. The report provides: An explanation of the concept of culture that has been operationalised; A detailed rationale of the cultural classification framework adopted; An elaboration of the key methodological issues addressed in the collation of a consolidated database of cultural venues and infrastructure in the City, and the mapping technologies deployed; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribution of 3,106 cultural venues that were mapped and broken down into spatial, cultural industry, and venue types; A presentation and discussion of a series of maps concerning the location and distribut...

RIVISTA GEOGRAFICA ITALIANA

Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affer... more Negli ultimi 20 anni, esperienze e pratiche di ricerca etnografica si sono progressivamente affermate nella ricerca geografica fino a diventarne una componente fondamentale. Eppure ‘fare etnografia' in geografia non è certo né scontato: richiede un adattamento alle esigenze e agli obiettivi della riflessione geografica, ma anche alla complessità del ‘campo' della ricerca nelle scienze sociali contemporanee. In particolare, i tempi, i luoghi e le forme di un'etnografia thick (Geertz, 1973) sembrano inadatte a confrontarsi con le complessità spazio-temporali delle dinamiche socio-spaziali attuali, con le trasformazioni del campo di ricerca, del soggetto che fa ricerca e del contesto in cui si fa ricerca, ma anche, e più radicalmente, con i limiti derivanti dal retaggio coloniale della ricerca etnografica. Attraverso il riferimento a cinque radicalmente diverse esperienze di ricerca sul campo, l'articolo pone la questione del fare etnografia nella ricerca geografica ed ...

First Monday, 2021

Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outc... more Acknowledged as urgent and complex, the communication of environmental science is at once an outcome and a subject of academic research. In this article, we detail the results of workshops with young residents of five “Antarctic gateway cities” (Hobart, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, and Cape Town) who helped design and evaluate an online game that sought to communicate complex intersections of climate policy and science. We focus here on secondary effects of the workshops and game. On the one hand, outputs such as digital games respond to renewed desires for and from researchers to reach beyond scholarly sanctuaries and engage with real-world issues and communities in ways that question barriers of expertise and institutional entitlement. On the other, such dissolutions expose gaps in competency that can unnerve both researchers and participants, interrogating the expediency of collaborative game design and evaluation, and posing questions about the broader role and scope of ...

City of Sydney and the whole metropolis. Because of the complexity of emerging trends and issues,... more City of Sydney and the whole metropolis. Because of the complexity of emerging trends and issues, the recommendations should not be read as a linear list of isolated solutions. Instead, they should be viewed as a repertoire or toolkit on which the City of Sydney can draw in the difficult task of prioritising multi-layered attention and actions to safeguard and nurture cultural creation and production in the city.

We also would like to extend our thanks to Steve Hillier and Pinar Cabadag from the City of Sydne... more We also would like to extend our thanks to Steve Hillier and Pinar Cabadag from the City of Sydney for the provision of the Floorspace and Employment Survey database and other GIS resources. 6. Case study of Redfern Street Village area…………….………78 6.1. Boundary of Redfern Street Village area 6.2. Cultural venues by spatial type and their characteristics 6.3. Cultural venues by value chain role 6.4. Implications for City of Sydney cultural policy making 6.5. Section summary 7. Mapping of cultural venues by sector………………………….97 7.1. Mapping of the music sector and its distribution 7.2. Mapping of the visual art sector and its distribution 7.3. Mapping the architecture and design sector and its distribution 8. Evaluation of the methodology………………………………….111 8.1. Rationale for the methodology 8.2. Limitations of the classification framework 8.3. Limitations of the data collection 9. Recommendations and future directions for cultural mapping ……...………………………………………………………..….118 10. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………126 11. References……………………………………………………….………..128 11.1. Articles and reports 11.2. Websites

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

Technology incubators are one of the infrastructural ends at the urban frontiers of capital. When... more Technology incubators are one of the infrastructural ends at the urban frontiers of capital. When built in areas of poverty in cities of the Global South, these hubs cultivate entrepreneurialism and opportunities for profit at the intersection of development and technological innovation. They promise to address the social challenges of urban marginality with remunerative market solutions. In Cape Town, Africa's so-called Silicon Cape, the largest technology incubator of the city ventured into its most marginal township-Khayelitsha-in 2015, pledging to lay the infrastructural groundwork for fruitful entrepreneurial innovation. This article recollects, ethnographically, an important moment at the outset of this incubator: a fifty-fourhour franchised hackathon, Startup Weekend, which took place in September 2015 as an inaugural event. The argument of this article is that such an incubator was a sociotechnical formation meant to create the conditions for entrepreneurship in a deprived urban area, relying on a web of material and immaterial connections; that it materialized the rationalities of millennial development as well as alternative goals; and that, as infrastructure, it was patched with diverse aspirations and improvised forms of sociality. The article thus contributes to an urban geography of development that acknowledges its uncertainties and singularities as political openings.

Urban Studies, 2020

Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed acro... more Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols and so forth. The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called ‘silicon cape’, is the topic of this article, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work a...

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2019

for their precious help with and support of this research, as well as the three anonymous IJURR r... more for their precious help with and support of this research, as well as the three anonymous IJURR reviewers who helped me improve this article. I would also like to acknowledge the Uber drivers who generously shared their tales with me. Mistakes in representing their stories are solely mine.

Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l&... more Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi: (i) qual e l'origine della smart city e (ii) quanto le pratiche smart si differenzino o meno dalla maniera tradizionale (e neoliberista) di pensare e trasformare la citta

Journal of International Development, 2016

Can economic growth and social progress be sought at the same time, and how? This question has lo... more Can economic growth and social progress be sought at the same time, and how? This question has long haunted two crucial branches of Economics, welfare and development theories. Having been proved false the trickle-down effect, whereby low-income categories indirectly profit from capital accumulation of the wealthier (Rigney, 2010; Stiglitz, 2012), the relationship between growth and equality remains a theoretical dilemma. To solve this economic puzzle, Stiglitz and Greenwald's Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress does not only attempt to build a new theoretical pillar of Economics but also debunks several assumptions of development doctrines based on the Washington consensus and more generally on neoliberal principles. Creating a Learning Society is the result of a series of keynote lectures to honour Columbia University's graduate Kenneth J. Arrow. Drawing on his work on technological progress and learning by doing (Arrow, 1962a; Arrow, 1962b), the book sets forth an economic theory of 'learning' that provides the basis for understanding growth without neglecting the matter of uneven development. In the first part of the volume, the authors broadly illustrate their key argument: the trigger of social well-being is not to be found in the market but in technological change, phrased here as 'learning'. Markets can laterally function as instruments that foster innovation, but they are not themselves instruments for thoroughly increasing standards of living, as many economists of the invisible hand purport. Even as such, they argue, markets do not hold the stir of innovation, and they are ineffective in promoting change. Allocating resources efficiently and accumulating capital have not been the catalysts of Western prosperity. In economic terms, theories of static efficiency, that is, theories that design models to make labour and capital as efficient as possible, fail to understand that the very source of growth is not entirely economic. Growth depends instead on the creation, the negotiation, the ability to disseminate and boost knowledge, in other words on the degree to which a society is a 'learning society' (p. 9). The authors trace this peculiar 'mind-set' in the very history of modernity and explain, although simplistically, how Enlightenment thinking raised the foundations of welfare societies that could only thrive for the importance that was given to innovation (here, 'learning'), an importance that has never been merely economic. The second part of the book provides the mathematical models for understanding the consequences of the authors' claims. This second section sharpens the idea that innovation is not triggered by the markets themselves, but by policies that promote learning in a broader sense. Hence, questions belonging to various areas of the economic debate (e.g. intellectual property, financial policy, etc.) are reframed as questions of learning determinants. Part three is then dedicated to the policy implications that an innovation-based reading of growth holds for decision-makers, especially in the field of industrial and trade policies. Follows a last section composed by commentaries that place the volume in the context of contemporary Economics. A critique of Creating a Learning Society cannot but start with a consideration on economic thinking itself. As Escobar reminds us, 'the need to compose the world as a picture is central to all theories of economic development' (Escobar, 1995, p.56). In the case of Stiglitz and Greenwald's volume, the picture that sustains their theory is again the picture of a gapa word that often appears throughout the book, not only to describe learning lacunae but also to portray global imbalances between different national economies. Despite the authors' effort to address the question of growth and equality outside the market, the theory of learning that they set forth does not move outside 'the economy'. As Timothy Mitchell argued, 'the role of economics is to help make possible the economy by articulating the rules, understandings, and equivalences out of which the economic is

Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi. Io: qual è l’... more Il volume esamina il paradigma della smart city affrontando due ordini di problemi. Io: qual è l’origine della smart city? Come è stato possibile il passaggio da un’idea inizialmente vaga e debole di smartness – legata al miglioramento delle performance urbane in ambiti molto diversi (dal welfare all’efficientamento energetico) – a politiche e programmi che vedono nella smart city la “migliore delle città possibili”? IIO: a partire dall’analisi delle pratiche smart, sono rilevabili caratteristiche proprie del paradigma, o si tratta di un insieme di esperienze in linea con il modello neoliberale dominante di fare e pensare la città? Essere smart implica continuare, con un po’ più di tecnologia, con le stesse dinamiche di sviluppo urbano che sono parte integrante della profonda crisi economica, sociale e politica degli ultimi cinque anni o può (e deve) significare altro?

Book Review of Stiglitz and Greenwald (2015) Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Grow... more Book Review of Stiglitz and Greenwald (2015) Creating a Learning
Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress.

Institute for Culture and Society, 2018

In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis that involved United States first, and Europe im... more In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis that involved United States first, and Europe immediately after, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring (Peck, 2012).
In Italy, a country that faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, austerity urbanism was declined through a series of measures that were tagged as ‘smart city policies’ (Vanolo, 2014). Observing the local translation of smart city paradigms in Turin and Milan, I argue that such agenda is a form of austerity urbanism that does not fit a restrictive category of neoliberalism. Although a critique of neoliberal regressive politics is still pertinent in the case of the smart city, other aspects need to be addressed in a different light. In this presentation, I will explain how diverse rationalities, not just neoliberal ones, converged in a mash-up of policies that were branded as ‘smart’.