1
Multiple Book Review: The Innovation Complex (Zukin, 2020) and Invisible Austin (Auyero,
2015)
ASB 344 - Technology and Society
Arizona State University
Coursework
20/10/2022
MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW 2
Introduction
Urbanization accompanies human development and progress, which leads to the sprout of
cities worldwide. However, recent studies have indicated that these urban settings can create
significant health problems and inequalities. As a result, cities are homes to both the upper-class
members of society endowed with enough resources and the middle and lower class with average
wealth and income and poverty-stricken. Therefore, the emergence and fast growth of cities
worldwide have come with diverse impacts on human lives. Couple with urbanization is the
issue of innovation and technological development. Cities worldwide are the hub of
technological development where cities spearhead the adoption and invention of technologies. It
spearheads the cities' fast developments. Technology and innovation have addressed issues
affecting the people, including poverty, exchange of information, communication, and even
created employment. However, even though this is the case, poverty, health issues, and
unemployment persist. Many scholars have studied urbanization, technological and the state of
affairs among the cities' populace. Zukin (2020) and Auyero's (2015) books portray New York
City and Austin as excellent modern cities in America characterized by technological
advancement, shaped by political endeavors. Still, they are deeply affected by social and
economic inequalities.
A brief explanation of The Innovation Complex (Zukin, 2020)
Zukin's (2020) book. "Innovation Complex." Looks into the issue of the growth of cities
and the impacts of technology that comes with it. It explains the physical locations where
technology companies have grouped and the cultural anxiety experienced by cities when
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technology's effects on the jobs and other economic aspects occur. The book is excellent in
offering a layered critical and historical interpretation of how the technology industry has and
reshapes cities such as New York. It explains how city governments play a crucial role in
running diversely fundamental aspects of the cities such as New York. It also looks into the
emergence of these cities as technological hubs. Zukin (2015) also describes how the
government and agencies' activities promote the tech industry's economy and employment
availability.
Zukin also explains how the financial crisis of 2008 brought immense impacts on the
economies of cities such as New York and how they overcame it. It describes how New York
quickly "subsidized new locations for individual and tech companies" (Zukin, 2020). It explains
how it successfully managed to subsidize the nonprofit partnerships and the private sector to
outfit workspace and set up programs for training and building infrastructure such as broadband
networks. Zukin (2015) explains the diverse technological growth in places such as Silicon
Valley and the immense presence, making it a tech hub. Zukin (2015) also demonstrates the
value of technology to New York, including aspects such as pushing up the value of properties
and increasing economic growth. However, she also highlights how it has overturned some
industry players, such as the transport and food industry. It also touches on crucial aspects of
funding technology which, according to her, has become difficult for the city governments to
accomplish giving power to the private companies. In general, this book explains the importance
of technology in cities and how it impacts growth, and how governments play a role in tech
prosperity in cities.
One of the essential criticism that can be raised as a result of Zukin work is the nature of
social stratification up to social inequality that the complex of innovation introduces and
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concentrates upon urbanized space. This urbanization into tech centers can frequently lead to
sudden gentrification itself, pushing out older communities and the small businesses that are
forced out in favor of high value development to serve a new, more well-paid tech worker
population. It is a process that develops what Murray (2022) could call a divergent path to global
city building in which the advantages of economic growth are massively unevenly distributed.
This skyrocketing property values reverberated not only as a measure of economic health but
also as a type of displacement of the very diverse, creative people who may be the ones
originally occupied by innovators to such cities. In its turn, this complex of innovation may
destroy the social and cultural diversity which is a crucial element of the long-term resilience of
the city and leaves the city of luxury condos and corporate campuses which cater to the needs of
a very limited variety of the population.
Zukin's critique opens up the understanding of city administrations, which in their
extreme zeal for a 'competitive' global image, usually end up following same development
pattern that is generally centered around technological spectacle. As a result, a city can be one of
those 'consensual fictions' as termed by Lederman (2015) in a different context, that is to say,
policy narratives that depict urban areas as creative and sustainable through the use of merely
flashy technology investments, meanwhile, they hide the gradually growing social deficits. The
subsidization of tech workspaces and training programs, in which the industry is undoubtedly
going to benefit, can be seen as a significant reallocation of public resources towards a single
economic sector leaving behind the rest of public goods like affordable housing, education, and
social welfare. This plan establishes tech-led growth as a dubious public good. This way, it
conceals the political offers, and does not allow a democratic debate as to who is the real
beneficiary of the development of the city.
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The emergence of innovation complex is an epochal shift in the authority patterns of the
city, as more and more authority is shifted out of institutional authorities, into entrepreneurial
activities and venture capital networks. According to Lederman (2015), Zukin notes that such
private players have an increased part in determining the material and economic future of the city
because of the challenge posed by public financing. This is consistent with wider global trends
that Murray (2022) has studied, where the future of cities is going to be impacted more by the
movement of money across borders and the interests of companies rather than by the locally
regulated democratic planning. The way the private sector is playing the part in renovating the
working places and instigating the training programs almost automatically means that the skills
taught and the infrastructure built are simply to meet the immediate needs of the industry flow,
not necessarily the long-term, comprehensive well-being of the citizenry. This, in turn, results in
a possible crisis of accountability, for which the city’s path may be guided by the profit motives
of tech investors rather than a publicly-determined vision for inclusive and equitable urban
development.
A detailed explanation of Invisible Austin (Auyero, 2015)
Invisible Austin: Life and labor in an American city by Auyero (2015) explores the lives
and struggles of the lower-class members of society in Austin. It looks at their diverse social
order aspects such as earning a living through cab driving, exotic dancing, working as restaurant
cooks, and dishwashing. It explores how they do house cleaning, working as office repairers of
washing-machines, roofing buildings, singing as musicians among other types of employment.
The book provides an insightful recount of their lives by narrating their life stories in a
psychological and empathy-filled manner. In recounting these peoples' experiences, Auyero
(2015) portrays how they are driven by a mix of complex aspects of social and individual forces.
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Through these stories, Auyero (2015) reveals to the reader how the needy members of society in
Austin give essential services for the residents of the city and their struggles daily. Despite
offering such services, they live in substandard housing, face imminent environmental risks, and
have inadequate schools and public services.
As an essential and timely reading, Invisible Austin creates a vivid visual image of the
fast-growing gap between the rich and the poor in Austin. This aspect is crucial to the
understanding of life in the city. It describes the growing inequality gap due to the cityscape's
reconfiguration and for readers to understand the city life, its growth, and the low-wage workers'
struggles. It is essential to know how they are forced to society's symbolic and social margins.
Notably, despite these struggles, Auyero (2015) indicates that Austin is a renowned and fast-
growing tech city for innovative and young people. It suggests that this city is a scene for
internationally recognized events such as formula I and an excellent place for the young and
vibrant members of society to live. It explains how the wealthy control the city's resources
amidst the booming economy due to technological advancement and also growing penury and
poverty is booming at the same time. Auyero (2015) illuminates the city's diversity regarding
how the rich and the poverty lead very separate lives amidst thriving inequality. It touches not
only on the social inequality but also how it underscores ethnic segregation, class, residential and
racial segregation.
The basic issue Auyero explores is that the current discourse on Austin as a
homogenously prosperous tech hub is deeply rooted in the historical record of the systemic
infrastructure of poverty that forms the economic foundation of the city. According to the book,
there is a material dependence of the celebrated city growth and the vibrant culture to the
invisible work of the marginalized underclass, who experience what Collins, Jensen, and Auyero
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(2017) describe as compound victimization. The concept refers to the various facets of economic
exploitation, environmental risks, and state negligence, which determine everyday life of these
workers. Their insecure jobs in the service industry is here to stay and not a fad in the lifecycle
but it is here to stay and will remain an aspect of the urban political economy which is organized
through policies to attract high-tech companies at the expense of low-waged workers. This
results in a very sharp contradiction between the flourishing prosperity of the city being active in
both the production and the consumption of the very penury it renders invisible, and that the fate
of these workers is a logical result of its growth model and not a by-product.
While facing economic challenges, Invisible Austin still unveils how those who are
marginalized both socially and spatially suffer from the deep psychological and emotional
wounds caused by the rejection of the people of the community and their low self-esteem. These
ethnographic accounts show a continuous fighting for the right to be treated with respect among
jobs that are, most of the time, degrading, unstable, and physically exhausting, thus leading to the
occurrence of what Iversen (2017) has identified as social isolation beyond the level of material
deprivation. New workers are not just economically marginalized but also symbolically; they are
made to feel like strangers in the city that they assist to develop and maintain, at the same time,
they are away from the communal identity that is built up around wealth and high-tech. The
emotional impact of this rejection, i.e., the stress of insecurity and the internalization of stigma,
is among the invisible contributors to urban inequality that affect mental health and break down
the social network in a manner that is less noticeable compared to substandard housing but still
highly destructive of the human spirit.
Also effectively enlightening in the book is the racial and ethnic aspects of urban
inequality that are so well established, as it shows that the subordination of classes with respect
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to one another in Austin cannot be separated of the segregated system. Whether Latino or Black,
the workers who are profiled are over disproportionately confined to their residence in
neighborhoods with sub-par schools and other public services creating a loop of intergenerational
poverty. This geographical segregation makes the proceeds of the economic transformation of
the city remain in the possession of whitener, wealthier enclaves, a geographical partition that is
perpetuated by historical policy and current market mechanisms, as Ortega, Jensen, and Auyero
(2024) argue. Accordingly, this invisibility should not be regarded as a passive state but an active
process of social erasure which operates along a highly racist fault line, and therefore the
inequality that prevails in the city should not be viewed solely in class terms but in terms of
racialized exclusion. Thus, the serious solution to urban inequality has to first note this racialized
fact. The city will remain the preserve of the few unless a concerted effort is made to destroy
these structural barriers, the city will remain prosperous in the hands of the few.
The approach methodology of Invisible Austin itself is also an important input that
patterns sociology as a localized intervention and as a joint venture. According to Collins,
Jensen, and Auyero (2017), the project was a collaborative experience worked on by a group of
graduate students on a long-term ethnographic basis, transforming research into an act of co-
creation with the study participants. Explored by Ortega, Jensen, and Auyero (2024), this
procedure focuses on long-term engagement and active listening, and makes sociological study
less of a detached analysis and more of an empathetic form of practice that is grounded on
human experience. This book is a strong argument against the invisibility of symbolic violence,
and not only the registering inequality, but also providing an underprivileged voice of the city of
the forgotten. Ortega, Jensen and Auyero (2014) assert that it develops a potent contrast to the
self-praising image of the city and suggests an ethical precursor to revolutionary social science.
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This contrasts to the more traditional, extractive model of academic research in which the subject
on the other is merely a source of information. Instead, it presumes that the rigorous scholarship
is and can be a two-way process that helps the community in which the rigorous scholarship is
exercised. The project also demonstrates the way in which the social purpose of sociology may
be attained by means of merging social justice with scientific research. Invisible Austin,
therefore, is a very essential roadmap of how to do a research which is not only deeply
intellectual but also deeply human.
Technological development
The Innovation Complex (Zukin, 2020)
This book explores how life in cities like New York delves and immerse itself and into a
colossal spectrum of information, amusement, and services. It has transmitted, mediated, and
organized, to a greater extent, tech products. Zukin (2015) looks at the blossoming of technology
such as mobile applications, automated devices and their handy features from innovation. The
book considers innovation the leading factor that explains the blessing of technology as
companies became innovative in approaching issues to do with technology, allowing them to
come up with diverse technological discoveries. It also attributes technological advancement in
New York to the city's pollical life. Politicians have created an enabling environment for tech
companies to thrive, making it the country's tech hub. It exposes the crucial relationship that
exists between politics or governance and technological advancement in the city. According to
Zukin (2020), the government in New York combined discursive politics and planning organized
behind innovation, making it a technological hub. It also looks at this issue through the lens of
reorientation that occurred with the emergence of technology which reorganized the workplace,
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created employment and revenue while allowing tech companies to blossom. It also looks at how
technology has underscored the income disparity and social inequality gap.
Invisible Austin (Auyero, 2015)
Auyero, in Invisible in Austin, looks at technology from a different perspective. In
chapter 1, Auyero (2015) explains the destruction of the dam in Austin by the floods, a
monumental project in Austin. Austin considers this dam a factor that could have made it an
industrial center in the South. Still, failure exposed its technological problems. Due to this
failure, Austin rethinks its technology, leading to the various technological developments that
later made it a high-tech center is known as the "silicon hills." By providing this insight, Auyero
(2015) tries to inform the readers about the hazards of poor technological capabilities and their
importance to economic growth. Also, in analyzing the issue of technology, Auyero (2015)
explores how it has brought about disparities among the city's different social classes. She
explains that the rich exploit the technological boom to their advantage. Simultaneously, the poor
lower-class members suffer from the lack of tech-related skills, making them jobless. Also, it
explains that it has brought about economic disparity in the city due to the lack of even creative
development. Unlike Zukin, Auyero provides a narrower insight into technology's issue and its
implication in the city.
By reading Zukin's work in a very careful and critical manner, one can see that the
"innovation complex" that is being introduced, somewhat ironically, results in a uniform tech
culture that, on the one hand, is not conducive to the idea of the broad creative diversity of which
it speaks, and, on the other hand, is the very same creativity that it says should be fostered. The
way this is set is through venture capital and subsidies which put the focus on scalability and
revenue generation at a fast pace rather than on transformative social change (Janković, 2020).
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As a result, the money goes mostly to the development of the consumer applications and the
acquiring of data while the urban crises like affordable housing are left almost completely out of
the loop. By leveraging this method, the technological production is turned to be a reflection of a
narrow set of standards and commercial interests, thus sidelining other concepts or ideas that aim
to benefit the society and are not immediately profitable. Such a market-centered approach to
innovation is a cause for cultural monoculture within the urban economy (Angelo, 2020). The
period of the complex being in control is characterized by a sort of fantasy of vigorous growth
that is, however, deprived of wider community welfare and requirements besides. The complex
is, by all means, the main factor in the shaping of the urban development that excludes social
innovation in a systematic way. The obsessive commercial nature of it is the main cause for
technological homogeneity and the perpetuation of existing economic and power structures
(Suire, 2022).
In the analysis by Zukin, the contribution by the tech boom to spearhead substantial
spatial injustice can be revealed, which a grim parallel is found in Austin of Auyero. The arrival
of high-paid tech employees and corporate offices radically inflates the prices of commercial and
residential housing (Suire, 2022). This severe economic stress increases the pressure of making
long-established residents and small businesses, and low-wage service workers are especially
susceptible. These laborers sustain the everyday life of the new elite but in simple terms as a
direct implication, rents increase, and travel distances increase. The complexity of innovation
consequently literally redraws the map of the city to have distinct areas of status and non-status
(Grilli, 2021). This planned spatial reorganization concentrates the benefits of economic
development, whilst callously distributing the costs onto the city poor. Such expenditures are
pervasive cultural eradication and displacement of communities which instills inequality within
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the very geography of the city. This split has transformed into the cityscape as one of the dark
aspects of technological development technology, which is paramount in contemporary urban
practice (Clark, 2021).
Although Auyero singles out the victims of the tech economy, he exposes the informality
and networks of survival against technological exclusion of the marginalized communities.
Service employees or artists are not only passive victims but active participants in the formation
of robust parallel economies (Clark, 2021). They have effective support systems that work at the
bottom level as opposed to the top blanketed sector of innovation, presented by Zukin. The
ethnography developed by Auyero implies that the true urban resilience is in such community
based networks which are established not on the foundations of venture capital but on the
principles of social trust. Their very existence introduces a serious challenge of the need to divert
resources in favor of grassroots innovation instead (Jankovic, 2020). Is there a benefit to
marginalized communities in targeted investment which helps organic solutions to be validated?
These solutions will typically serve real, localized demands that mainstream tech will tend to
ignore, assisting their ingenuity will help support more inclusive development and may be a
game-changer as the future of development that does not value social capital as much as it values
financial capital (Angelo, 2020).
Right before our eyes, these works form a dialectic dynamic of disgraceful urban
construction in which apparently visible technological affluence relies on an unseen base of
precarious labor. More than a large army of service employees, drivers, janitors, and gig workers
is required in the innovation complex to operate every day (Grilli, 2021). Its economic processes
purposefully maintain these worker’s peripheral, developing an unsustainable urban paradigm in
which development loses its linkage to general prosperity. It is not that technology is bad, but
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that the form that technology is taking in cities today is built on a platform of exploitation. An
equitable city thus needs a radical redefinition of innovation itself in order to incorporate new
social contracts (Suire, 2022). The significant profits of technology should be re-distributed
equally, and the welfare of every citizen should be at the core of its agenda. This comprehensive
strategy would define success in a new way by the importance placed on community health and
equality, and this would be a required change in the ought to exist in just and sustainable cities
(Clark, 2021).
Economic Inequality in the Cities
The Innovation Complex (Zukin, 2020)
In this book, Zukin (2020) explains how the widening gap between the rich and the poor
expands the need to adopt new technology by promoting and uplifting tech companies. Zukin
explains that the changes brought to the city's landscape as a way of "accommodating the
ascending tech complex." Creating the "alluring" conditions for businesses for innovation to
thrive brought a negative impact on the city's populace by increasing the housing inequalities and
broadening the income gaps. The wave created by innovation rendered many jobs and replaced
them with technological automation. In providing this insight, Zukin (2020) tries to display how
the most anticipated technological changes expected to change society for the better become the
central element in creating various social hazards. Zukin (2020) adds that the emergence of tech
companies put more income in the hands of the few people and pushed many residents to a lower
class poor level in the city.
Invisible Austin (Auyero, 2015)
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Auyero explains the issue of inequality similarly to Zukin. According to Auyero (2015),
the tech boom experienced in Austin after the dam project's failure has not only recolonized the
city into a modern technological hub but also made it the hub of economic inequality. Auyero
explains inequality better because, with her students' help, she managed to collect first-hand
information through interviews of diverse members of the lower social class in Austin. For
sentence, she explains through musicians' perspective how they cannot support themselves
because of the economic divide created by urbanization and technology, which brought about
unequal creative development. Auyero (2015) explains how artists cannot support themselves
through their creative work. It is because services such as health care have been privatized,
making them quite expensive and unaffordable. Auyero (2015) also explains it through
"residential mecca," which considers the most evident way of looking at the social and economic
inequality as disparities in affordable use are prominent in Austin. The book provides a better
understanding of inequalities in the city through diverse perspectives and viewpoints of different
accounts of different personalities and various aspects of their daily lives.
An essential aspect of this urban restructuring is the involvement of the state in producing
inequality by actively encouraging policy decisions. Trying to establish themselves as
competitive innovation centres, municipal governments often enact retrogressive fiscal policies
such as tax-abate schemes and rezoning programs that favour commercial development at the
expense of community interests. Such interventions are effective subsidies of the innovation
complex, at the cost of the public, to form a model akin to Zukin (2021) describing as a model of
a planetary Silicon Valley whereby private interests, namely in terms of technological assets, are
shifted to a publicly-funded model. This corporate welfare creates an accelerated gentrification
and pushes those who have lived in a neighborhood out of it, re-organizing the urban landscape
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in such a way that it caters to capital and not people. The resulting spatial inequality is nothing
less than an economic phenomenon but it is politically a manufactured reality that disadvantages
vulnerable populations at a systematic level and puts wealth and access to those who work in
technology (Zukin, 2020).
The cultural implications of economic disparity among cities that are driven by
innovations are also worth the consideration. According to Zukin (2020), the reorganization of
the urban environment is frequently accompanied by the absence of the recognition of deeply
rooted cultural traditions in the name of aesthetics that appeal to global investors and technology
elites. The end of local music scenes, autonomous art collections, and underground cultural
occasions which at one time identified neighborhoods can be observed in this phenomenon. Once
artists and cultural workers are squeezed out by soaring rents and privatization of amenities,
cities which become appealing in the first place through their vibrant nature face the risk of
losing the very thing that made them appealing. The contradiction is abrupt: urban places market
their cultural spatial authenticity to attract investment but this torrent of capital eventually kills
the cultural authenticity. This cultural displacement adds to inequality, with the disadvantaged
people being deprived of means of livelihood, as well as the power to recount their pasts
(Besbris, 2022). This, in consequence, makes economic inequality something that is mixed with
cultural dispossession, thus urban innovation as an economic endeavor is not only an economic
endeavor but a cultural reorganization with far-reaching repercussions.
Along with material deprivation, the innovation economy generates what can be called a
crisis of social reproduction in cities. With the skyrocketing housing costs and the decline of
social services offered by the government, even those working at the essential jobs, such as
teachers, the healthcare providers, the sanitation workers, and others, become rendered unable to
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live in the same cities, which they are working to support. This creates an inherent paradox of a
complex of innovators relying on these service providers but disabling them financially in the
life of the city (Zukin, 2020). What is emerging is the increased reliance on the extensive travel
durations and unsustainable living conditions that compromise employment and social
integration. This crisis is especially affecting care work, typically childcare, elder care, domestic
labour, which still predominantly resides with women and minority group members whose
economic standing is already often unsustainable in the tech-driven city economy, also posing a
structural susceptibility, placing the city at risk of continued sustainability in the long term
(Zukin, 2021).
Politics and the political class in the City
The Innovation Complex (Zukin, 2020)
This book puts policies and political class at the center of the technological advancements
and New York's growth as a tech hub and favorite technological center in America. Zukin (2020)
explains the intertwining relationship between technological advancement in New York and
politics. It explores how the incorporation of political planning and discursive intentions around
technology reshaped New York's economy. It created an enabling environment for giant tech
companies to blossom. Zukin explains that the reorientation in politics led to technological
success through innovation, leading to establishing a better and wealthy city. Further, Zukin says
through the need to create more workplaces, combat economic crises, reduce production costs,
among other factors that led to the relationship between technology companies and the
politicians. In general, Zukin attributes New York's success as a technological hub to the
goodwill of policies, explaining the importance of pollical stability in economic and technical
improvements. Politicians created an enabling environment for the companies through low rents
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for overarousal spaces for shipyards and factories and reduced taxes. Even though there are other
negative implications of this relationship, Zukin strongly supports a positive relationship.
Invisible Austin (Auyero, 2015)
Invisible Austin provides an insight into the politics and its roles in the development of
technology and Austin's economy. Through Auyero's (2015) interviews of various personalities
that led to this book's existence, running themes about Austin entail over-the-top politics
characterized by negativity regarding the behavior of politicians and their contribution to the
economic and asocial inequalities in the city. Unlike Zukin's book, Auyero's (2015) book
portrays policies as people whose lives and actions in the city of Austin are filled with betrayal
and sex scandals and associates them with the city's fall from its grace and prosperity. Auyero
(2020) also associates politicians with thrilling crime sagas and portrays them as romantic
bohemian. Also, it associates politicians with the episodes of labor exploitations, especially
during the construction of the city's capital. The anti-corporate political actions made the cost of
living relatively high, making low-cost goods and services unavailable city. In general, Auyero
(2015) associates a lot of negativity and the city's failure on the bad politics and bad political
behavior in the city.
Policymaking is one of the most critical factors in technologically developing urban
politics that expresses greater scales of ideological broadness regarding what a city is supposed
to become. According to Zukin (2020), the emergence of New York as a tech hub was not a
chance event but rather the challenge that was refocused by the strategic decisions made by
policy makers that reshaped the city. This point is in line with the understanding presented by
Hatuka et al. (2018), which states that global cities are becoming more and more oriented on
models like the one of the smart city, the creative city where technology can serve as a political
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tool to solve economic and social issues. These models are not apolitical, as they serve the
interests of big businesses and other wealthy stakeholders, and small populations are pushed
behind them. Besbris (2022) also supports this view by stating how the political elite tends to
negotiate between the needs of capital and the strain of citizens, yet in reality, the consequences
are all disproportionately pro-innovation growth. Put together, these works allow seeing that
politics not only offers some stability of the growth process but also imprints into it a certain
concept of life in cities when technology will be the main stream of further development. The
result is a city that is being transformed by deliberate political discourses that support innovation
at the same time increasing inequalities based on policy bias.
The politics of the relationship between the political classes and the technology firms also
casts some doubts on control and responsibility in urban settings. Zukin (2020) demonstrates the
impact of lower taxes and other incentives given to tech companies to thrive in the form of lower
taxes and good leases to occupy industrial spaces at the expense of the revenue to chests that can
be used to finance social infrastructure. As Levine (2019) points out, these trade-offs are
representative of the urban politics dynamics, where voters and elected office representatives
trade off between attracting corporate investment and meeting the needs of the people. In the
same vein, Hatuka et al. (2018) observe that the discourse of the resilient city and sustainable
city tends to conceal political tradeoffs, in which a prioritization on efficiency of a private sector
industry is done at the cost of democratic inclusiveness. As witnessed by Besbris (2022), the
political elite often justifies such concessions by arguing that global economy compels it to be
competitive, although it further increases the inequality of the city. The outcome of this process
is the establishment of a system of governance in which political classes become advanced in
favor of corporate interests in the guise of progress, which prompts the basic questions of those
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in the society who actually gain access to the advantages of the technological growth and
whether this kind of policies can be maintained without any opposition of the society.
The last aspect focuses on the symbolic nature of politics in defining cultural legitimacy
of technology progress. In his argument, Zukin (2020) states that the political leadership of New
York developed not just the material incentives but also a conversation that introduced the tech
sector as the natural destination of the city. Besbris (2022) argues that such rhetorical framing
assures the investor and developers that the political environment will be conducive to
innovation, which endorses growth cycles. As revealed by Hatuka et al. (2018), the trend in the
creative city narrative which is popular across the world connections the political agendas into
inspirational branding efforts which justifies redevelopment of cities. Levine (2019) clarifies that
these type of branding are essential in an age of an intercity competition, and cities are selling
themselves the world over to acquire capital. These arguments, combined, make it possible to
assume that the social layer is a producer of culture as well as a controller, conditioning the
perception of a technological change and an economic transformation by the residents. Levine
(2019) adds that by enveloping politics into the discourses of innovation and prosperity, leaders
embark on legitimizing uneven development to an extent where people embrace controversial
policies that would otherwise displease people. Politics then turns out to be the facilitator as well
as the narrator of technological modernity in cities.
Conclusion
Zukin (2020) and Auyero's (2015) books portray New York City and Austin as excellent
modern cities in America characterized by technological advancement, shaped by political
endeavors. Still, they are deeply affected by social and economic inequalities. Zukin (2020)
looks into cities' growth and the impacts of technology that come with it and how politicians
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navigate its challenges to create a modern city such as New York. Auyero (2015) explains the
lives and struggles of the lower-class society members in Austin through social and economic
disparities. The two authors explain technological advancement as the two cities' key features
and associate it with property and social and economic inequalities. They look at remarkable
disparities through the lens of technology and uneven creative development, respectively
associating it to the effects of technology and poor politician stargates. Zukin associates good
governance from politics to the propensity of New York. In contrast, Auyero associates Austin's
failure and inequalities to poor political strategies and lousy behavior among policies. These
books are excellent in understanding the effects of technology on urbanization and human
settlement in big cities.
MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW 21
References
Angelo, H. (2020). “Between Fixity and Motion:” Emplacing Tech in New York City-Sharon
Zukin, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy (Oxford, OUP,
2020, 296 p.). European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de
Sociologie, 61(3), 567-573.
Auyero, J. (2015). Introduction: Know them well. Invisible Austin: Life and labor in an
American city, 1-19.
Besbris, M. (2022). The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy.
Clark, J. (2021). Book Review: Sharon Zukin, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech and the
New Economy.
Collins, C., Jensen, K., & Auyero, J. (2017). A proposal for public sociology as localized
intervention and collective enterprise: The makings and impact of invisible in
Austin. Qualitative Sociology, 40(2), 191-214.
Grilli, L. (2021). The innovation complex: cities, tech, and the new economy: by Sharon Zukin,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2020. xi+ 304 pp., US $29.95 (hbk), ISBN
9780190083830. https://global. oup. com/academic/product/the-innovation-complex-
9780190083830.
MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW 22
Hatuka, T., Rosen-Zvi, I., Birnhack, M., Toch, E., & Zur, H. (2018). The political premises of
contemporary urban concepts: The global city, the sustainable city, the resilient city, the
creative city, and the smart city. Planning Theory & Practice, 19(2), 160-179.
Iversen, R. R. (2017). Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City.
Janković, S. S. (2020). Sharon Zukin, 2020. The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech and the New
Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 312. Sociologija, 62(2), 297-302.
Lederman, J. (2015). Urban fads and consensual fictions: Creative, sustainable, and competitive
city policies in Buenos Aires. City & Community, 14(1), 47-67.
Levine, M. A. (2019). Urban politics: Cities and suburbs in a global age. Routledge.
Murray, M. J. (2022). Many Urbanisms: Divergent Trajectories of Global City Building.
Columbia University Press.
Ortega, Á., Jensen, K., & Auyero, J. (2014). You will never walk alone: ethnographic training as
collective endeavor. Teaching Sociology, 52(1), 1-14.
Suire, R. (2022). Sharon Zukin, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech and the New Economy.
New York, Oxford University Press, 2020, 320 p. Métropoles, (31).
Zukin, S. (2020). The innovation complex: Cities, tech, and the new economy. Oxford University
Press.
Zukin, S. (2021). Planetary silicon valley: deconstructing New York’s innovation
complex. Urban Studies, 58(1), 3-35.
