Making the Innovative City: Capital and Community in the Boston Region

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three papers on urban development, entrepreneurship, community, and inequality in the Boston region. It argues that the remaking of Boston and Cambridge into attractive sites of investment for real estate and tech development has both made these cities into attractive places to live as well as unaffordable and exclusionary. Various methods to attenuate these inequalities, both today and in the past decades, provide benefits to some but feed into the growth machine that depends on the extraction of techno-science and urban rents. I argue that a new development trajectory is necessary to overcome this problem. This dissertation’s first paper centers on urban renewal, which transformed the face of US cities in the 1950s and 1960s. While urban renewal is often thought of as essentially distinct from later “neoliberal urbanism,” I argue that in the case of Boston and Cambridge, “urban entrepreneurialism” is a thread of continuity between the two. Urban renewal transformed these cities to cater to education, services, healthcare, and high technology. In attempting to revitalize the cities’ tax base, entrepreneurial managers contended with expanding tax-exempt institutions like universities and hospitals. “Section 112 Credits,” an urban renewal financing mechanism, was created in 1959 to harmonize the interests of cities and institutions by allowing some expenditures on institutional expansion to fund urban renewal programs. I analyze three such projects in Boston and Cambridge to evaluate the program’s impact. I find that Section 112 did not have the impact boosters anticipated in the early 1960s due to organized community resistance, inconsistent federal funding, and the fact that the program did not necessarily increase tax revenue. In this dissertation’s second paper, I argue that in the past two decades, both configurations of racial capitalism and the production of space for technological innovation have undergone a partial reconfiguration. In this paper we argue that “race-conscious neoliberalism” has emerged as a mutation of “neoliberal multiculturalism.” In contrast to a race-blind focus on “diversity,” race-conscious neoliberalism explicitly acknowledges historical injustices, while promoting market-friendly solutions that are aimed at generic diversity rather than specific redress. “Innovation districts,” while purporting to value generic diversity, have a two-tier structure whereby the production of space and amenities is catered to sectors that export services and intellectual property. These two patterns resonate to create a situation that reproduces historical racial injustices, even through policies held to be progressive. We illustrate this argument with the case of Boston’s Seaport District and the Massport Model, a prototypical “re-imagined urban area” and a market-friendly diversity model for urban development first used there. This third paper in this dissertation reviews, critiques and extends the concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE), arguing for its relevance in studying the political economy of urban space. Literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) has grown rapidly over the past five years, using the concept as a framework to understand regional clusters of entrepreneurship. To make this argument, we distinguish between niche EEs (NEEs) and growth EEs (GEEs). This distinction is based on the overlapping but distinct networks of actors and institutions forming each type of EE, and also reflects broadly different relationships to growth and productivity, the entrepreneurial subject, global and local scales, and financial ecologies. We argue that EE research has largely focused on GEEs to the neglect of NEEs; by broadening the EE concept we address shortcomings in the treatment of small businesses, financial relations, social difference, as well as urban politics within the EE literature. Drawing on the EE literature and interviews from a case study of Boston, we show that the infrastructure of GEEs and NEEs are not only “for” fast- and slow- growing businesses, respectively, but reinforce social and economic differences. While NEEs do redistribute resources to marginalized entrepreneurs, these resources are focused on building businesses and only indirectly related to the needs of marginalized communities and equitable development more generally.