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.