INTRODUCTION

The extraction of economic value from urban space is a long-term feature of capitalist societies, particularly in relation to the relentless production and reproduction of land rent. The long tradition of understanding economic value and economic growth in the context of urban space as the economic value of land characterized urban studies and cognate fields during high Fordism and Keynesianism – and it remains a key aspect in the present conjuncture of heightened commodification of the housing sector. Economic value extraction from urban spaces and urban living, however, has expanded during the last few decades, in the globalized era dominated by ICT. Urban value extraction and the emergence of algorithmic spaces have become two sides of the same coin. In more recent times, the advent of digital platforms has diversified the extraction of economic value from cities and urban environments, not only from their built environment but from a variety of sectors related to the essential foundations of everyday life, such as infrastructure, mobility, leisure, education. As such, the expansion of the “urban field” (Friedmann & Miller 1965) as it unfolds today can be understood as an intensification and diversification of the urbanization of capital and as a significant response to the various global crises that have taken place since the 1990s in the world economy.

Over the last few decades, the urban field has been closely connected to the urban technological paradigm. In other words, cities and wider urban environments have become primary sites involved in the creation and extraction of economic value in the techno-capitalism era. The last four decades, in particular, have seen the succession of different manifestations of the urban predominance in the economization of knowledge and the technology sector: informational cities, science parks and technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s, smart cities in the 2000s and the 2010s, startup ecosystems, innovation districts, innovation complexes and the platform economy in the 2010s and the 2020s. By following the logic of Sharon Zukin (2020), we comprehend these spaces as discursive, organizational/ institutional and physical.