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The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of digital platforms and software for operating remotely and encouraged employers to reshape the workplace for social distancing. But it is not at all clear what these arrangements will mean for cities that have spent the past decade building an ‘innovation complex’ around physical density, digital technology and real estate development. On the one hand, many parts of the tech ecosystem that relied on face-to-face interaction – such as coworking spaces, hackathons and venture capitalists’ mentoring of start-up founders – have already moved online. On the other hand, cutting tech ecosystems loose from place-based offices, labour markets and institutional networks puts cities’ economic future at risk. This could drastically weaken the value of the city’s fixed capital of buildings and land, its social capital of institutional networks and communities, and its human capital of workers with tech skills. Yet partnering with tech leaders to ‘reimagine’ the city could advance the power of Big Tech. To try to understand which parts of the urban tech ecosystem will likely survive the pandemic, I take a critical look at how the discursive, organisational and geographical spaces of a planetary Silicon Valley culture became embedded in New York between 2010 and 2020. 新冠病毒 (COVID-19) 大流行加速了远程操作数字平台和软件的使用，并鼓励雇主重塑工作场所以保持社交距离。但我们一无所知的是，这些安排对那些在过去十年围绕物理密度、数字技术和房地产开发建设了“创新综合体”的城市来说将意味着什么。一方面，依赖面对面互动的科技生态系统的许多部分（如合作空间、黑客马拉松和风险投资者对初创企业创始人的指导）已经转移到了网上。另一方面，将科技生态系统从基于地方的办公室、劳动力市场和机构网络中剥离出来，会给城市的经济未来带来风险。这可能会极大地削弱城市建筑和土地固定资产、机构网络和社区社会资本、以及拥有技术技能的工人的人力资本的价值。然而，与科技领袖合作“重塑”城市可以提升大科技的力量。为了理解城市科技生态系统的哪些部分可能在这场大流行中幸存下来，我以批判的眼光审视了2010年至2020年间全球硅谷文化的话语、组织和地理空间是如何在纽约扎根的。

The emergence of urban tech economies calls attention to the multidimensional spatiality of ecosystems made up of people and organizations that produce new digital technology. Since the economic crisis of 2008, city governments have aggressively pursued economic growth by nurturing these ecosystems. Elected officials create public-private-nonprofit partnerships to build an “innovation complex” of discursive, organizational, and geographical spaces; they aim not only to jump-start economic growth but to remake the city for a new modernity. But it is difficult to insert tech production space into the complicated urban matrix. Embedded industries and social communities want protection from expanding tech companies and the real estate developers who build for them. City council members, state legislators, and community organizations oppose the city government’s attempts to satisfy Big Tech companies. While the city’s density magnifies conflicts of interest over land-use and labor issues, the covid-19 pandemic raises serious questions about the city’s ability to both oppose Big Tech and keep creating tech jobs.

Sociologists tend to over-conceptualize the divergent cultures of adjacent places, both neglecting necessary structural and institutional factors and focusing on symbols more than interests. In the post-industrial era, sense of place reflects geographical mobility, the social construction of landscape, and marketing strategies. Like gentrified neighborhoods and hipster districts in cities, rural regions like Vermont are reborn through the social, cultural, and economic efforts of local entrepreneurs to create a distinctive and authentic sense of place.

An increasing number of sociologists today are examining the social production of digital technology. Although younger researchers may be digital natives and write from “within the algorithm,” and older sociologists may begin by trying to define terms and concepts that have become commonplace in the tech “space,” all share the goal of unpacking the “black box” of computer software by analyzing how, where, and by whom it is developed and asking who benefits most by its use. Some of the articles in this special issue of Theory and Society focus on questions of connectivity, privacy, and equity in light of classical sociology’s concern with the state, the self, knowledge, and power; others look critically at forms of inequality in the operations of specific platforms, algorithms, urban tech ecosystems, and coworking spaces.

The concept of urban lifestyle ecompasses the pursuit of cultural values, as well as demographic, racial, and industrial changes which support urban consumption. Consumption has replaced production in the urban identity. This raises issues for urban redevelopment projects, and the dependence of desirable \"consumption industries\" upon low-wage labor. This assessment of urban lifestyles considers models of modernity and postmodernity, the strategies of urban redevelopment schemes, and changes in urban politics and cultures.

Abstract Hackathons, time-bounded events where participants write computer code and build apps, have become a popular means of socializing tech students and workers to produce “innovation” despite little promise of material reward. Although they offer participants opportunities for learning new skills and face-to-face networking and set up interaction rituals that create an emotional “high,” potential advantage is even greater for the events’ corporate sponsors, who use them to outsource work, crowdsource innovation, and enhance their reputation. Ethnographic observations and informal interviews at seven hackathons held in New York during the course of a single school year show how the format of the event and sponsors’ discursive tropes, within a dominant cultural frame reflecting the appeal of Silicon Valley, reshape unpaid and precarious work as an extraordinary opportunity, a ritual of ecstatic labor, and a collective imaginary for fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all, a powerful strategy for manufacturing workers’ consent in the “new” economy.

Gentrification, the conversion of socially marginal and working-class areas of the central city to middle-class residential use, reflects a movement, that began in the 1960s, of private-market investment capital into downtown districts of major urban centers. Related to a shift in corporate investment and a corresponding expansion of the urban service economy, gentrification was seen more immediately in architectural restoration of deteriorating housing and the clustering of new cultural amenities in the urban core. Research on gentrification initially concentrated on documenting its extent, tracing it as a process of neighborhood change, and speculating on its consequences for reversing trends of suburbanization and inner-city decline. But a cumulation of 10 years of research findings suggests, instead, that it results in a geographical reshuffling, among neighborhoods and metropolitan areas, of professional, managerial, and technical employees who work in corporate, government, and business services. Having verified the extent of the phenomenon, empirical research on gentrification has reached a stalemate. Theoretically interesting problems concern the use of historic preservation to constitute a new urban middle class, gentrification and displacement, the economic rationality of the gentrifier's behavior, and the economic restructuring of the central city in which gentrification plays a part. Broadening the analytic framework beyond demographic factors and neo-classical land use theory is problematic because of serious conceptual and methodological disagreements among neo-Marxist, neo-Weberian, and mainstream analysts. Yet efforts to understand gentrification benefit from the use of economic paradigms by considering such issues as production, consumption, and social reproduction of the urban middle class, as well as the factors that create a supply of gentrifiable housing and demand for it on the part of potential gentrifiers. An emerging synthesis in the field integrates economic and cultural analysis. The mutual validation and valorization of urban art and real estate markets indicates the importance of the cultural constitution of the higher social strata in an advanced service economy. It also underlines how space and time are used in the social and material constitution of an urban middle class.

Consumption is a social, cultural, and economic process of choosing goods, and this process reflects the opportunities and constraints of modernity. Viewing consumption as an \"institutional field,\" the review suggests how consumption bridges economic and cultural institutions, large-scale changes in social structure, and discourses of the self. New technologies, ideologies, and delivery systems create consumption spaces in an institutional framework shaped by key social groups, while individual men and women experience consumption as a project of forming, and expressing, identity, Studying the institutional field requires research on consumer products, industries, and sites; on the role of consumption in constructing both the consuming subject and collective identity; and on historical transitions to a consumer society. Ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis show a global consumer culture fostered by media and marketing professionals yet subject to different local interpretations.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 have created an unprecedented public discussion about the uses and meanings of the central area of lower Manhattan that was once the World Trade Center. While the city sifts through the debris, contrary forces shaping its future are at work. Developers jockey to control the right to rebuild \"ground zero.\" Financial firms line up for sweetheart deals while proposals for memorials are gaining in appeal. In After the World Trade Center, eminent social critics Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin call on New York's most acclaimed urbanists to consider the impact of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and what it bodes for the future of New York. Contributors take a close look at the reaction to the attack from a variety of New York communities and discuss possible effects on public life in the city.