Sharon Zukin’s research while affiliated with Brooklyn College and other places

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Publications (36)


Variations on Variations : placing public space in context
  • Article

May 2022

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73 Reads

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1 Citation

Sharon Zukin

The year that frames this special issue, 2020, was a year of enormous aspiration and tragic repression, both enacted and represented in the commonly accessible places where our most significant collectivities are formed. It was a year of euphoria and denial, peaceful protest and violence, ingenious celebrations of participatory civic rituals and terrifying mobilizations of near-fascist state power. It was also when a previously unknown corona virus struck down millions of people in a global pandemic. But 2020 was not the year when public space “died.” It was more alive, more deeply desired, and more varied in form than ever. Sadly, the year also marked the death, from the Covid-19 virus, of Michael Sorkin, an architect, writer, and public intellectual whose concern about the end of public space inspires this collection.


Seeing like a city: how tech became urban
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

October 2020

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145 Reads

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48 Citations

Theory and Society

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.

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Editors' introduction to the special issue on the sociology of digital technology

September 2020

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13 Reads

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3 Citations

Theory and Society

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.


Planetary Silicon Valley: Deconstructing New York’s innovation complex

September 2020

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116 Reads

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50 Citations

Urban Studies

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.


Death and Life of Great American Cities, The/J. Jacobs

April 2019

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172 Reads

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs defends the complexity, vitality, and diversity of older cities against the massive post‐World War II shift of resources and people to US suburbs. She praises mixed uses of space and describes the “sidewalk ballet” of storekeepers, neighbors, and strangers that keeps a street lively and safe at all hours of day and night. But she condemns the “great blight of dullness” imposed by bureaucratic urban planners and the modernist template of urban design. Their power, unchecked by community “self‐organization” and citizen participation, creates isolated “towers in the park,” empty green spaces, and unsafe streets. Although these ideas were rejected by dominant urban planning writers at the time, they influenced later generations of politicians and planners and became the key ideas underlying urban revitalization, historic and community preservation, and gentrification.




Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (excerpts)

January 2018

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1,319 Reads

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989 Citations

Journal of Economic Sociology

Naked City is a continuation of Prof. Sharon Zukin's earlier books (Loft Living and Cultures of Cities) and updates her views on how people use culture and capital in New York. Its focus is on a conflict between city dwellers' desire for authentic origins and new beginnings, which many contemporary megalopolises meet. City dwellers wish to defend their own moral rights to redefine their places for living given upscale constructions, rapid growth, and the ethics of standardization. The author shows how in the frameworks of this conflict they construct the perceived authenticity of common and uncommon urban places. Each book chapter tells about various urban spaces, uncovering different dimensions of authenticity in order to catch and explain fundamental changes in New York that emerged in the 1960s under the mixed influences of private investors, government, media, and consumer tastes. The Journal of Economic Sociology published "Introduction. The City That Lost Its Soul," where the author explains the general idea of the book. She discusses the reasons for the emergence and history of the social movement for authenticity, having combated both the government and private investors since the 1960s. Prof. Zukin also traces the transformation of the concept of authenticity from a property of a person, to a property of a thing, to a property of a life experience and power.


Fig. 1. all public Hackathons in new york city categorized by sector, 2015. 
sample of public Hackathons, new york city, october 2015-may 2016.
Hackathons as Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the “New” Economy

December 2017

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912 Reads

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63 Citations

Research in the Sociology of Work

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.



Citations (27)


... In addition to innovation activities within enterprises (Evans, 2009;Hutton, 2006), innovation platforms (Zukin, 2021), the urban built environment (Mariotti et al. 2023;McNeill, 2021), institutional tools Luo and Chan, 2020), and social interactions (Wijngaarden et al. 2020;Zhu et al. 2023) contribute to the emergence and development of urban innovation spaces. This perspective aligns with the multidimensional framework proposed by Adu-McVie et al. (2021). ...

Reference:

Exploring the innovation potential of urban space at the micro scale: a case study of Suzhou’s main urban area
Planetary Silicon Valley: Deconstructing New York’s innovation complex
  • Citing Article
  • September 2020

Urban Studies

... As technology and digitalization continue to pervade and shape various facets of society, the integration of digital sociology presents significant opportunities for American sociologists. Exploring online behaviors, community formation, and the profound impact of digital technologies on social structures and interactions will become increasingly crucial [108]. ...

Editors' introduction to the special issue on the sociology of digital technology
  • Citing Article
  • September 2020

Theory and Society

... Since the mid-2000s, cities have been key targets for technology companies seeking to create and dominate new markets [1][2][3]. Few companies have been bolder in pursuing the city as a valuable digital and physical testing ground than Google LLC and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. [4][5][6][7][8]. Even before launching its infamous 'urban innovation' arm Sidewalk Labs in 2015 [6][7][8], Google had initiated an audacious claim to cities and skies globally: its delivery drone venture. ...

Seeing like a city: how tech became urban

Theory and Society

... Rights reserved.list reaffirms results from previous studies about their economic importance in the worldSassen (2001),Zukin (2005),Hussain et al. (2019). These cities are global hubs 4 with very high degree centralities, bringing economic stability to not only their countries but to their regions as well. ...

“The city as a landscape of power: London and New York as global financial capitals”
  • Citing Chapter
  • October 2017

... Point-Of-Interest (POI) refers to an umbrella category of destinations, from tourist attractions to local community amenities such as restaurants, library, community centers. It is often used as a proxy for human activities, since its presence depend on and generate pedestrian traffic (Zukin, 2010;Yue & Zhu, 2019). We used the density of POI per square kilometer (P den ) to measure urban life, computed by dividing the POI count by the area of the district. ...

Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (excerpts)
  • Citing Article
  • January 2018

Journal of Economic Sociology

... News values such as accuracy, fairness, and transparency are incorporated, ensuring that the outcomes do not compromise journalistic ethics. Continued collaboration beyond hackathons can lead to long-term solutions and the spread of best practices (Zukin & Papadantonakis, 2017). ...

Hackathons as Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the “New” Economy

Research in the Sociology of Work

... Furthermore, emphasising language makes it possible to move beyond the dimension of content to consider the pragmatic dimension of speech, which also plays a central role in the construction of meaning (Billig 1991;Willig 2014). In gentrified neighbourhoods, residents are required to manage contradictions (Zukin 2016), dilemmas (Donnelly 2018) and subjective complexities (Di Masso et al. 2021) when expressing their views about urban transformations. Based on a discursive awareness, these tensions are viewed as resources (Parker 2013) that individuals navigate to manage accountability issues. ...

Gentrification in Three Paradoxes
  • Citing Article
  • August 2016

City & Community

... HHT offers a multidimensional immersiveness perceived by tourists as "real" and authentic to which sound is critical. Next, we provide context for the tourism industry in Harlem, which tends to emphasize the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s but is also a key part of Harlem's 2nd -state sponsored -Renaissance that began in the 1990s (Hoffman 2003;Zukin 2011). We then analyse the role of three types of soundmusical, verbal, and ambient. ...

Harlem between Ghetto and Renaissance
  • Citing Article
  • May 2012

... Sometimes at the expense of existing local or globalized culture. As Sharon Zukin suggests, foodies-maybe even more than artists-are the vanguard of gentrification and displacement [8,9]. We once saw concentrations of local-yet-multicultural food cultures; we are now seeing the emergence of globalized spectacular cuisines, a narrow range of street food cuisine (pulled pork, Korean corn dogs), French style bistros, luxury steak restaurants. ...

Restaurants as "Post Racial? Spaces. Soul Food and Symbolic Eviction in Bedford?Stuyvesant (Brooklyn)
  • Citing Article
  • February 2014

Ethnologie française

... Sometimes at the expense of existing local or globalized culture. As Sharon Zukin suggests, foodies-maybe even more than artists-are the vanguard of gentrification and displacement [8,9]. We once saw concentrations of local-yet-multicultural food cultures; we are now seeing the emergence of globalized spectacular cuisines, a narrow range of street food cuisine (pulled pork, Korean corn dogs), French style bistros, luxury steak restaurants. ...

The Omnivore's Neighborhood? Online Restaurant Reviews, Race, and Gentrification
  • Citing Article
  • October 2015

Journal of Consumer Culture