Visionary Politics: Technologies of Government in the Capital of Innovation

Abstract

Taking up experiments in “civic innovation” as windows into the making of new urban worlds, I attempt in this essay to map out the parameters of a novel framework for municipal rule and account for the conditions underlying its ascendance in San Francisco, CA. I explore how productions of urban space and nature today serve as the means and objects of an emerging mode of government premised on yoking all forms of urban activity to the dictates of innovation. When proponents of civic innovation pursue particular forms of intervention in the built environment to constitute urban subjects as human capital, they imbibe, reproduce, and enact normative notions about the nature of the city as a problem to manage. Though the project of civic innovation is neither complete nor inevitable, the political vision animating it entails the subsumption of urban life as such within a rubric of decision making modeled on the market.

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