Putting the digital growth machine in place: Shifting growth genres in Silicon Valley’s urban politics

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship has raised important concerns about the swelling power of the technology industry in the politics of urban development. Yet in helpfully sounding the alarm, some scholars have risked obscuring the variegated ways that tech sector growth has been politicised and materialised in different places and times. To allow for greater attention to variety and the specificity of places, this article proposes that digital growth machines assemble, and are partly assembled by, cultural genres of growth that arise, stabilise and change in relation to the political and historical configurations of particular places. By tracing the changing politics of tech-led development in Mountain View, a small city in the heart of Silicon Valley that is home to the global headquarters of Google, the article argues that local growth machines have repeatedly shifted growth genres once an established genre had been problematised politically. During these moments of transition, growth coalitions dialogically assemble new genres of growth that they figure as a pragmatic and promising way to help remedy harms of previous growth. While shifting growth genres can help temporarily ease political tensions and allow digital growth machines to carry on, many of the problems stemming from industry expansion continue to worsen, thus setting the stage for future backlashes.