Urban Innovation Networks

Big companies are strange complexes. They are nests of heterogeneity, collecting individuals from most varying cultural, ethnic or political backgrounds. These people are increasingly asked to bring as much of their very individual creativity to the table as possible. Their ideas, their knowledge, sometimes even their dreams. And yet, many business discourses still treat companies as homogeneous entities, with one culture, one goal, one strategy. The internal richness of personalities, motivations and talents is at best seen as a subset of values that all entirely absorbed by the big value behemoth that is the company and its goals, strategies, missions and visions.

The analysis I am undertaking here is engaging with the notion of the contemporary metropolis as a container of opportunities and as a set of forces that clearly reach beyond the pure locality of the urban field. Hence, this work is in some ways influenced by the significant body of research that has in the last 40 years appeared under the heading of the “global cities discourse” (see for instance Cohen et al. 1981; Friedmann 1986; or Sassen 1991, 1994). And yet, what I am describing here is not an example of how global cities as conceptualized by Sassen work. Rather, the idea of the city as resource brings with it significant deviations from the ways in which Sassen and others envisaged their “global cities”. I will therefore introduce the global cities discourse at this point, but also present arguments what my main thesis in this book has a slightly different perspective.

There has been a lot of rethinking of what the urban sphere is. Cities are increasingly seen in a “virtualized” way today: Not so much as mere agglomerations of concrete and people, and also not simply as givens. Rather, the city today presents itself as a virtuality: a permanently changing, unstable set of forces and potentials. As a collective dream, a very real dream world, and as a never-ending project in the eyes of all involved.

Having outlined my actor-network-oriented understanding of urban space, I now want to discuss this with reference to significant spatially constructive categories or disciplines. The first one is, not quite surprisingly, architecture. The question is to what extent can architecture as a discipline even maintain its productive capacities, given that spatial development is no longer driven by powerful intentional planners or by omnipotent creative geniuses (architects), but by the complex interactions between different human and non-human actors and the networks they procedurally create. Specifically, given the importance of a super-individual understanding of knowledge within the new city spaces, it is necessary to rethink architectural knowledge with reference to this understanding. The question is whether there can be an architecture that has a productive role within a setting that wants to understand the twenty-first century (post-global) city as resource with reference to the notion of knowledge. To what extent can architecture contribute to the (in the first instance clearly capitalist) idea of a “knowledge city” (Edvinsson 2006) be seen as reality?

In one particular respect, this book is a rather tricky endeavor: It is dealing with many different notions that have been developed in the literature on companies and management; and it wants to effectively yield new perspectives on corporate activity. And yet, it is not a traditional management book. It aims at making certain aspects of the contemporary urban and cultural reality more understandable, hence hopefully producing concepts and methods that are not limited to the corporate realm. This is a cultural book just as much as it is a purely management-oriented work. This issue will become particularly obvious, and has to be kept in mind with particular insistence, in this chapter. For here, we deal with concepts that have a very close relation to management writing: the terms “innovation” and “resource”. Also, we will rely on one particular theory that comes clearly from the world of economic thinking. However, it has to be stated that I understand neither resource nor innovation as concepts limited to corporate actors. Rather, the strength of actor-network theory, and therefore hopefully also of this book, is that it creates concepts that are applicable to all kinds of cultural settings. The engagement of a company in a city is one – but only one – such setting.

As the next major step in this book, I want to bring the conceptual background developed before in direct touch with the reality of the urban sphere. This does not mean that the framework I offered is merely a tool to understand a new urban reality that has already established itself to the full extent possible. To me, it seems as if most economic, cultural or social institutions do not yet engage with the urban realm to the degree it would be possible and make strategic sense for them. And yet, there are urban strategies that seem encompassing enough to justify a closer examination at this point. This examination is what I will do next. And while each of the cases presented below is certainly unique, with its own strategic drivers, its own problems, and its own spatial specifics, there are also certain perspectives from which these cases can be analyzed in a very similar manner. Specifically, each of them seems to have an own way of understanding the city as a resource along the lines developed in Chap. 5. This is why I will structure each of the sub-chapters below in a similar way: I will first present the individual case in question with a focus on its strategic specifics and on the ways in which it develops an own innovation-related approach to the city, and also an own understanding of the urban sphere. I will then present in a very concise manner the way in which each institution understands and “uses” the city as a resource. This will not take place in an uncritical manner, in the sense that all strategies would be treated as successfully urban and resource-oriented. Rather, I will ask whether the resource-oriented strategy in question really manages to exploit the city as resource in the most encompassing possible way. In at least one case (Igreja Universal), the result will be that this is by no means the case.

When the work on this book started, the main ideas were based on my observation that a shift in the focus of certain mainly corporate actors could be observed, and that the cities we live in played a role in that shift. When talking to managers within these firms, there was not even much agreement that such a shift was indeed happening. Rather, it seemed as if there was more of a subconscious sentiment that the corporate activity would in one way or the other gain from becoming to a higher degree “urban” – whatever this might entail. It was the motivation of this book to think through what this might entail. I wanted to offer a theory-informed backing for the activities of those – very different – companies engaging with the urban sphere, as well as with the issue of architecture in the more narrow sense, fitting them with arguments why their engagement with the city is a sensitive thing, and how it might add to very sound economic targets, such as the creation of competitive advantage.