Tech Won't Save Us - How Cities Sell Themselves to the Tech Industry w/ David A. Banks

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by David A. Banks to discuss how cities have been reshaped to attract tech companies and what the consequences have been for the people who live in them. David A. Banks is the author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. He’s a lecturer in the Geography and Planning department at University at Albany, SUNY. David also writers Other Day and co-hosts Iron Weeds. Follow David on Twitter at @DA_Banks.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network. Also mentioned in this episode:David wrote about Richard Florida, the creative class, and his book The New Urban Crisis.An excerpt of his book was published in Dwell.Support the show

When you replace industry that makes things with the fire industry, finance, insurance, and real estate, they make their money off of infinite financial growth, right? And so they want everything to get as expensive as possible. That's how they make their money. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is David A. Banks. David is the author of The City Authentic, How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America. He's also a lecturer in the Geography and Planning Department at the University of Albany, and he writes the Other Day newsletter and co-hosts the Iron Weeds podcast. David was last on the show in December of 2020, you know, way back in the early days on episode 40,

where we talked about how the tech industry was kind of shaping our cities and affecting a lot of what was happening in city life. And so this conversation really picks up on and builds on that earlier conversation by talking about how in the same way that social media has encouraged all of these influencers to brand themselves in a certain way to show that they are authentic, it has done very similar things to cities and cities have had to compete against one another to brand themselves in particular ways to make themselves appealing to capital and in particular to the tech industry and to workers in the tech industry. development patterns in cities. It's shaped what governments are focused on and who they are focused on serving. And it's also created a lot of inequality and a lot of negative outcomes because, you know, they've been focused on serving quite an affluent population over, you know, the people who are in their cities who really need some help. And so I think that this is a really fascinating

and important conversation with David, where we dig into the implications of these things, how these strategies worked, and, you know, where they came from. You know, who was putting out these ideas that cities should be attracting major tech companies in this way and should be kind of reorienting their policy goals around this. And in particular, we talk not just about kind of major cities like San Francisco or New York City or Los Angeles, but smaller cities like Albany or like Troy in New York, where David lives, where they have also kind of taken these policies because they are smaller cities. You know, there is a lot more

competition for a very small amount of capital that usually just locates in kind of major metropolises. And so the potential benefits for them are much lower, but it really affects the types of cities that arise from that. So I always love having David on the show. He's always fantastic to talk with, and I think that you're really going to enjoy this conversation.

If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can join supporters like Etienne from France, Mia in New York City, Ben from London, and James in Victoria, BC, by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. David, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. I am very excited to chat with you again because we're talking about two topics that I love to talk about, technology and cities. This is a perfect

episode for me. And of course, having you back on the show after like a very long time, I'm not even going to do the math in my head as to how long it's been, but it was December 2020 last time. So it's been a while and you know, it's about time we had you back on the show. Yeah. It's like been four COVID shots. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. That would have been around that time. Right. I've got 5g. You've got 5g. It's I'm just radiating it everywhere I go and people get mad at me. I've had so many shots, but man, it's great to have you back. And

it's great to be able to talk about your new book, The City Authentic, which I was very happy to say, you know, my name is on the back there gave you a little blurb. Very proud of that. I got I got the parents marks bump right there. Yeah, yeah. I'm moving up in the world, man. Yeah. So are you with your book? You'll be blurbing books next. You know, it's how these things go. Here's the thing, right? The book is fantastic. The book goes into like a bunch of important history, but also gives us really important insight into what is going on right now in cities and like how tech has served to reorient cities in the present, but also how technologies have kind of helped to facilitate this process in the past, right? And so I want to

start with like a general question, and then we'll dig into some of this history and kind of go through how this has progressed over time. Because, you know, I think it's fascinating to dig into. So obviously, the name of the book is The City Authentic. Now, what does it actually mean to be authentic? Yeah, oh, boy. When I try to answer that question in front of my students, I usually just ask them for examples, like things that they think are authentic, right? And it will be stuff like, you know, a live band performance, or, you know, like your mom's recipe for, you know, lasagna or whatever. And then I ask, like, well, yeah, okay, well, let's dig deep, like, what do these things have in common, right? And what it usually comes down to is that these are

things that were made without your input, or like without you in mind, right? Like, because like, the band didn't know you, your mom made the lasagna before you were born. So these are just things that are out there that you discover, or that you encounter in some way, and that they resonate with you in some way, right? And so if we look at like the inverse of that, like what is not authentic, right? It's things that are contrived specifically to impress you, right? And that move to like, make something deliberately to attract you usually reads as unauthentic when it's discovered that this was a contrivance in some way, right? So, I usually describe this in my book in two terms.

One is predictably unique, right? So, a predictably unique thing is like where it's just, you know, just like it's a riff on a common topic, you know, like you go to every city and there's like a coffee shop that like makes a pun on the word grind or drip or something, right? Or different cities will now have like started to have like apparel that they sell in different stores. Building off the kind of I heart NY trend and everyone needs to do their own. Yeah. Or, you know, keep Austin weird. I was in Denver last month and I would go to, for research, I would go into the gift shops. Yeah. Just for research. We get it. Yeah. For research purposes. And they would have all these shirts that would

say like mile high in Denver because they've had weed legal there since like 2014 or something. And I bought one and I actually wore it. I put it on during my academic conference presentation. I was like, this is important. And it was dead silence. Like, I don't know, academics have no sense of humor. It was like, it was like a tie dyed mile high in Denver shirt. And I just like put it over a suit and tie and like no one, I got nothing. But like authenticity walks this fine line between things that you didn't know you wanted, and then you find them and you're like, Oh, wow, this is, this is something that I found that didn't even consider me when it was created. That means it's authentic, because it has an origin somewhere. And the urban sociologist Sharon Zukin, who, you know, if I'm sitting on the shoulders of giants, she's definitely one of the big shoulders that I'm sitting on. She argues that, you know, like, cities are actually a bad place to find authenticity, because they change so much, right? So like, these aren't, if you're looking for a place that is going to have like something old in it, like the city isn't really a great candidate for that. But cities are usually

considered places to find authenticity because they at least probably in the last like 20 years or so, peddle in the experience of origins, right? The experience that you are finding something that is old or the first to XYZ, you know? So that's kind of what authenticity is today is focused around experiences and whether or not the experience that you're having connects to your expectations of what an experience should be of us are walking around trying to create the story for ourselves that creates our identity. And when we find stuff that we that resonates with us that we like, right, like we try to rein that into be part of our identity. And everyone selling stuff knows that and you know, tries to, to be that this, the second thing that I use to sort of talk about authenticity is called the thirst games, which there's what I describe as mostly cities, but also like all the attendant organizations that have knit cities together in regional capacities. Maybe we'll get into that later. But you know, like our industrial development authorities, business improvement districts, they're all competing for your attention also. And instead of the Hunger Games, because you know, I, you know, I put in a lot of pop culture references,

I need to tamp it down a little bit. And maybe you'll make something a little original here, something authentic. So when I say thirst games, you know, I am talking about like a ruthless competition. But instead of hunger, right, like thirst is one, you have it more often, you know, like, you can't go pretty long without water. But also, I'm tongue in cheek evoking the idea of a liquidity and of what Zygmunt Bauman calls like liquid modernity, where the most powerful actors in a modern society are ones that are able to shift and move and, and change quickly with the times while also being able to, like, get into places of power and then repel people and organizations that they like don't want to be around them or they see as threats. And so like,

all of those things coming together is kind of like what I'm referencing when I say the thirst games, which is also like a big part of authenticity. Yeah, I love this notion of the thirst games and the competition between these cities. And, you know, we're going to come back to some of these business improvement districts and things like that, that you're talking about. But I want to return to what you said about, you know, Sharon Zukin saying that a city is not somewhere that you go for authenticity necessarily, right? Because so much gets kind of replaced and kind of bulldozed over. And I feel like that's especially the case in the North American city, but of course, in many others as well, where we've seen, you know, so much get kind of destroyed and

built over in order to make way for the automobile. But this is kind of a process that goes back even further than that. And while the book is called The City Authentic, and this is a concept that you're kind of referring to and laying out in terms of what has been happening more recently, you also refer to the past, right? And previous movements of the city beautiful and the city efficient, which kind of eras that came before the one that we're in now. Do you want to give us kind of a brief description of those two periods and what you think really defined them? Absolutely. The city beautiful movement, which I think is probably what most people have heard of. If you took an American

history course in high school or college, there is usually a paragraph that says something about the City Beautiful Movement. And basically, all you need to know about that is that once the frontier closed in the United States, that's when all the eastern capital had to go find new places to be invested in, because we had slaughtered a great deal of native people and taken their land. And now we'll now let's like retrench those gains and put them into cities, because the material wealth is like still coming out of like these newly conquered territories, and we need to put it somewhere. Otherwise, it'll lose value, right? Because if you just keep taking gold out of like these newly conquered territories, and we need to put it somewhere. Otherwise, it'll lose value, right? Because if you just keep taking gold out of the ground, or oil or something, right, but you're not reinvesting it, then like, you know, the supply increases and the value of

it goes down. And so the city beautiful movement was an attempt to build a bunch of very expensive things in a lot of cities to one do what's called a spatial fix, which is what I just described, where, you know, yeah, you build a big thing and, and spend a lot of money and to keep the value of commodities up, and the value of money itself up. But it also was a signal to other rich people that they should start investing too, right? So if you get like a Carnegie Library, you get like, I don't know, you know, like some Rockefeller funded museum or concert hall, right? You know, like that's a signal to, you know, it may be like the second tier rich people that is like, oh, okay, this is a safe place to invest. It's going to stand around for a while because the Rockefellers and Carnegie's are

invested in this place too, right? And of course, because these people want to like live forever. Just takes a different form today where they literally are going to do it. Yeah. In this case, they just plaster their name onto things. And it won't be good enough if these are private things because then no one's talking about it. So they plaster their name on these gigantic buildings that are usually very public facing because also this is a time where rich people aren't very popular. So they're also trying to give back in ways that make them seem a little less evil. The Bill Gates of the earlier era, basically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the city beautiful movement building really big, honestly, beautiful things,

usually where poor people lived, you know, so you, you know, you bulldoze them. And then you say, like, I love the people, except those that were right in this place right here, right? That is historically put between like Haussmann's Paris and Hitler's Berlin. Those are both obviously European cities, but a ton of it happened in North America, because that's where all the money was sloshing around at the time. And then the city efficient, this is a less used term, there's several other candidates for like names for this period. I use city efficient, because it's very convenient to say city beautiful city efficient city authentic, obviously. So that's, that's why I picked this one. And you know, and this is where code becomes really popular, right, both in the lessing sense,

right, like code, as in computer code, but also law, zoning codes, right. And this is where you start talking about units to the acre, you're engineering things to national or regional specifications, all in an effort to make things more efficient, which is not just for helping people get places faster or easier. But it's also making it easier to invest in places by making them standardized, right? The car obviously gets popular and transforms cities around it. And of course, when you're using

a very sophisticated technology like a car to get around, it needs specificity and rationalization in order for it to work, right? Because if you have cities with roads of all kinds of different widths and like in some places you go on the left side and some places you go on it to work, right? Because if you have cities with roads of all kinds of different widths, and like, in some places, you go on the left side, and some places go on the right side, right? Like that won't work, right? So you have to have rationalization and efficiency in order to have these enormous technical systems to work correctly. So that's the city efficient. And I should say, this is also when like cities, right, I should talk a little

about law and code is like, this is also where like cities are hiring actual city planners as a profession. And that my field of urban planning, like start seeing itself as at the level of lawyer, doctor, engineer is planner, right? And this is really crucial to not only the profession, but it's also like when a profession forms, it's also creating its own market. And so it's saying like cities have to be planned. If they're not planned, there'll be chaos. I think it's fascinating to hear you kind of periodize it in that way, but also to think about kind of the technologies that were involved in those periods, right? Like if you're thinking about the city beautiful and the need to build these big kind of architectural projects,

internal combustion engines and steam power and things like that are necessary in order to move all these goods and materials and what have you and to make this possible. And then you move into the city efficient era where now the automobile, the automotive city is taking over and you're rebuilding things around the image of the automobile. And certainly that is what we see in North America and in many other cities through that period where many parts of the city are really being kind of leveled to make way for the development that is being done in order to remake things for the automobile, to encourage

people to be using the automobile to get around. And of course, I think we also see a bit more of kind of like the city becomes more bland or whatnot because of the way that things are built, because we have these kind of cookie cutter, big box stores and all this kind of stuff that's being built. And this is kind of what this period looks like. And so obviously with talking about that, you get us up to kind of the later part of the 1900s, you know, around the 1990s, that period with all of that. So what are the challenges that cities are starting to face, you know, at the end of this city efficient period that starts to make the kind of conditions for a new mode or a new kind of era to emerge as you start to talk about the city authentic? Cities have these interesting set of problems. Like on the one hand, crime is down in North America and Europe, like never before seen ways. Crime's at historic lows, but they also don't have any money. Industry has left most North American cities and a lot of European ones, and they're not coming back. They're not interested. And that was how cities did grow is that they would do smokestack

chasing, but the smokestacks aren't listening. We're sending those all to China at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those all go to China and Mexico, right? Like South America, like the labor is too cheap. And so they're not, they're not listening. What labor is not cheap does stick around, right? And it's in these creative class kind of fields, right? So the white collar industries, basically, right? And here, this is where the geographer Jamie Peck describes this as like, the perfect lacuna or like open space where all these city officials are like, well, we don't have any other playbook. And so in Waltz's Richard Florida in 2002, with the rise of the creative class, and he's like, here's the new playbook, right?

Literally, like this is the book that I wrote is the playbook. So what you want to attract is what he calls like the three T's like talent, technology and tolerance, right? So tolerance being this is very dated to 2023 years, but he's talking about like he'll talk about like a gay index because he recognizes that cities that have a large lgbtq population seem to be doing pretty well this is also a time where if it's like a dual earner household that doesn't have any kids you know like they have a ton of expendable income and they're and they're still like these like very well-defined districts that lgbtq people like coalesce around and they seem to be doing really well so he's like oh you need those and they also all seem to be in like these designerly kind of

professions it's pretty essentialist reading from what we can see at the time but he's working with whatever he can find in the late 90s and then also probably like a specific subset of like the LGBTQ community that he's interested in, right? Yeah, it's going back and forth. It's like, well, yeah, of course, I didn't find like the trans person that, you know, like got kicked out of their family's house and lives in Mobile, Alabama. Like that person's not on his radar because he's not looking for them. Technology is obviously like these upcoming Silicon Valley kind of companies, you know, he sees that. And then tolerance for all of it is super important.

And the talent is being able to do these white collar jobs. And so the answer then is like, well, just keep these people happy, right? Because creativity is like the new oil or whatever, right? Like this is the new source of value creation. And because these people tend to flit around to like different employers or they're self-employed, they can work anywhere. You know, like the job of cities is to be the fun weekend dad, as I describe it, right? You don't have to make any rough choices, just be fun, right? And if you can create this atmosphere where people want to live, and you make small investments and create like enticements for fun things to show up, then you'll just create this like culture and economy

or ecology even of creativity that spurs innovation. I think this is really important, right? Because this is a moment, as you're saying, cities are kind of, they're kind of stuck, right? They're looking for what is going to be the next thing to drive them forward to kind of create a new wave of kind of prosperity, wealth creation, all this sort of stuff. And, you know, Richard Florida enters with this playbook. Richard Florida, of course, has blocked me on Twitter. He's not a particular fan because I've criticized them. Yeah, I'm blocked also. But, you know, so he kind of enters with this playbook, like this is what you can do in order to revive the economy. And his playbook is basically like, look at all these people in quote unquote, creative professions. Really what he means is people earning like higher than average incomes

and saying, you as cities need to go out and you need to take actions and implement policies that are going to attract these specific people, right? You need to be looking for them. You need to be kind of orienting your whole kind of approach toward attracting these people, toward making these people happy. So what is the ultimate effect of doing that, right? Because this is a moment where obviously a lot of cities are trying to attract tech industries

because that's a big part of the creative economy and the tech industry is really taking off in this moment. So what is the effect of kind of having all of these cities chasing after these particular type of workers, this particular class of workers? Yeah. So this is actually interesting because like, you know, we're talking about like the 90s and the early 2000s. The culture picks up on this like inevitability of like the way things are going in the 80s. And you see it in movies,

starting with like, even like Christmas Vacation, like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, like the neighbors, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and I don't know the dude's name, but you know, like, they're just like these like, yuppie people that you're supposed to hate. But you see them as like these people out of place, like they should be in a city, they look like they should be in a city, but they're not they're in like this, like, suburb living next to Chevy Chase, like this, something's wrong. And then like in 86, like David Byrne makes this movie that I love, and pretty much everyone else I talked to hates called True Stories, where he's basically describing this exact problem of like, cities not being able to retain talent. I think it's actually said in the movie, like, you know, people don't realize if they're working or not working. And

they just do things because they enjoy it. And, and so like, what the hell do you do these people? What do they want? And then I think probably the best description of it is Beetlejuice, that movie Beetlejuice, where the Dietzes show up to a small Connecticut town, because the dad has nerves or something, and he needs to calm down. But they reproduce themselves, right? Because that's constantly what this class does, or what this sector of the population does, is they can't help but like in a magpie fashion like collect culture and sell it right because of course like it's perfect the dad is a real estate agent and the mom is an artist and those two things are constantly coming together to create value

their first idea is like oh this connecticut town is so quaint and nice and i like it and if it could just be tweaked a little bit to be a little bit more, like amenable to the tastes of city people, we could just like take over this entire town and turn it into what today would be like, you know, Airbnb utopia of some kind, right? And like, that's their first, their first move, but then they find out that their house is haunted. And then they say, pretty much like, oh, this is even more specific. You can't find this anywhere else. And so this is a competitive advantage or a comparative advantage that no one else can really have, right? And this is the essential component of the city authentic, right? Which is that like, here's a thing that

cannot be exported, right? Or removed, because it is directly tied to this geography, this place in space and time. This thing happened, right? Whatever way we can get people to spend money to experience it, to experience that origin, right? Like that's our economy now. Even better if the people that make a lot of money doing designerly creative things like it and will spend all of their, you know, walking around money on this sort of thing. So any sort of thing in the past, or some sort of geographic feature that is amenable to expendable income

is great, right? Which is why, you know, you get bars, like when I describe in my book that name themselves after past tenants of the building, right? So there's like a wine bar that opens up in my town of Troy that's called the Confectionary, which is confusing, right? Because it's a wine bar named after a candy store, right? But it's because a candy store used to be there in the 1800s, right? They're not making like candy themed or candy flavored wines or anything for you? No, no, no, right?

Because like it can't be that creative, right? You know, because it really what you want to do is like take history, freeze it in amber and then like, you know, sell it back to people. You know, if they had picked the tenant right before the bar, it would have been insurance themed, right? And like, that's not something that people want to expend money on willingly. Yeah, let's go to the insurance bar. Sounds great.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. I think that you make a really important point there that I wanted to pick up on and kind of talk a bit about, right? Because I guess to kind of condense a short history here for people to understand maybe who aren't really into like urban geography and these sorts of fields, you know, basically what we see in a lot of cities, especially kind of culture oriented ones, is that you kind of have a lot of industrial places leave. Then you have kind of artists move into these former industrial areas. You have the kind of loft boom. So they're looking for cheap places

to live and then kind of finance people, people who want to be cool, follow after them and kind of gentrify these areas, right? These places get kind of redone, then they start to get more expensive. And, you know, we have kind of seen this process through many large cities where real estate prices, where neighborhoods have kind of been updated, have kind of been gentrified and prices have gone through the roof over the past, you know, number of decades, basically. And there's something really important that you talk about in your book where, you know, when we had cities whose kind of economic bases were more dependent on industrial work, there was a desire to keep property prices and housing prices low. But as we shift to this focus on the creative class, so to speak, and the focus on finance industry, that desire goes away.

Do you want to talk to us a bit about that and how that proceeds and why that desire to keep the cost of living low, because then you could pay lower wages. And you wanted land prices low, one, because that would influence the cost of living, but also because like, if you ever expanded your factory, right, you're paying more in land prices, because a factory takes up a lot of land. And you also don't want a ton of competition for other uses of land. And you don't want your factory getting surrounded by apartments or other factories or something, right? You want to be the big guy, the big fish in the small pond, which is why, you know, like my region in like upstate New York, right, is just like dotted with cities that never really got

beyond like 100,000 people was because this was like a nice little sweet spot for that sort of economy. But when you replace industry that makes things with the fire industry, the finance, insurance, and real estate, they make their money off of infinite financial growth, right? And so they want everything to get as expensive as possible. That's how they make their money. And when you also put like FinTech in there, right, like financial technology firms, and the growing property and real estate technology stuff, you know, like Zillow and a ton of other things that you've never heard of, right, that do a lot of back end work. They also want this sort of infinite growth model, because one, right, like they work on monopoly logic, right, that they need to be the only or one of only a handful of companies that do whatever it is that they do, because everything that they do were only works at enormous scales. If they're a regional competitor in something, it's not going to make any money. Right. And so technology and the fire industry together right are really really focused on just

making things as expensive as possible because that's the only way that they can make money because all the things that they do are like taking a percentage off of real value creation right of like the stuff that people actually do to make a living right like they're always the middlemen on it or like they're they're trading it, or they're speculating on it. As everything gets more expensive, their little percentage gets higher, or the actual dollar value of that percentage gets bigger. And so that's the material change when you go from industry that makes things to an industry that usually just kind of speculates. Yeah.

And I think that's really important to understand, especially when we look back at the impact of the kind of creative class theory, right? And having all of these cities running after this particular industry, trying to attract these particular industries to their cities, having all of these workers and what it actually means for people who live in cities, especially at a time where cities are trying to attract more people back to them, right? To kind of keep a kind of vibrant economy going. You know, in the book, and I know you've written a review of this focus on the creative class and kind of running after the tech industry and the fire industry and remaking our cities in this way? That book, The New Urban Crisis, I don't think Florida's written a book since then.

I think he's still trying to figure out like what his thing is now. Even he can't like ignore the fact that like this thing that he kept saying people should do like isn't working. And it's also just like a fascinating book, because it comes out in 2017 is so, so clear, especially from like the last chapter that he was supposed to be our HUD secretary under Hillary Clinton, or just like something involved, like his star was supposed to rise with a Hillary Clinton presidency in some way, and that didn't pan out. And so he's like, well, I guess I'll just finish this book and figure out what to do. But the issue there, and this is something that he acknowledges, right? So, what I'm about to say comes mostly from that book is that, you know,

cities sort of retrench their wins and make it impossible for new cities or like down and out cities like in the Rust Belt that want to revitalize, right? Like they can't compete with a New York City, a Chicago, a Los Angeles, or even Atlanta and Orlando, right? Like they can't compete with a New York City, a Chicago, a Los Angeles, or even Atlanta and Orlando, right? Like because they retrenched their earlier wins with what are called agglomeration benefits, right? Like, if you do X job, for example, Atlanta, the film industry, right? Like, like in the, I think it was like the late 90s, they started like, making it really cheap to film there. And then that sort of grew and grew and grew to the point that, you know, like they started like, making it really cheap to film there. And then that sort of grew and grew and grew to the point that, you know, like now, like, you know, around by me, we're

trying to get prestige television to always film by us. So like Succession, and the Gilded Age were both filmed around the Albany area. And that was the direct, like, effort of revitalization work to like, they picked that as like, you know, because we have like, several, you know, if you want to do like a period piece on 18th century, New York City, like we're a much cheaper to film in than actual New York City, right? You know, so they'll do stuff like that. But once you like get some wins, you can't reach them anymore. So what ends up happening is you have like this massive inequality, both within cities, but also between cities. And there's just like no catching up. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that you know, if your economy is supposed to

be built on like having like a fun place to live, where like creatives get to like have like these adult playgrounds, then of course, like, there's only going to be like a couple places. Is it even comparable to say like New York City, nightlife is anything like Albany, New York nightlife, right? Like, that doesn't make any sense. And so I'll just end by saying, you know, like what Albany and areas like it, like these smaller cities, what they try to do is position themselves as like these unique thrift store finds to like the brand name of the bigger cities, right? And that's the best that we can come up with, right? You know, of course, if you have money, you can just like spend it on like the thing that everyone knows exists. But if you want

like the real like jewel in the rough kind of thing, then like, you know, you come up here, and you can find what we'll say is fairly similar experiences, these experience of urban origins at a deep discount. Yeah, it's so fascinating, right? And you think about this narrative that, you know, we've been hearing for a while now that a lot of the economic activity has kind of moved to the coast in the United States, right? To the large cities, you know, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, places like that. And like, you can see that that is exactly what has happened, right?

Because for these industries, like they need to be close to all of these other kind of industries that they're connected to, to these other companies that they're connected to. And it's much more difficult for smaller cities to ever catch up or become like the next tech hub or whatever, you know, regardless of the number of tax incentives and whatever that they offer to these major companies, right? Maybe they'll get a data center or something like that, but that's not the same as like having a bunch of tech workers actually doing kind of that higher value work. And so your book focuses a lot, not on like the large cities like New York city, but as you say, these smaller cities that are trying to attract people that are trying to attract tech workers that are trying to attract the creative class

in many senses. And so how does that actually work? Like, how do they try to bring these people in? And how do they use, obviously, the book is called The City Authentic. How do they use the technologies that are kind of pushing authenticity at us, the technologies through which, you know, us as kind of individuals or influencers try to, you know, position themselves as authentic for people who are watching? How do cities do this same sort of thing? Yeah, so one thing that surprised me is that a lot of cities recognize that competition amongst them is starting to become an obstacle, right? For the longest time, the intercity competition was just, you know, like default, like, oh, competition equals

capitalism equals good, but completely uncritically thinking that like, well, when we all compete, we all become the best of ourselves, right? But, but that's not panning out at all, right? Because you have these like obvious winners that just keep increasing their gains and their lead in front of others, right? And so like, what's interesting that, like, everyone that I spoke to on this did not want to be on the record saying that this is what they clearly needed to do because a lot of places, especially, like, small cities and towns,

don't want to, like, be incorporated into a larger city for reasons that range from hometown pride to, like, unfounded assumptions that crime will go up once, like, your trash is picked up by a different municipal authority, like somehow that turns into crime going up or whatever, right? There's a lot of magical thinking around that kind of stuff. So you know, it's like one thing is that like cities have to like at least administratively consolidate and get bigger, or at the very least,

when they make their pitches to the public to say like move here or visit here as a tourist or to potential employers, like, you know, move a factory or an office here, they have to make the pitch as a region, not as individual cities, right? So one way they're doing that is one, you have to create an organization that works at that level, right? And so in New York, we have what are called regional economic development councils. These are ones that Andrew Cuomo, the former esteemed governor, set up. And there, you know, there's a recognition that, yeah, New York City, if you put that against Syracuse, right, like, or Albany or Buffalo, like New York City wins every time for, you know, like whether or not Facebook is going to put a headquarters there or something, right? So what they do instead, is they have competitions within these 10 different

regions. And so New York City is never competing with something else. Or if they do compete, and they sometimes do, the competition is designed to such that the things that make New York City, New York City are kind of like, handicapped, so to speak, like in the way that you know, like speaking like a golf handicap kind of thing. And so what ends up happening there is that you get these really intense thirst games within the regions. And so in the capital region of upstate New York, you'll have different cities competing for like, you know, between low six figure around their low interest loans, grants and other kind of incentives to build things and to transform maybe old industries into new ones, clear brownfield sites to put on new clean tech, stuff like that. And usually these economic development councils, which are

composed of governor appointed representatives that are usually already like the gentry of that region, right? Like the high executives or owners of big employers, they usually are the ones that are on these councils, and they will release reports that say, like, this is our vision for the region. And then it is up to everyone that wants their money to say, here is how what I want to do fits that vision, right? And that's how these organizations talk to each other in order to create economic growth. Some of it is better than what it could be just kind of like smoky back rooms where you know, people are, you know, like slapping backs and making deals, you know, like, now, all the slapping backs and making deals have minutes

and are publicly announced. But in general, like this rationalized system where you get like points, and those points are reported, right? Like that's what they started doing. One of the things that stood out to me, like, while you were describing that in the book was just how necessary, like a whole ton of consultants are for all of these, like smaller cities who compete in this, right? And like, it made me think I was talking a couple months ago to Rosie Cullington. And you know, she has a new book out about the consulting industry. And you just think about like how these companies can

make so much money, like going around to all these cities and selling them similar plans, or even just cities having a higher like local consultants to come in and write these proposals for money and projects they might never get funded to do. Yeah, because I've done it before. Like I've been one of those consultants. And it's ridiculous. So I mean, like a couple episodes ago, you had Kate Wagner on, I was listening to that in the Moynihan train hall, which is a very interesting experience. You can already see like parts of it like falling apart already, like the Amtrak sign is like blinking and stuff. And it's just like, this is amazing. What Kate was talking about where architects have started to adopt the tech big idea rhetoric, right? Like the TED Talk style thing where it's like, like this building is going to revolutionize

humans relationship to the horizon, or you know, you just say some wacky stuff like that, right? And that is totally the case, not only in architecture, but also in economic development, where they just have to say, everything is the next iPhone, we are going to revolutionize the way that Albany connects to the global economy by making a new wing on the community college. Like, just say we need a new wing on the community college. I don't know, just like calm down, right? But they need to hit the soaring rhetoric. Because otherwise, it gets lost, like people just like stop paying

attention. And because like, that is the language of power now, is to say that every single thing changes the world forever. Right? And it has to have this, again, this like authenticity component to it, where you say, like, you know, not only will change everything forever, but it could only happen here, right? Like, this is the perfect place for this thing to happen, because we have always been known as the place that does XYZ, right? So just to give a brief example, right, like around here, we always had a bunch of apple orchards, and some of them are very old and continually operating, right? But you know, commodity prices being what they are, right? You know, like the apple business isn't as lucrative as it used to be. And you know, you're competing with a global economy of apples where like you get red delicious is red delicious apples, like coming from Argentina or whatever,

right? So like, what else do you do, you have to go up the value chain to like more finished products. And so apple orchards will go to these regional economic development councils and say, we need $600,000 to turn us into a cidery or some other like Apple derived product facility. And here's how doing that reshapes the entire region into this new kind of economy. One is like that, but then also, you know, actual high tech sectors like we have a chip fab up here from Global Foundries, I think it's a United Arab Emirates owned company, I think it is. And then we're also building a port on the Hudson. This is where the Hudson stops being a seafaring ships can only go up to basically Troy where I live. And that's why Troy exists in the first place, right? And so there's a port in

Albany that's supposed to do a lot of wind farm stuff. So you take like huge pieces of these windmill machines, and you'll put them on barges and send them down the Hudson, you know, and all of these sorts of ideas, while just like fine on their own, are always couched in like, we have always done this. This is in our blood and in the soil. Like, like, it comes really close to blood and soil kind of rhetoric, where it's like, we have to do this sort of stuff here. Just magically, this is where this kind of stuff happens. Yeah. So even even the most like hard nose tech stuff gets this like, tinge of magic dust that that that it has to happen here or something.

Yeah, this this is part of our legacy that we need to continue because this is what we do. One of the things that I find fascinating is to think about how this kind of trajectory has developed over time, right. And as you say, like you have these smaller cities that are trying to attract industries that have already kind of been rooted in like the larger kind of metropolises, right? And they're trying to kind of cash in on some of that wealth to try to attract some of that. And, you know, obviously I was thinking as I was reading your book about things that are happening locally here in Newfoundland, where I am on the East coast of Canada, not a very big place, right?

But you still see these similar discourses. And I'm thinking like, you know, if you look back at the creative class, and part of the promise was like, you need to do things that are going to attract these type of people. So like, even if the real estate soared, and even if like a lot of things got worse, and inequality got worse, like at least you got some better buses and like some things like that, right? But it feels like now you don't even get that, right? Like you see these governments doing tax credits for tech companies and tax credits for, you know, film companies and whatnot to try to attract these sorts of industries to the area. But it feels like there's not kind of the consideration of what you actually do to improve, you know, society for most of the people who live

in it. It's just how do I attract these industries and these types of jobs that are the industries that are making a lot of money in the current economy. And the other part of that, I think relates to something that was happening during the pandemic, right, where we did see a lot of people or it looked like a lot of people were leaving cities and going to less expensive areas. And again, you know, Atlantic Canada up here on the East Coast is one of those places that were like, very kind of behind kind of sluggish economically. And all of a sudden, you had an influx of people from places like Toronto, where the real estate is really high. And then the real estate prices started

to soar here as well. And the people who lived here kind of couldn't afford the new prices as everything kind of shot up and their jobs weren't making the big kind of tech salaries and stuff of the remote workers who were moving in. So I think that's kind of like a big comment. But I wonder how you think about that development and what you've been seeing in the past few years as these things have kind of continued and as they've also kind of changed as the conditions have changed. Yeah. So I mean, big cities are, I think, always going to exist as long as like we can maintain complex civilization, right? Well, let's say that. And I would hope we're going to be able to maintain complex civilization for quite a while. the big cities kind of disgorge people for any number of reasons, and a pandemic is a good one.

But what I saw in upstate New York was that, you know, even though Hudson, New York, which is just south of me, a little less than an hour south of Albany, was the largest recipient of New York City people, right? Like the most New York City people went to in and around Hudson. Even then, the number of people that went there is disproportionate to the rent increases, right? The land value increases. Part of it is who moved. It was, you know, fairly well off people that could afford to move, but also people who were like, had so much wealth that I heard from several real estate agents that this is basically what happened when people would go like, had so much wealth that I heard from several real estate agents that this is basically what happened when people would go like, does it have high speed internet access? They're like, yes. And it's like, I will take it for 50,000 over asking, like without seeing it.

It was just because like, I need to get out of here away from the plebs that are all disease vectors to me. And I will just use all these services to bring food and information to me. Right. Internet gig economy services, stuff like that. Yeah. So that's, that's the tech angle here is that all of these neo feudal systems where, you know, you tap on a phone and, and, and some poor person has to go grocery shopping for you, right? Like that enabled a lot of people to very confidently say like, oh, I can just leave the city go buy some sort of, you know, like old shack or nicer suburban thing that at the time probably cost 180, maybe low 200s kind of place. And then they all did that and everything jumped up in price like crazy. You

know, like, I'm fortunate enough to own my home, mostly because I lived here before the pandemic, where like, I have a three bedroom house that I pay less on my mortgage than I would in rent, which is why we did in the first place, right? It was just like, it actually was cheaper. If you could amass a little bit of money to get the down payment, it was cheaper. But now that's not necessarily true anymore, where like, the value of my house, like more than doubled over the pandemic, and they haven't really gone down because one, like if housing prices go down, a lot of stuff falls apart. Right? So like everyone is invest everyone in that arena is invested in literally and figuratively and like, keeping prices from never going back down, there's this

ratchet effect where they just keep going up and up and up. Right. But then there's also these like really interesting situations where you're like, okay, well, now that you move up here, right, and you maybe get some groceries, but like, you've lived in Manhattan almost your whole life, or at least like your adult life. And now you live in a place that snows a lot. And you have a 500 foot driveway leading to a country road, you need to like, find out how to plow it. And like, like, and who like takes away your garbage and your furnace runs on oil. And like, if someone needs to show up and like, fill it with oil again, there's like you know you're not hooked up to a city sewer or anything right so like there's all these new things that you have

to deal with and so what some people were doing was like going on like next door on these facebook groups like to ask for like you know recommendations for different sorts of services to get this done and what they would often find is like very very angry people like get out gentrifier. They correctly recognize this as rural gentrification. They're like, get the fuck out. I'm not going to tell you where I get my oil because they'll jack up the price on me, which is correct, right? Like, no, I'm not going to help you like do this here.

No way. Yeah, it was a total revolt to the point that this real estate agent that's in the book, Megan White, they created their own app. They had to create a walled garden of their own called Upstate Curious, where they had to like, be able to have their clients talk to each other in the same way that a city would just sort of naturally let you talk to each other because you're physically proximate. They had to recreate that in a rural setting through the phone, just so that they could talk at all, like in share something, because most people just didn't want to

talk to them, period, or and they would get some pretty serious harassment thrown their way. But now she's also going into commercial real estate. Because obviously, like now these a lot of these people want to stay here, but they want like, you know, the wood fired pizza and like all the other like a nice hairstylist. They like they want all these urban amenities in the country. But you can't like do the serendipitous like, you know, like, oh, you know, I got off the different train station today and found this new place. So now they're also like trying to knit together these networks of affluence in the countryside, mostly through social media, which is fascinating to watch. That is absolutely wild. And, you know, I think it also shows just like another means of kind of, you know, the wealthy in this particular class kind of carving themselves out

from everyone else, but in this more kind of digital way, right? You can't even use the app that everyone else is using because they hate you. So you have your own app with your own kind of selection of services that you can access or tell you where to go and all this kind of stuff with your own like specific community. That's wild. Before we start to close off our conversation, I wanted to ask you how this plays out on social media as well, right? Because you not only have cities kind of promoting themselves on social media or like the kind of organizations that run kind of the downtowns and want you around those areas and kind of shopping in those areas in particular, but also particularly like developments that want you to care about, you know, whatever it is, their housing development or their business or what have you. So how does this kind of branding effort then play

out on social media as, you know, this is kind of one vector for the authenticity and the attempt to sell authenticity to attract people to a particular city? Yeah. So this is, this gets really interesting because, um, you know, everything we've talked about so far, right. Is, uh, involves the, um, the person in the community, the person in the community or the organization claiming how unique the place is. It's predictably unique. It's authentic. It's one of a kind. start looking at people who already live here or have lived here their entire life, and they want to talk about that experience through the lingua franca of the internet, like memes and stuff like that, right? You actually get them talking in terms of mass produced culture and objects, right?

So I speak to one person who wanted to remain pseudonymous. So I got to make up a name for them, which I absolutely love making up names. So Elroy McDaniels is the name I gave this person. You're good at making up the name. I like it. I love making up names. I wish more people wanted to remain pseudonymous in my book. That was the only one I got to do. But he runs this Instagram account called Upstate New York Memes, NY Memes. And it's just stuff like the starter pack meme, right? Which is, I think kind of played out by now, but at the time was fairly popular where it's just a collection of things, right? And then you label it

the X starter pack, right? So if it was the tech won't save us starter pack, right? It would be your book, right? And it would be thinking thoughtfully about technology and a podcast app. I don't know. People get mad at Elon Musk. Yeah, yeah, right. And so I was looking at these starter packs for like cities and towns around here, like places that like, nobody has heard of if you're not from around here, right? Like Loudonville, right? Or well, now now people know Clifton Park, because that's where Keith Ranieri had his, like, dungeon for NXIVM, which was around here. So sometimes people know Clifton Park. So like, I asked him, like, okay, so like, what makes Gilderland, New York, right? Like, the place that it is. And, you know, it's like, well, you know, like, people talk about like,

my dad drives a BMW, and we have the largest Walmart in the world, which is actually true, like the biggest Walmart in the world is up by me, I don't know why. And of course, the argument here is that like, this has to be widely understandable through consumerism. And so it's this flip where like, actually, this place is like all other places. And the differences are in these minor consumption habits, because everyone can think of like the person that drives a BMW or always has a hydro flask on them or wears Uggs, right? Or it'll be stuff like, you know, because a lot of this is like high schoolers talking to each other, you know, it can get kind of mean and catty. It'll be like, you know, backpack SoundCloud wrapper and pregnancy tests, you know, backpack SoundCloud rapper and pregnancy

tests, you know, or like this high school and this other high school is, you know, Land Rovers and Chanel or something. And I was also surprised to find out that there is like almost no literature on this, at least nothing that I could find. But this happens everywhere. So because Elroy, who I was talking to, did this because he had a lot of friends on Long Island. And, you know, like Long Island, much like Southern California, has like a bunch of little municipalities that are almost indistinguishable from each other if you aren't from the place. But everyone has very, very specific opinions about those different places like that but because they're kind of indistinguishable on their face to describe their differences has to be one like this narcissism of small differences but also like through little consumptive habits that are very clear to people of like what makes them different and so like this happens like all over the place. Like I remember Buzzfeed RIP doing like a, you know, you grew up in Miramar, Florida, which is where I grew up, right?

Like you lived in Miramar, Florida when, and it was just like a list of like 30 things that made sense to me, but wouldn't make sense to anyone else. You know, like, you know, the fact that, you know, did you know Johnny Depp went to Miramar high school? It was like, yeah, you know, like stuff like that. And so like, it's just like very fascinating that like, once you actually get into the community, the authenticity talk is completely gone. And it's replaced by its exact opposite. And that it's so useful that actually real estate agents buy posts on this guy's account to sell their house. Yeah, of course. Of course. It's, uh, I don't know. I think it's so fascinating to see how those things kind of develop, right. And to see just the ways that social media is used in order to kind of forward these broader trends that are

happening. You know, I think in this conversation, you've given us so much to think about, right. Not only how these cities and how these trends have kind of progressed through history, but also how the tech industry and the growth of the tech industry and kind of its influences on cities have shaped a lot of that development over the past couple of decades. off our conversation. How do you see these things continuing in this moment and into the future? Like, how do you see capital and technology kind of continuing to remake our cities in order for them to kind of further profit off of what is happening? So when I talk about this book in front of like fellow geographers or stuff like that, they usually say like, this has always been like this, right? Cities have always advertised themselves. And they've always been obsessed with growth and all that all that stuff. And that's true, right? So what's different is one, like how far cities can reach and how they can reach specific kinds of people or companies, right? And so like, one, one way that this is kind

of trending is, you know, now that influencers are just kind of part of a PR budget, they're not just like some weird idea. They're just like, pretty mainstream idea for how to market anything. You know, cities have started going to those placement ad firms that just exist. And we're like, I want to buy an influencer for an afternoon. And like, I want, you know, we'll fly them out to whatever city client city and like, they just like do their thing in our city. And then that will make our city seem cool. Right? And of course, you pick the influencer for the kind of people you want there, right? If it's like Youngstown, Ohio, and it's an aging population, you get like some young zoomer to like go there and be like, wow, actually

Youngstown is pretty rad or whatever. In the Hudson area, you had Alison Roman, like the foodie, like cookbook author, like talking about the area a lot. And then she actually invested in three different restaurants in the area, right. And the other thing is just that, and this is the much darker side of this is that because there are now all these platforms that allow private capital and really large companies to command a really big portfolio of real estate, they can now like, manipulate everything from you know, like the original asking price of homes to like the interior decoration of homes, like all these different things can like be commanded from like far away places and can be deployed in ways that are most advantageous to them. And usually it's a zero sum game disadvantageous to the locals. And so we're now seeing industries that used to be only regional is there now to manage real estate at

that scale. This can be really, really disturbing. And from the city authentic perspective, right, it's just going to become like, you know, like these new riffs, these new flavors of the same warmed over bullshit, right? So cities become as different as like Panera is from Jimmy John's, right? Like there's just like, the distinction is really only that skin deep. And you start to see inklings of that with like cities getting really interested in like their flag design, that's something that's in the book or companies that don't foreground their owner and are instead like, you know, like Starbucks for a while would own stores that weren't didn't look like a Starbucks, but are just a coffee shop, you'd see

more of that. And you know, like, just like the prevalence of a food hall that is usually owned by the developer or the property manager of the building. And this is just like an attempt to like, you know, just pack a place full of restaurants pretty quickly and easily and cheaply. Like that sort of stuff is going to stick around for a while until we see some major shift in the economy, which could be soon. But usually, you know, like when there's a big economic downturn, there's a retrenchment and a consolidation of capital. And they'll just keep doing stuff like what I just described. You're not leaving us on the greatest note of optimism there, David. But you know,

this is a realistic podcast, right? We're trying to understand what's actually going on here. But you know, I think that these trends are worrying, right? As we see these technologies enable capital to increase its power, not just within the cities where they already operate, but to extend that into other cities, so that they can further manage more buildings, more properties at a larger scale, you know, and it becomes completely divorced from what's happening locally and just part of this larger trend. And they can more easily kind of push up prices and rejig things for, you know, the types of people that they're serving that are more affluent and, you know, with little consideration for what it means for the actual place where they're working and investing in and all this kind of stuff. David, great to talk to you as always.

Obviously recommend people to check out the book, The City Authentic, find out more about all these things we've been talking about today. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you so much for having me. David A. Banks is the author of The City Authentic, How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America.

He's also a lecturer at the University of Albany. You can follow David on Twitter at at DA underscore Banks. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.