Sharon Zukin

Sharon Zukin

You hear a lot these days about "innovation and entrepreneurship" and about how "good jobs" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as "superstar cities." In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up.

A video produced by Alice Arnold and the distinguished sociologist Sharon Zukin, for the publication of "The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech and the New Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz, and Xiangming Chen

Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, a cutting-edge text/ethnography, reports on the rapidly expanding field of global, urban studies through a unique pairing of six teams of urban researchers from around the world. The authors present shopping streets from each city - New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Berlin, Toronto, and Tokyo - how they have changed over the years, and how they illustrate globalization embedded in local communities. This is an ideal addition to courses in urbanization, consumption, and globalization.

Since its initial publication, Loft Living has become the classic analysis of the emergence of artists as a force of gentrification and the related rise of 'creative city' policies around the world. This 25th anniversary edition, with a new introduction, illustrates how loft living has spread around the world and that artists' districts - trailing the success of SoHo in New York - have become a global tourist attraction. Zukin reveals the economic shifts and cultural transformations that brought widespread attention to artists as lifestyle models and agents of urban change, and explains their role in attracting investors and developers to the derelict loft districts where they made their home.

The social spaces and cultural labels of shopping offer us hope of achieving the American Dream: low prices define our concept of democracy. Brand names represent our search for a better life. Designer boutiques embody the promise of an ever-improving self," writes Sharon Zukin in her introduction. In Point of Purchase, she traces the incredible phenomenon of shopping and how it became central to American life-from the mid-nineteenth century to today, from the grand department stores to internet shopping and Zagat's guides. Unlike many social critics, Zukin doesn't condemn shoppers, but rather argues that shopping has become so important in our daily lives because it is one of the few means we have left for creating value that was once provided by religions, politics, or work.