Unpacking the ‘Start-up City’

This book provides an invaluable overview of neoliberalising trends in urban policies and governance by presenting novel perspectives on municipal entrepreneurship support policies. It seeks to address a current lack of in-depth empirical knowledge of this topic and the reference literature’s silence on local actors agency. The book’s scholarly debate around the impact of neoliberal capitalism on cities interweaves with empirical observations in the European cities of Barcelona and Milan with a view to examining what lies behind the “start-up city” label, and the way local actors reproduce, contest and re-signify entrepreneurship policies and practices in a highly individualised context. Based on more than sixty interviews with key policy actors, including young beneficiaries, it sheds light on their representations, motivations, intentions and room for manoeuvre in a way that encompasses local specificities in which multi-scalar economic, social, institutional and cultural processes interact. Finally, this book offers new insights into critical entrepreneurship studies and current debates about convergence and divergence trends in urban policies and governance.

Maria Dodaro is a Researcher in Economic and Labour Sociology at the University of Padua and in 2019  graduated with a double PhD in Urban Studies from the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, and Sociology from the University of Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests include the economic and socio-institutional transformations affecting urban policies and governance and local welfare systems, with a focus on the multi-scalar dynamics inherent in such changes, social innovation processes, individualisation, inequalities and social actor agency.