Urban entrepreneurialism 2.0, or, the becoming south of the urban world

ABSTRACT
Recent debates on the ‘global urbanism’ paradigm have had the merit of questioning long-accepted geographies of centrality, peripherality and marginality in the field of critical urban studies. However, these discussions have rarely interrogated the changing realities of global capitalism (Peck, 2015), particularly after the so-called ‘tech boom 2.o’ of the late 2000s and the 2010s. With the emergence and accelerated development of online platforms, the smartphone, artificial intelligence and other ‘networked digital information technologies’ that have reshaped everyday life in unprecedented ways (Grennfield, 2017), urban environments have become increasingly more attractive for profit-driven economic activity, as vast and heterogeneous concentrations of consumers, knowledge and social relations. This increased profitability of urban environments has led to the rise of a new wave of urban entrepreneurialism across the world, which is under scrutiny here.