CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by PORTO@iris (Publications Open Repository TOrino - Politecnico di Torino) POLITECNICO DI TORINO Repository ISTITUZIONALE The politics of innovation, entrepreneurship and community as a discursive practice. Researching a startup incubator in Milan. Original The politics of innovation, entrepreneurship and community as a discursive practice. Researching a startup incubator in Milan. / Quaglia, ANNA PAOLA. - (2018 Jun 13). Availability: This version is available at: 11583/2710170 since: 2018-06-27T11:05:11Z Publisher: Politecnico di Torino Published DOI:10.6092/polito/porto/2710170 Terms of use: Altro tipo di accesso This article is made available under terms and conditions as specified in the corresponding bibliographic description in the repository Publisher copyright (Article begins on next page) 04 August 2020 Doctoral Dissertation Doctoral Program in Urban and Regional Development (30th Cycle) The politics of innovation, entrepreneurship and community as a discursive practice. Researching a startup incubator in Milan. Anna Paola Quaglia ****** Supervisor(s): Prof. Ugo Rossi, Supervisor Doctoral Examination Committee: Prof. Filippo Celata, Referee, “Sapienza” University of Rome Prof. Daniel Cockayne, Referee, University of Waterloo Prof. Stephen Collier, Referee, The New School Prof. Francesca Governa, Referee, Polytechnic University of Turin Prof. Alberto Vanolo, Referee, University of Turin Politecnico di Torino 2018 This thesis is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution - Noncommercial - NoDerivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. I hereby declare that, the contents and organisation of this dissertation constitute my own original work and does not compromise in any way the rights of third parties, including those relating to the security of personal data. Anna Paola Quaglia Turin, May 11, 2018 A mia madre Acknowledgment I would like to acknowledge the DIST (Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning) at the Polytechnic University of Turin, the School of Public Engagement at The New School and the Departement Architectuur at KU Leuven for their material and intellectual support. I am also deeply thankful to my informants who have been of invaluable help and generosity, as well as the organization that hosted my ethnographic inquiry. A special mention goes to my supervisor, Ugo Rossi. I thank him for his intellectual example, trust, patience and more importantly, for providing me a valuable and symbolic space for learning, where my own research desires have found expression and legitimacy under his guidance. I am also grateful to Stephen J. Collier of The New School for offering me the possibility to participate to the most interesting and challenging course of my (long!) educational career, “Planning and counter-planning”. The effects of the intellectual fervor I encountered at The New School and particularly in their research community, have been positive and long-lasting. A special thought goes to Kea Fiedler and the Public & Urban Policy Doctoral Student Association. I would also like to thank Lisa Björkman of the University of Louisville for her personal and intellectual passionate support. I have received extensive feedbacks, editing and proof-reading support by a group of friends and colleagues which I thank heartily: Noah Allison, Dylan Brady, Samantha Cenere, Katy Gill, Camilla Guadalupi, Alberto Vanolo and i particularly, Laszlo Cseke, Giulia Li Destri Nicosia and Mark Stephens. The help received for the review of this work has been invaluable, personally and intellectually, but it goes without saying that I am solely responsible for the final outcome of this work. I am also grateful to Costanza Guazzo and Alessia Toldo for their understanding, cooperative spirit and for our stimulating research environment. These three beautiful, hard, authentic and “undisciplined” years, count the presence of good friends: Camilla Guadalupi, Samantha Cenere and Cristina Lo Presti (long-life to the “disagios”!), Laszlo Cseke, Manuela Poggiali, Giovanni Pagano, Erika Cristina and Alberto Blasi; Matteo Pizzi, Cecilia Postal and Flavia Pugliese; Gabriele Segre, Cristina Ricardi, Marta Legnaioli, Elisabetta Iorio, Fabrizia Uboldi, Lorenzo Marinone, Chiara Garibotto and Aleksandra Postrigan, Stefania Silvestro, Ignacio Rullanski, the Stephens family, Katy Gill and Ania Stanislawski. I feel I belong when I think of and I am with you all –and it feels good and meaningful (I do not like much grouping but I do not like either to be overly sentimental: each of you knows why I like you or why I don’t). A special thank goes to Giulia Li Destri Nicosia and Giovanni Leghissa, friends and remarkable researchers: our mutual exchanges have been enriching and stimulating to go further in wondering. Also, I would like to express my heart-felt thanks to L.T. for reasons I am unable to say much about, but which she knows and fortunately, she holds in silence. Thanks to my extended family: my grandmother Irene Colombotto, an affective anchor in my mobile geography, my aunt, Giorgina Marengo, my uncle, Giorgio Schiani and my cousin, Elena Schiani. Also, for some memories on mountains and flowers deep rooted in myself, a special thought goes to Liliana Franco. This work is dedicated to my mother Giancarla Marengo whose presence, patience and unconditional love has proven substantially important for choosing to be. Last, but certainly not least, a sincere thank goes also to my father, Vittorio Quaglia and to my brother, Marco Quaglia. ii Summary This study investigates innovation as a discursive field and it aims to answer the following research questions: under what conditions of possibility does the discursive practice “innovation” become subjectively and collectively sensible and meaningful? How does such discourse “speak the truth” to and for the subject? The research explores innovation as a meaningful social fact that, on one side, features ideal and objectified traits as an object of knowledge and, on the other, it socially inscribes itself into reality through spatialization. The analysis problematizes innovation as a social phenomenon that manifests itself in and through spaces –urban, organizational and corporeal, contingently to relational processes and subjective enactments. To answer the research questions, the study performs an analysis of innovation as a discursive field through a genealogical exercise that builds on an ethnographic observation conducted at Core, a startup incubator and co-working space located in Milan. The inquiry moves from the basic consideration that acknowledges as meaningful the relationship between innovation, the city and the urban space at large. Rather than assuming the “city-innovation” nexus as given, the study iii investigates some of the epistemological grounds, ontological properties and features of the rational discourse underlying innovation (Chapter 1). More precisely, this study begins with a problematization of how innovation is commonly thought and represented as requiring specific spatial conditions to thrive, and how a particular configuration of the object “city” is pre-reflexively implied and imagined when the desideratum “innovation” is evoked. Building upon this first genealogical analysis, the “eventualization” of innovation as a discursive practice is then investigated with reference to Milan’s contemporary social space (Chapter 3). In the chapter, particular attention is paid to key policies and initiatives embraced at the local and national governmental levels from 2011 to 2016. Building on the assumption that for a discourse to materialize into a social practice, organizational and corporeal spaces of configuration are needed, the results of the ethnographic investigation are then presented. The organizational spatial rhetoric and pedagogy are analyzed in order to shed light upon the material conditions of the appearance of the discourse of innovation (Chapter 4). Finally, the relational conditions of possibility for innovation to occur are explored, and the experience of being an “innovative” subject is investigated (Chapter 5). This study offers a contribution to critical social theory and research, as well as to human geography, in two ways. On the one hand, it performs a “methodological journey” to show how certain objects of thought e.g. the urban space, the city or innovation– territorialize in institutions, rituals, “banal” gestures, unconscious and pre-reflexive practices through spatial relations. On the other hand, this work sheds light on the rhetoric of innovation by arguing that it corresponds to a new anthropological discourse rather than being a simple expression of historically contingent economic necessities. iv Contents Introduction .....................................................................................................4 Overview of the thesis.............................................................................8 Investigating the “city-innovation” nexus....................................................... 13 1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................ 13 1.2 Making sense of innovation ................................................................ 16 1.3 Approaching the “city-innovation” nexus epistemologically ............... 20 1.4 The city