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- Convenors:
-
Cindy Rentrop
(Technical University of Munich)
Stefan John (Human Technology Center, RWTH Aachen University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-11A22
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to explore the co-production of regions vis-à-vis innovation. Both are mobilized and instrumentalized for legitimizing and shaping a particular innovation culture. We are interested in practical and theoretical insights into making and doing a region and its transformation.
Long Abstract:
Innovation has become the go-to answer for power-holding actors in order to build and legitimize institutions, companies, urban spaces, and even regions. We are looking at processes of regionalization in order to initiate, establish, maintain, and shape innovation. These processes are to be seen critically as regions are instrumentalized to stay competitive in a global context.
We want to examine how regions vis-a-vis innovations are co-produced and, thereby, want to reflect on the respective modes of innovation and formations of regional and content-specific eco-systems within the particular regions or urban spaces with respect to the socio-political, cultural, historical, and material contexts. With two given examples of Heilbronn and the Rheinisch Region, we give insights into transformational processes that are closely interwoven with specific technologies and, thus, visions and imaginaries of innovation. While both regions aim at more attention on different levels, innovation in the form of AI and establishing a hydrogen region are seen as a means to an end, resulting in a structural change in the socioeconomic fabric. In both cases, different actors are mobilized, and networks are formed to innovate and form the solution to the problem or diagnosed deficit.
Within our panel, we want to highlight and assess the significance of the mobilization and instrumentalization of regions and regionality for innovation and vice versa. Our guiding questions are: How are regions constructed and mobilized to advance a particular way of innovation? Respectively, how is innovation constructed and mobilized to initiate structural transformations in regions? Which actor coalitions are formed, and how do they imagine, initiate, and realize transformations? We are looking for abstracts that give empirical and theoretical examples of different regions, innovation formats (e.g., Living Labs and other forms of inclusion), and technologies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, we compare two German regions that face a transformation of their socioeconomic fabric, fueled by several self-diagnosed deficits. In order to obtain and maintain future-proof characteristics in the global economic competition, technology-driven governance approaches become more popular for the scholarship of urban development and policymaking. Our first case describes how the end of coal mining and its energetic use pressures the Rheinish lignite region into reinventing itself. Next to less complex technologies, hydrogen plays a central role in the transformation, which is perceived as the solution to stay competitive and maintain wealth. The second case describes how the understanding of incremental innovation by the German Mittelstand no longer fulfills the requirements of the global imperatives of innovation. Therefore, a key region of the Mittelstand, namely Heilbronn-Franconia, drives its own transformation towards Artificial Intelligence, considering it as the premise to remain competitive and maintain its wealth. Even though both regions vary in their initial economic structure and their social, cultural, and historical dynamics, face unique structural challenges, and imagine different solutions to their problem, we want to compare their approach to the technology-driven governance of regions. We are interested in how both regions are mobilized, instrumentalized, and governed through technologies and which impact this technology-driven governance has on the respective region. We, therefore, deconstruct the mechanisms behind both cases in order to outline which dimensions of technology-driven governance lead and guide regional transformations and what is imagined and considered to be a successful transformation.
Paper short abstract:
Social innovations in energy are changing how citizens and local actors do energy transformations. To understand the socio-material re-configurations of social innovation processes we look at modes of infrastructuring between social practices and (new) energy infrastructures.
Paper long abstract:
Significant changes are ongoing to enhance the involvement of citizens and local actors in the German energy transition. At the moment about half of German Federal States are in the process of introducing participation laws at the state level. They aim at better engaging citizens in energy projects hoping to foster acceptance and speed-up the transition envisioned by the political decision makers (in federal and state governments). However, what this development also entails are emerging new multi-actor constellations between citizens and energy companies.
From the perspective of social innovations in the energy sector (SIE) we look at how such constellations manifest in specific local settings. Based on an understanding of SIE as new ways of organising, thinking and acting on energy systems (Wittmayer et al. 2022), we discuss how an intensified socio-material relationship is one central point in grasping the pivotal levers for building up decentralised, renewable energy infrastructures in local settings. To do this, we draw on the STS concept of infrastructuring to understand socio-material relations in the context of local energy transitions. Infrastructuring relies on a relational approach to question the ongoing co-constitution of materialities and practices combined with social norms, ways of knowing, standards and other contexts (Star/Ruhleder 1996, Star 1999, Edwards 2003, 2010, Blok et al. 2016).
Based on two case studies in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, we analyse different modes of infrastructuring local energy practices used by the social innovation actors studied.
Paper short abstract:
In Upstate New York and Central Ohio semiconductor firms are involved in multi-billion-dollar investments to construct chip fabrication facilities. How do different communities create, maintain, and enact the stories about who they are and what regional futures they envision in light of this change?
Paper long abstract:
The US Chips and Science Act, with over $50 billion in funding for incentives to produce semiconductors in the US, promises to “bury the term ‘rustbelt’” by transforming post-industrial places to microchip fabrication hubs. This innovation policy aims to fix ‘lagging’ regions, by subsidizing regional economic growth and by achieving national objectives (competition with China, global technological supremacy, national security). This paper compares Upstate New York and Central Ohio, where semiconductor firms are involved in multi-billion-dollar investments to construct chip fabrication facilities, catalyzed by the Chips Act. These two regions, distinct in notable ways, are brought into alignment not only through these recent investments, but also through the justification that semiconductors can rescue them. Through comparing existing innovation initiatives alongside these efforts to revitalize, we ask “rescue them from what?”. Recognizing divergences in local and national narratives about regional identity, we tease out tensions surrounding the kinds of futures individuals, organizations, and policymakers deem desirable – and who gets to partake. Drawing together perspectives from regional studies, urban planning and STS, we ask what it is to “see like a semiconductor company”, how the imagination of a “Silicon heartland” travels and is taken up (or not), and how “bringing back” industrial policy to the US rubs up against identity and legacy. We make sense of the ways in which different communities, like residents, policymakers or experts create, maintain, and enact the stories about who they are and what regional futures they envision, and the processes through which this happens.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on STS and feminist techno-science studies, this talk focuses on the (re)-making of two different tech regions through mobilization of new entrepreneurial networks in the Bay Area and Munich.
Paper long abstract:
Entrepreneurs are agents of innovation for creative destruction (Schumpeter 1942). They are expected to be always ready to trade whatever is necessary for the next opportunity (Latour 1993). Yet, from the literature -if not from our personal experiences, we know that humans need a network of relations to sustain living (Tsing 2015). But how can the free-floating entrepreneurs sustain a living?
During a nine-months field work in entrepreneurial housing (known as co-living spaces) in the Bay Area and Munich, I found that a particular bond is emerging among co-living entrepreneurs which is not only limited to business interaction but also ubiquitous to all aspects of social life, providing emotional and professional support for the parties involved. To explain such happening, I developed the term ‘entrepreneurial kin’, a type of bond that supports entrepreneurs to mobilize creative destruction in a specific region. Entrepreneurial kin not only brings entrepreneurs together, demonstrating a deep, yet concurrently fluid social tie, but it also co-shapes and transforms the vision(s) of tech regions that it is embedded in.
Drawing on feminist techno-science tradition of co-shaping (Wajcman 2004, 2010), and STS (Latour 1993; Müller et al. 2014; Haraway 2016; Clarke and Haraway 2018), this talk focuses on the (re)-making of two different tech regions in the Bay Area and Munich, through mobilization of new entrepreneurial networks. Here, the entrepreneurial network is seen as the agent of innovation that transforms the region from the inside out. Situational Analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnography are used as main methods.