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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?

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.