Congratulations to Professor Desiree Fields on her new paper, co-authored with two students in the Department of City and Regional Planning, titled "Platform Firms, Commercial Real Estate Cycles and San Francisco’s Growth as a Tech Cluster, 2008–2020". This article uses the lens of the commercial real estate market to examine the urbanization of digital technology companies in San Francisco in the years between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, the rise of digital platforms and algorithms contributed to a period of dramatic tech industry expansion, and cities turned to tech as an urban economic development strategy. The article offers a retrospective on how the digital growth machine took shape in San Francisco’s downtown core. Amid ongoing geographical debate about the relationship between digital platforms and cities, we show how the mundane realm of office space is a crucial prism for understanding this relationship.
Read the full paper, published by the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, here!