INTRODUCTION

The politics of urban revival has characterized neoliberal societal and political regimes and experimentations since the late 1970s and the early 1980s. This process has taken place in several nation-states across the globe, and it has been marked by an intensive technologization and monopolization of the urban field in the operations of capital. In this chapter we first discuss the concept of the urban field. Second, we go on to argue that the urban field is a phenomenon that should be approached through an analysis of the changing relationship between the nation-state, the local state (cities) and capital. In so doing, we highlight the conjunctural nature of the urban field and its character as an open, politically constructed and connective societal phenomenon. In short, this is not only a strategic-relational field of struggle through which different social actors and factions of capital seek to operate, but also a field of action that reconstitutes the urban fabric at a given historical conjuncture in a specific manner. In the third part of the chapter we discuss the fluctuating essence of the urban field.

The nationalization of the urban field during the twentieth century indicated a specific coming together of capital, the local state and the nation-state. During the past few decades, the urban field has been increasingly constituted in the strategic urbanization of the state, a process that ties transnational capital, the nation-state and the local state tightly together in the name of innovation, technology and economic growth (see Moisio & Rossi 2020). In this process, the nation-state has been a constitutive force, as our discussion on the digitalization of the Finnish nation-state demonstrates in this chapter. Here, digitalization has emerged as “a method of government that can procure the nation's prosperity” (Foucault 2008: 13). We believe that the Finnish case is relevant in disclosing some of the key processes of the corporatized state, not least because the “neoliberal revolution in Finland” (Patomäki 2007: 13) has been characteristically a technocratic process whereby technological knowledge, and the whole techno-industrial complex, has assumed a pivotal role.