Digital fix under state entrepreneurialism: Urban digital transformation in Hangzhou,China

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of the “digital fix” to articulate urban transformation toward smart cities as a new form of fix beyond the spatial fix. We develop a framework to reveal the motivations, mechanisms, and outcomes of the digital fix, and then use a case study of Hangzhou to illustrate how it is performed under state entrepreneurialism. The findings are as follows. First, the digital fix is driven by a combination of capitalist and territorial logics: over-accumulation crises in the primary and secondary circuits, and top-down political mandates for innovation-oriented development. Second, the digital fix operates through three mechanisms: the smartification of the built environment, the digitalization of economic activities, and the platformization of social reproduction. Third, the digital fix expands the sphere of capital accumulation and urban development toward the production of smartness, moving beyond erstwhile manufacturing industrialization and land urbanization. State entrepreneurialism differentiates China’s urban digital transformation from neoliberal practices, because the interventionist form of statecraft is expanded by digital instruments. We discuss the crisis tendency of digital fixes as a call for future research.