Commuting to the urban tech campus: Tech companies’ and their elite workers’ co-production of South Lake Union, Seattle

Abstract

This article demonstrates how tech professionals commuting to neighbourhoods redeveloped for their work are contributing to their transformation into urban tech campuses: gentrified districts where landscapes, understandings of place and temporalities are shaped by their praise of innovation, emotional detachment from place, and daily ebb and flow. While also resulting in displacement, othering, and the rewriting of histories and geographies, commuters’ contribution to tech-led gentrification contrasts with the emotional investment into place and the sense of permanence gentrifiers use in established residential neighbourhoods they perceive as authentic and progressively remake in their image. While concomitant, it also differs from residential new-build gentrification, as it reinforces not only middle-class norms but also the economic discourse of the high-tech industry, which co-produces these places as elite worker oases. Using South Lake Union, Seattle, WA as a case study, this article aims to contribute to a social understanding of tech-led gentrification: while recent research has focused on residential gentrifiers and on the macro political and economic forces that transform declining urban areas into so-called innovation districts, this qualitative study explores gentrification through the narratives and uses of public space of an urban tech campus’s dominant population – an elite, predominantly young, white, male commuter workforce several times larger than the local residential population.