Crypto-urban statecraft: post-pandemic urban governance experiments in Miami

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this Urban Pulse essay, we explore post-COVID-19 pandemic experiments with integrating cryptocurrency into urban governance. Drawing on the case of the City of Miami, we draw attention to practices and imaginaries of crypto-urban statecraft. This concept signals the recalibration of urban governance using cryptographic technologies. In Miami, crypto-urban statecraft has emerged as a response to multiple layers of crisis associated with COVID-19 and the Anthropocene: the pandemic's impact on the region's tourism and real estate sectors, and growing fears over the threats climate change poses to the region's real estate markets. In response to these conditions, crypto-urban statecraft leverages fantasies of blockchain-mediated transformations of social and political life to advance two distinct but related strategies: the first, a “hostile takeover” of urban space and territory via elite tech investment and real estate speculation; the second, an attempt to deterritorialize urban government from that same volatile urban space, via an increasingly abstracted “third nature” of an informationalized political economy. Crypto-urban statecraft, we argue, signals ongoing changes in urban governance that may increasingly define the terrain of post-pandemic urban politics.