City and Innovation: the past as future in the urban innovation rethoric

Abstract

This article examines the constitution of a techno-economic and politico-institutional paradigm of urban innovation in contemporary social science through an analysis of its historical legitimization. I argue that the elaboration of a theoretical discourse of technological innovation is sustained in evolutionary cycles of economic development, and implies a recourse to an argument of historical teleology. It thus provided the foundations of narratives which project the course of the information society into the urban world of the future. I seek to analyse how the social scientific discourse on innovation (whether technological, political, economic, or social) shares a double semantic field that both locates its forms of argumentation in the past and projects its forms of perfectibility into the future.