From Hollywood to Silicon Beach: The Disruption of the Los Angeles Economy through the Digital Growth Machine

Keywords: digital technologies, digital growth machine, economic geography, urban geography, hinterlands
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper contributes to a growing literature that theorizes how digital technologies are changing cities, with far-reaching socio-spatial effects. Specifically, we draw data from Los Angeles to theorize how the digital growth machine takes root, develops, and contributes to broader social, economic, and spatial restructuring.

We describe the ongoing transformation of the city’s longstanding growth coalition —and two of its key industrial bases, Hollywood studios and real estate developers— by incorporating firms, logics, and priorities from the digital technology industry. Until recently, the LA growth coalition was dominated by the aerospace, film, and television industries, making the city an unlikely candidate for economic disruption. However, deindustrialization paved the way for the tech industry to surge in the 2010s, which brought a significant influx of firms and capital. This shift, in turn, began to change the city's growth coalition, its elite power dynamics, and its urban governance.

At the same time, the reorientation of Los Angeles as a city revolving around digital technologies has also created cascading effects in its hinterlands. These effects simultaneously exemplify a symptom of the “one-click economy” to fulfill the demands of the LA market, and of the city’s own strategic position in the port-to-rail container transport network, and a recipient of staggering volume of trade from across the Pacific. Altogether this case establishes the inner workings of the digital growth machine that operates to disrupt even an entrenched, powerful growth machine.