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Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin. Edited by Joseph Straubhaar, Jeremiah Spence, Zeynep Tufekci, and Roberta G. Lentz. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. xii + 284 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, notes, references, appendices, index. $55.00 cloth.
Austin, Texas, by most accounts, is one of the most attractive cities in America. It is said by many people and magazines to be one of the best cities in which to live. Outside of Silicon Valley, it possesses some of the best high-tech companies and the most generous investors in high technology. Young people from across the country attend the University of Texas at Austin - and few of them ever seem to leave. It has become the Urbantopia of our age, the model for the new "creative economy."
But is it? How much of what we know about Austin is simply its branding, not its substance? This book by Joseph Straubhaar and his colleagues from the University of Texas suggests that all is not perfect in Urbantopia.
For many decades, Austin was simply another college town. But in the 1970s and 1980s several strategic decisions and some luck helped the city become a "technopolis" - a center of high technology in which all its residents, presumably, would have the technical skills and know-how to work and live in a hightech world. The city council,...