Browsing by Subject "Silicon Valley"

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    Maker Made: Creating a Silicon Place in Berlin, Germany
    (2016-12) Phillips, Leonore
    Drawing on the inspiration that Silicon Valley provides, this dissertation is about the way Silicon Allee in Berlin Germany is made by workers, students, bureaucrats and even the larger population of Berlin. Silicon Allee is a community; it’s a matrix of interconnected people, machines, ideas, places and words that are changing, connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting; maintained through webpages, text messages, classrooms, university spaces, meetups, camps, tweets, coworking sites, coffee shop talk and offices. In this age of ultra-information and continuous connections that can span the globe in seconds, Berlin’s Silicon Allee is also embedded in a larger culture of computing that both ignores and reinforces boundaries. I use this dissertation to explore the way that these boundaries are made, unmade and revised both locally, nationally and globally through discourses on and practices of work.
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    The opportunity cost of parking requirements: Would Silicon Valley be richer if its parking requirements were lower?
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2021) Gabbe, C.J.; Manville, Michael; Osman, Taner
    We estimate the off-street parking supply of the seven most economically productive cities in Santa Clara County, California, better known as Silicon Valley. Using assessor data, municipal zoning data, and visual inspection of aerial imagery, we estimate that about 13 percent of the land area in these cities is devoted to parking, and that more than half of the average commercial parcel is parking space. This latter fact suggests that minimum parking requirements, if binding, depress Silicon Valley’s commercial and industrial densities, and thus its economic output. In an exploratory empirical exercise, we simulate a reduction in parking requirements from the year 2000 forward and show that under conservative assumptions the region could have added space for nearly 13,000 jobs, equivalent to a 37 percent increase over the actual job growth that occurred during that time. These additional jobs would be disproportionately located in the region’s highest-wage zip codes and could add more than $1 billion in payroll annually, further implying a large productivity gain.