In an interview, she describes how she first immersed herself in urban sociology literature to aid her teaching, and was later inspired to carry out field research by reading a newspaper article about manufacturers who were being forced out of their loft space in Lower Manhattan.
I wound up advocating in support of their cause with the local community board and the city government, and eventually that turned into the research I did for my first urban book, Loft Living.
[1]Other early influences include Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century and anthropologist Sidney Mintz's 1986 book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
In contrast to the prevailing Chicago School and its ethnographic focus on communities, immigrants and settlement patterns, practitioners of this new, more interdisciplinary approach were concerned with the role of the state and with analyzing how "urban space is produced deliberately and in response to the needs of capital.
In their 2013 book Gentrification, Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly call Loft Living the most influential study of the development of “loft identity” and praise Zukin for developing the concept of the “artistic mode of production.” This refers to the way in which major local elites and investors have tried to use artists and culture industries to attract capital and stabilize precarious real estate markets.
[10] The solution she proposes is to redefine authenticity and connect it back to the idea of "origins," then use it to support "the right to inhabit a space, not just consume it as an experience.
[18] Zukin’s recent book The Innovation Complex traces the emergence of the urban tech economy in the 2010s, relating it to the efforts of local governments to find a new growth engine after the 2008 financial crisis as well as to the rise of software, the increased importance of mobile apps, and tech companies’ decisions to locate near young people who were both producers and users of new digital technology.