Urban Platforms and the Future City

Transformations in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge and Everyday Life

Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin, Kevin Ward, Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin, Kevin Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000220643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title takes the broadest possible scope to interrogate the emergence of "platform urbanism", examining how it transforms urban infrastructure, governance, knowledge production, and everyday life, and brings together leading scholars and early-career researchers from across five continents and multiple disciplines.

The volume advances theoretical debates at the leading edge of the intersection between urbanism, governance, and the digital economy, by drawing on a range of empirically detailed cases from which to theorize the multiplicity of forms that platform urbanism takes. It draws international comparisons between urban platforms across sites, with attention to the leading edges of theory and practice and explores the potential for a renewal of civic life, engagement, and participatory governance through "platform cooperativism" and related movements. A breadth of tangible and diverse examples of platform urbanism provides critical insights to scholars examining the interface of digital technologies and urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban knowledge production, and everyday urban life.

The book will be invaluable on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for academics and researchers in these fields, including anthropology, geography, innovation studies, politics, public policy, science and technology studies, sociology, sustainable development, urban planning, and urban studies. It will also appeal to an engaged, academia-adjacent readership, including city and regional planners, policymakers, and third-sector researchers in the realms of citizen engagement, industrial strategy, regeneration, sustainable development, and transport.

1
INTRODUCTION

Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John G. Stehlin and Kevin Ward

We are witnessing a profusion of digital platforms that play an increasingly pervasive role in mediating many areas of life. By 2015, every one of the top ten trafficked US websites was a platform, while in China platform businesses held each of the top eight spots in Chinese web traffic rankings (Moazed and Johnson, 2016), and American and Chinese platforms made up nine out of the top ten most downloaded apps of the 2010s (Meisenzahl, 2019). Platforms represent an increasingly hegemonic business model, predicated on the capacity to realise exchange value not through direct production of goods or services but through building and mobilising networks of producers, distributors, and consumers, constructing and shaping the activities and practices of participants in such networks, and deriving rents from these activities (Stehlin, 2018; Sadowski, 2020).

Platforms can be categorised in a number of ways, but a common feature is their function as a mediator between various network actors (Srnicek, 2016; Langley and Leyshon, 2017). These mediators have come to condition how we shop, what we buy in terms of both products and services, how we pay for things, how we move, how we communicate and socialise with each other, and how we relate and manage personal information, as well as the organisation of industrial processes and the infrastructural architectures that facilitate all of these activities. Platforms increasingly mediate everyday consumer experience of digital life, relationships between firms, and the ‘back end’ of a vast range of digital processes, such that platforms like Amazon and Google, for example, are nearly inescapable (Hill, 2019). The ‘winner take all’ advantages conferred by strong network effects create a tendency towards monopoly, leading to fierce battles, mergers (both horizontal and vertical), and sudden failures in the platform economy. These dynamics are fuelled by huge inflows of venture capital into the platform sector, driving massive valuations and equally fragile bubbles.

Platforms are also increasingly prevalent as an urban phenomenon, in part because cities provide the largest and richest markets for their services. But their importance goes far beyond the general phenomenon of ‘platform capitalism’ occurring in an urban setting (Srnicek, 2016). Instead, digital platforms fundamentally, and unevenly, reconfigure urban space and life itself. Developers of digital platforms are increasingly, and rapidly, seeking to intervene in nearly all aspects of urban life, from built environments and infrastructure systems to environmental monitoring and civic engagement (Barns et al., 2017). This can be seen across a range of digital platforms that directly reshape urban space, including well-known platforms like Airbnb on home-sharing, CityMapper on journey planning, FreeNow on car sharing, and Uber on ride-hailing; rising giants like China’s Didi Chuxing and Indonesia’s Go-Jek app ecosystems; and less prominent platforms like Germany’s Coup Mobility electric scooter sharing service to Uganda’s SafeBoda moto taxi-hailing platform. These platforms form the infrastructure of an emerging digitally mediated urbanism that is reconfiguring cities across the globe.

Accordingly, this book interrogates the emergence of ‘platform urbanism’ (Barns, 2020), bringing together contributions from across a number of disciplines, including geography, innovation studies, urban planning, and media studies. It takes the broadest possible scope, examining how platform urbanism transforms urban infrastructure, governance, knowledge production, and everyday life (and, in turn, how these aspects challenge notions of platform urbanism). It brings together researchers from across five continents and has four main aims:

• To advance the leading edge of theoretical debates at the intersection of urbanism, governance, and the digital economy;
• To draw on a range of empirically detailed cases to contribute to theorising the multiplicity of forms platform urbanism takes;
• To illuminate international comparisons between urban platforms across sites, with attention to the leading edges of theory and practice through a rich array of cases;
• To explore the potential for a renewal of civic life, engagement, and participatory governance through ‘platform cooperativism’ and related movements.

What is platform urbanism, and why now?

Our intention in this book is to emphasise the processes of urban platformisation. This complements and extends existing literature and debates on platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016; Langley and Leyshon, 2017) and also moves beyond a relatively static analysis of platform types derived from a few large firms and towards a sensitivity towards trajectories (Stehlin et al., 2020). The focus here is on both platforms as entities and platformisation as a process, where the latter complements understandings of the former.

Most interest to date has addressed platforms as disruptors of industries, understood through the lens of Schumpeterian processes of creative destruction (Geissinger et al., 2018; Kibum et al., 2018). Celebrated examples include Apple’s iPhone and App Store ecosystem supplanting a generation of mobile handset manufacturers, Spotify reconfiguring the consumption of music from the tangible CD and record to a digital music service, and Uber’s challenge to establish models of private taxi hire. Much academic focus has been on understanding how platform business models interact with incumbent firms, how value is created and captured for innovating firms, and how new jobs are produced and existing jobs are destroyed (Gawer, 2014).

Seen broadly through this lens, platforms are architectures that organise and control networks, providing a context and infrastructure for people and firms to create and exchange value in new ways, through matching them with each other and with content, goods and/or services created on the platform. At a general level we can say that ‘platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact. They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects. More often than not, these platforms also come with a series of tools that enable their users to build their own products, services, and marketplaces’ (Srnicek, 2016, p. 43). Or, to put it in a slightly different way: platforms allow for the creation of new markets, where consumers and producers can connect with each other and exchange goods, services, and information (Moazed and Johnson, 2016). Crucially, the platform firm does not own the services, but only the underlying network infrastructure and the system architecture that controls it, which allows rapid deployment and ‘viral’ network growth at low marginal cost.

Platforms do not simply enable such activities in an open-ended way, but actively steer and shape them, raising the issue of their internal algorithmic structure. This consists of a ‘stack’ with three elements: (1) technological architecture; (2) service provision (or community, network, etc. of producers and consumers); and (3) data (Bratton, 2015). The primary function of this structure is to convert disparate pieces of user information into processed ‘data capital’ (Sadowski, 2019) by consistently expanding the network of users and developing new ways of measuring and monetising activity across these networks. This means that forms of urbanism generated through certain kinds of platform activities, even those with seemingly emancipatory potential, have definite tendencies towards entrenching platform power that are difficult to overcome.

Digital platforms form a specific element of a shift towards a digital economy, where the interweaving of corporate interests, new business models, emerging information technologies, and data capture is becoming a hegemonic model (Srnicek, 2016; Langley and Leyshon, 2017). Indeed, platformisation speaks to a wider societal transformation that scholars have grappled with in debates not only about the digital economy (Mosco, 2017) and the development of ‘smart’ governance responses (Kitchin, 2014; Shelton et al., 2014; Leszczynski, 2016) but also about the circular economy (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017), the sharing economy (Sundararajan, 2016), and platform ‘cooperativism’ (Scholz and Schneider, 2016).

Platforms and platform urbanism

This explosion of digital technologies and data has increasingly played out in urban contexts and through urban platforms. Debates have proliferated in policy, business, and academic circles regarding efforts to integrate digital technologies and urban territories as ‘smart’ cities (Kitchin, 2014). These debates fuse the disruptive potential of digital technologies with attempts to re-think how services and infrastructures that underpin urban life can be governed through ‘smart’ systems and technologies. Our focus on platform urbanism (Barns 2020), though, goes beyond more general questions of how ICTs are changing urban living and governance and is also distinct from analyses of ‘smart cities’ and other forms of data-informed urban governance. To a certain extent, platform urbanism has begun to supplant smart urbanism; where ‘smart city’ policies installed ‘urban operating systems’ (Marvin and Luque-Ayala, 2017), platform urbanism implies monitoring techniques and governance efforts that emerge from the proliferation of platforms that are given as much latitude for operation as possible. For example, instead of public-private partnership contracts for ‘smart’ traffic monitoring, we are more likely to see Uber’s data ‘dashboard’, Uber Movement, an even more opaque technological interface, performing a similar governmental role. In the tension between the platform and the urban, a multiplicity of ‘types’ of urban platforms proliferate (Stehlin et al., 2020).

Thus, it is important to clarify what we mean by ‘urban platforms’ and what it is that is urban about these platforms. At issue is not simply whether the bulk of platform activity occurs in cities, but the extent to which the activities they enable are constitutive of and/or parasitical on urban space: how they create a platform city (Anttiroiko, 2016). As Rodgers and Moore (2018a) note, platforms can be parasitic on urban infrastructures, novel infrastructures in their own right, and co-generative with the urban, where at issue is ‘how the urban shows up in, through and as platforms; and at the same time, how platforms show up in, through and as urban’ (2018b). At the same time, a distinction can be made between how single platforms intersect with other urban dynamics and how wider, dynamic ecosystems of platforms and urban information infrastructures rework entire dimensions of urban life (Andersson, 2017). As digital technologies and data become central to new, ‘disruptive’ business models that promise the breakup of established monopolies, settled labour relations, and existing technologies, it is also urgently necessary to understand the social interests that promote platform development and deployment, the kinds of resources they marshal, and to what ends.

Why, though, the turn now towards research on platform urbanism? Long-term processes of capitalist development, punctuated by crises and responses that inform the search for new forms of capital accumulation, have begun to synthesise with the increasingly important role of information, data, and knowledge in economic life (Srnicek, 2016). These developments have had a long gestation, arguably back to previous capitalist crises of accumulation in the 1970s and the weakening of post-War models of nationally based Fordist industrial economies amid a secular decline in manufacturing profitability in the global North (Brenner, 2006). The increasingly explicit role of information and knowledge in the organisation of economic life has been understood over this period through the lens of a shift to post-industrial society (Bell, 1976) and as a phase of disorganised capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987) predicated on economies that increasingly manipulated signs, symbols, and spaces (Lash and Urry, 1994). The issue is that 21st- century capitalism is increasingly not just about extracting data but also about utilising this in producing knowledge to generate value through cultural circuits (Thrift, 2005; Scott, 2012). This political economy prioritises financialisation, interweaves this with innovations in IT, regulation, and organisation to create new possibilities for profit (Thrift, 2005; Krippner, 2011). These dynamics were intensified by the financial and economic crisis of 2007–2008, which has fuelled the search for new investment horizons and accumulation strategies. It is within this confluence of political-economic change and the importance of data and knowledge, and technological and organisational innovation that the circumstances that have given rise to the platform can be understood.

Equally crucial in the post-crisis moment has been the intensification of urban development processes, as cities across the globe have been remade as part of a new ‘spatial fix’ for global capital (Harvey, 2007) that combines intensive growth in urban cores with an increasingly technocratic approach to urban management, particularly envi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Section 1 What kind of urban infrastructure are platforms?
• Section 2 Do platforms represent a new model of urban governance?
• Section 3 What kinds of urban knowledge are generated, legitimised, and valued through platforms?
• Section 4 How are platforms re-shaping everyday urban experiences?
• Index