This book reflects on what it means to live as urban citizens in a world increasingly shaped by the business and organisational logics of digital platforms. Where smart city strategies promote the roll-out of internet of things (IoT) technologies and big data analytics by city governments worldwide, platform urbanism responds to the deep and pervasive entanglements that exist between urban citizens, city services and platform ecosystems today. Recent years have witnessed a backlash against major global platforms, evidenced by burgeoning literatures on platform capitalism, the platform society, platform surveillance and platform governance, as well as regulatory attention towards the market power of platforms in their dominance of global data infrastructure. This book responds to these developments and asks: How do platform ecosystems reshape connected cities? How do urban researchers and policy makers respondto the logics of platform ecosystems and platform intermediation? What sorts of multisensory urban engagements are rendered through platform interfaces and modalities? And what sorts of governance challenges and responses are needed to cultivate and champion the digital public spaces of our connected lives.
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Yes, you can access Platform Urbanism by Sarah Barns in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Human Geography. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
S. BarnsPlatform UrbanismGeographies of Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9725-8_1
Begin Abstract
1. Introduction: A Scene on a Train
Sarah Barns1
(1)
Sitelines Media, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Sarah Barns
End Abstract
In which I introduce the broad terrain we shall be navigating, and some of the ways we will traverse this field of platform urbanism. This will include momentary, fleeting encounters with city scenes, refracting different ambiences of platform logics, design tactics and interfaces.
A Scene on a Train, Somewhere
Picture the scene. Youâre on your daily commute, standing room only in the train carriage. Your head is slightly bowed, eyes cast downwards at your phone. It gleams brightly, revealing a cavalcade of news stories, friendsâ holiday snaps and algorithmically-selected promotions, proceeding down your social media feed. You idly push these along, in search of something fresh. You glance up. Everyone else seems to be doing what youâre doing. Looking at their phones: swiping, tapping and watching. Or listening to the sounds of far-away. Despite all these clustered bodies, thereâs an eerie silence, save for the rattle of the train carriage and the muted, tinny noise of music playing through someone elseâs headphones. No one talks. Your friendâs holiday snaps are marginally more interesting than this, so you cast your eyes back down to the feed, and roll on.
Itâs a scene that could take place across any number of cities across the world. Though this experience has its own place-based peculiaritiesâthe language of the station announcers, the particular advertisements pasted throughout the carriage, the social etiquette of passengersâthis scene is also very much a global phenomenon, one we may experience wherever we find large volumes of commuters with access to smartphones. The smartphone interfaceâwhether that of Appleâs iPhone, or the Android operating systemâconstructs a certain uniformity of experience across time, place, culture and disposition. Head oriented towards screen in palm as a mode of contemporary urban encounter; swipe for idle people-watching; tap for active engagement.
Commuting itself is a daily ritual for many. As the distances between jobs and home have increased across many of the worldâs major citiesâa function of the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the worldâs urban footprintâtime spent commuting has, for many, continued to grow. For those who find themselves in train carriages going to and fro to work, the smartphone is likely to be a vital part of the trip. This daily commute, so often thought of as liminal, interstitial or even âwastedâ time (Bisell 2018), is a time many now spend completely absorbed in their smartphones. Confined within the space of a speeding train carriage, eyes cast downwards at our glowing rectangle screens, as digitally-augmented commuters we are very much âalone togetherâ, to use Sherry Turkleâs (2011) phrase. We expect little interaction with our fellow commuters who, despite being crammed perhaps a little too close to our physical selves, are orienting their communicative selves somewhere entirely else. Somewhere quite different indeed to the train carriage you find yourself inhabiting for a duration of time, as it whisks you along the railway tracks, freed from the gridlock of traffic, and the pedantry of pedestrian space-time.
Familiar and pervasive as it is, this scene can also be seen as a rather peculiar way for large groups of people to actually interact in one place. As Turkle has put it, our digital devices help put âreal on the runâ (2011), meaning that they introduce substitutes for connecting with each other face to face. Whether or not we agree that âface to faceâ communication is in fact more ârealâ, or less artificially-constructed, than digital modes of communication, itâs clear that the widespread attraction of glowing rectangle screens means commuters are, predominantly, in dialogue with those who are not in the same space. For the many who live in cities that are growing, this trend towards greater communicative displacement is happening at the same time that our physical spaces are becoming more and more dense. Our bodies are getting jammed together ever closer, as cities continue to absorb growing populations, and increased demand for networked transit, even as our news-feeds orient our social natures elsewhere.
Returning to this scene, your eyes cast downwards towards your personal device, it may or may not occur to you that you are, in fact, simultaneously embedded within three of the modern cityâs greatest inventions. The first of these, the railway network, is linked to the very formation of the modern metropolis. A nineteenth-century innovation, the advent of rail transformed peopleâs everyday experience of space and time, enabling cities to expand rapidly in their geographical footprint (Glazebrook and Newman 2018; Mattelart 2002). Once established as a successful mode of large-scale transportation, railway networks were introduced almost universally in medium-sized or larger cities, with remarkably similar impacts. In particular, new rail networks allowed new housing developments to proliferate along their corridors, expanding urban populations at the same time, particularly across those cities whose economies were prospering as a result of the industrial revolution. New rail networks fueled the expansion of many citiesâ footprints, but at the same time they also helped reinforce the primacy of the centre as a âcentral business districtâ, allowing large numbers of people to be brought into city centres at regular intervals (Glazebrook and Newman 2018). At metropolitan scales, most rail systems adopted a radial network pattern, and were rolled out quite rapidly over the short space of a few decades, by urban entrepreneurs who entered into partnership with city governments (Newman et al. 2017). So, in a very practical sense, the train youâre texting and swiping on during your daily commute is particular kind of network technology that has, quite likely, played a critical role in shaping the very structure and fabric of your city (Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1
Connected commuting. Illustration by Elin Matilda Andersson, commissioned by Sarah Barns for the Cities Plus Data initiative, 2014
The carriage youâre in may, by now, be feeling rather airless. In Sydney, where I write from, you might be unlucky enough to find yourself on one of the notorious âred rattlersââold trains that lack air conditioning or heating, and somehow manage to feel too warm even in the cooler months. Itâs this very air that also happens to be a medium for the wireless transmission of all the messages and photos and emails and songs you and your fellow commuters are busily sending and receiving. Building on nineteenth- and twentieth-century innovations in radio-telegraphy and radio-communications, todayâs smartphones use parts of the electromagnetic spectrum devoted to radio frequencies, which make use of frequency bands between 3 kHz and 300 GHz. These are otherwise known as âradio wavesâ. The discovery of these radio waves, by pioneering physicists and engineers of the nineteenth century, happened to utterly transform the way we communicated in the twentieth century.1
Through wireless communications, our capacity to communicate instantly with those who were far removed from us physically would rapidly advance. As has been widely observed, it was as though human society had conquered or annihilated distances, not just by speeding up transport modes, but also, increasingly, by dematerialising our communicative spaces as well. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, responding to the significance of radio as a new medium of communication, described the modern spatiality of âbeing-in-the-worldâ (Dasein) as being pushed âtowards the conquest of remotenessâ (Heidegger 1962). Such technology shifts would come to embody a new cultural era, one accompanied by new intellectual frameworks through which to understand an increasingly globally-connected, yet radically-deterritorialised world. We emerged into âthe epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersedâ (Foucault 1984)âa way of being that in turn became synonymous with the cultural logics of late capitalism (Jameson 1984; Castells 2000; Lunt and Livingstone 2011).
When we look back in time, to when todayâs old technologies were new (Marvin 1988), we notice how often emergent technologies are initially experienced as a shock or displacement to the senses. Watching people immersed in the brand new medium of radio, German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer bemoaned the way radio âvaporises beingsâ. âSilent and lifeless, people sit side by side as if their souls were wandering far awayâ, attuned to the playground of broadcast noises from afar (Kracauer 1995). Being âalone togetherâ, then, is not exactly a new phenomenon. As Scott McQuire (2008: 4) has noted, âthe widening of the gap between ways of life primarily grounded in place, and emergent ways of life in which spatial experience is increasingly opened to events occurring elsewhere, has been a primary characteristic since industrial modernityâ (McQuire 2008).
