Coordinating the city: platforms as flexible spatial arrangements

Abstract

The problems and possibilities of platforms in cities lie in their constitution in urban space, thus moving away from a focus purely on the platform as company, and its on-screen interface and algorithm. The geography of urban platforms is distinct from both the space of a network and the place of node, although it draws on both. The platform is a flexible spatial arrangement that does not have a fixed territory but rather draws on other territorialised networks to actualise in urban form. The capacity for the platform to act therefore occurs through its ability to articulate together more or less territorialised urban elements. It implies a reorganisation of urban operations (such as transport, housing and so on) not through new physical infrastructures, but instead through novel technologies of coordination of those already existing. At present, discussion of platforms in cities is dominated by the platform as company, which generates private value from the coordination of differently networked actors. However, appreciating the urban geography of the platform as a flexible spatial arrangement indicates that platforms can hold much promise for the organisation of cities but requires a more equitable distribution of the value generated by coordination of urban actors.

What’s so new about New Municipalism?

“…As a pre-paradigmatic field, municipalist spatialities are still evolving through experimentation and contestation. One concrete abstraction through which alternative regionalisms are beginning to take material shape is the 'flexible spatial arrangement' (Richardson, 2020) of the platform. Just as Amazon and Uber are reconfiguring capitalism through digital algorithms and platform technologies, new municipalists are building organisational and digital citizen platforms that link together diverse urban coalitions and infrastructures.…”

“…How might the digital algorithmic feedback infrastructure utilised by Amazon, for instance, be socialised and coordinated at the municipal scale? Research is required into how technological sovereignty is advanced by municipal platforms (Lynch, 2019); how platform municipalism evolves in contestation to, and dialectical interplay with, platform capitalism; how it contends with the contradictions inherent to platform urbanism, not least the paradoxical pull between the decentralisation of data production among platform users and its recentralisation in programme projections and articulations (Richardson, 2020).…”

“…This sets out the historical context for understanding the contemporary landscape, from which I outline a tripartite typology for conceptualising new municipalist varieties – platform, autonomist, managed – through several indicative case studies across the Global North (with which I am most familiar), bringing Barcelona into comparison with Rojava (Syria) and Jackson (Mississippi) and with Preston (England) and Cleveland (Ohio). Finally, I tease out the contradictions and challenges facing the movement before, in conclusion, outlining future research directions, focusing on the potential of platform municipalism, situated within current critical debates around ‘platform capitalism’ (Dyer-Witheford, 2020; Srnicek, 2016), ‘platform urbanism’ (Leszczynski, 2019; Richardson, 2020) and ‘digital socialism’ (Fuchs, 2020; Morozov, 2019).…”

Platform urbanism, smartphone applications and valuing data in a smart city

“…(2016) describe this dispossession as “data colonialism.” They point not only to how profit is made from individuals’ data by corporations and not individuals; they also show how such data quantifies and surveils urban life as “previously private times and places are commodified and privatized as a new terrain for capital investment and exchange” (Thatcher et al., 2016, p. 991; and see, for example, Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015; Schindler & Marvin, 2018). It has also been noted that platform users do not properly profit from their sharing of data (Barns, 2020; Graham, 2020; Richardson, 2020).…”

“…Both of these insights entail a third: the need to be attentive to different kinds of geographies. The spatial vocabulary most often used to understand the political economy of urban digital data circulations describes a “conjunctural” geography of simultaneous “embedding” and “disembedding” (Graham, 2020), or “recentralisation” and “decentralisation” (Richardson, 2020); that is, the geographies of apps are divided into the “front end” of everyday use and the “back end” of data circulation (Boichak, 2019). The notion of “front end” and “back end” is helpful in describing some of the geographies of how apps and platforms work, for sure (particularly the opacity of the back end to app users [Barns, 2020]).…”