Platformization of Urban Life

Abstract

THANK YOU! ation. Our originally planned critical reflection on smart urbanism in relation to gender relations had been shifted to the examination of platform urbanism and digitized urban everyday life.We are also grateful to all participants of the international conference Platform Urbanism -Towards a technocapitalist transformation of European cities? in March 2021. Despite being still -or again -in locked down life, we had the chance to discuss face-to-zoom and via various other communication platforms intensively. After the conference, transcript publishing immediately made us an offer for a book publication, which we were very happy to agree on. In the last years the publisher has become specialized on the nexus of society, technology, and space in the field of cultural studies. In 2018, we have already published the anthology Smart Cities. Critical perspectives on digitalization in cities with transcript. For this current volume, some of the conference participants have contributed their papers in more detail and we were able to engage additional authors. We would like to thank all of them for the inspiring discussions of their drafts and the excellent revisions.Last, but not least, we would like to extend our gratitude for the technical support of the conference warranted by Luca Braun, Theresa Bürstmayer, and Mario Diethart and to Vivien Breinbauer for preparing the final book manuscript. We also thank Marielle Smith for her professional proof reading.In nearly every end there is a new beginning: in the aftermath of the fellowship, we were working on a project proposal together with labor and feminist geographer Karin Schwiter from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. And right at the moment when this book's manuscript was finished, we got the approval for the follow-up project Urban Platform Economies: Transformations of labour and intersectional inequalities in care services (TICS), which is funded by the German Research Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Austrian Science Fund. We are very excited about further collaborations and debates on digitized urban futures and critical, feminist reflections on technocapitalism, racialized labor relations, and gender justice.