Full Description
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.
Contents
1. Introduction Part 1: What kind of urban infrastructure are platforms? 2. The urban stack: A topology for urban data infrastructures 3. Political ecologies of platform urbanism: Digital labor and data infrastructures 4. Unicorns, platforms, and global cities: The economic geography of ride-hailing 5. Digital infrastructures, services, and spaces: The geography of platform urbanism Part 2: Do platforms represent a new model of urban governance? 6. Joining the dots: Platform intermediation and the recombinatory governance of Uber's ecosystem 7. A new institution on the block: On platform urbanism and Airbnb citizenship 8. Political struggles in the platform economy: Understanding platform legitimation tactics 9. Analysing urban platforms and inequality through a 'platform justice' lens Part 3: What kinds of urban knowledge are generated, legitimised, and valued through platforms? 10. When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, extraction 11. Platform urbanism and knowledge-power 12. Wiki-urbanism: Curating a slum resettlement colony with open knowledge platforms 13. From panopticons to the partial: blockchain mapping in platform urbanism Part 4: How are platforms re-shaping everyday urban experiences? 14. Platform phenomenologies: Social media as experiential infrastructures of urban public life 15. Urban consumption, markets and platforms as flexible spatial arrangements 16. Between algorithms and the streets: The everyday politics of ride-hailing taxis in India 17. Platforms in the making: hacking the urban environment in Brazilian cities
