The Mediated City 09: Platform Urbanism

Publicly Sited

If you have been fortunate enough to travel to new cities, in countries other than your own, it is more than likely your travels in and through this new city was mediated. Not just in the myriad ways we’ve been discussing so far in this series, but increasingly through a specific kind of media form: ‘platforms’. Your accommodation and sightseeing arranged through Airbnb or TripAdvisor; your local travels negotiated with the help of Google Maps or Citymapper; rides hailed through Uber or Lyft; evening meal delivered via Grubhub or Just Eat. When you are in your own city or locale, you probably use some of these platforms, alongside many others. What exactly constitutes a platform, in general, and in relation to urban life specifically, is somewhat up for grabs. In this episode, we explore different perspectives on platforms as new forms of urban media, whether that be as a form of communication, a type of service, a business model, an infrastructure, or even an institution. The popularity of such platforms is clear, and it is not a stretch to say residents and visitors alike find such media useful for grappling with urban complexities. But platforms have disrupted cities too, whether that be their housing markets, transportation services or local businesses. And this disruption seems to brought forth a situation in which platforms are becoming indispensable infrastructures, and maybe even emerging institutions, of urban life.

Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Negotiating the Platform Pivot: From Participatory Digital Ecosystems to Infrastructures of Everyday Life / Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power); José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Emily West (Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly); Frank Pasquale (From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon); Jathan Sadowski (Who Owns the Future City? Phases of Technological Urbanism and Shifts in Sovereignty); Lizzie Richardson (Platforms, Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal); Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham (The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction); John Bull (Schrodinger’s Cab Firm: Uber’s Existential Crisis); Niels van Doorn (A New Institution on the Block: On Platform Urbanism and Airbnb Citizenship); Douglass C. North (Institutions); Benjamin Bratton (The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)