Urban Platforms and the Future City

"As digital platforms exert ever more influence on how cities run, function, and what it means to live in them, they increasingly reconfigure urban environments in their own image. Urban Platforms and the Future City is an essential field guide for navigating this brave new world, tracing the contours of platform-mediated cities in the making and identifying opportunities for shaping what platformized urban futures will look like." Agnieszka Leszczynski, Western University, Canada Digital platforms are reconfiguring everyday geographies and the production of urban space. This book charts the nature and operations of urban platform and their relationship with urban infrastructure, governance, knowledge production, and experiences. Rich in conceptual insight and empirical examples it is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary urbanism. Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, Ireland

Mike Hodson is senior research fellow in the Sustainable Consumption Institute, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester and a member of the Manchester Urban Institute, UK. Julia Kasmire researches and teaches on how to use new forms of data for social scientists with the UK Data Service and the Cathie Marsh Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. Andrew McMeekin is Professor of Innovation at the Alliance Manchester Business School and the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI), UK. John G. Stehlin is Assistant Professor in the department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. Kevin Ward is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Director of the Manchester Urban Institute at the University of Manchester, UK.

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 Ubers 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