Abstract
This article analyses how digital platforms challenge and redefine the way in which urban forms of citizenship are shaped. What we call ‘platform urbanisation’ accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when digital platforms penetrated with increasing rapidity into every aspect of urban life. While these digital platforms have facilitated new possibilities for engagement, access to services, efficiency in processing data, and customising responses to people online and offline, they also pose political challenges related to inequality, privacy, exclusion and social polarisation. Developing a techno-political urban environment built upon inclusion, equality, and respect for the rights of users, necessitates leveraging the potential of digital platforms to empower citizens and acknowledging and incorporating the political nature of this new urban environment. Furthermore, the intersection between the political influence of platforms on the governance of citizens and everyday life has a biopolitical dimension, since the power of platforms is exercised through policies and practices that affect individuals and collectivities. The article clarifies two essential facets of platform urbanisation: (1) the political nature of such a process, which requires a reframing of citizenship and (2) the role of both material and immaterial infrastructures in this process, which serve thus to constitute it as a new biopolitical territory. This conceptual expansion allows us to interpret digital platforms as an inextricable merging of political rationality, administrative techniques and technology.
Introduction
Techno-politics encompasses issues such as surveillance, privacy, censorship, digital rights and the role of social media in shaping political discourse, and it promotes a biopolitical turn through a standardisation of human interaction (Bratton, 2015). Such elements are all part of the implications of platform urbanisation, a process that experienced a significant acceleration during the global COVID-19 pandemic, in which platforms imbue and ‘become’ material and immaterial spaces of the urban environment.
Digital platforms and the techno-political environment they enable have, of course, been an integral component of urban narratives for decades (cf. Moore, 2007). Imaginaries of digital platforms generally promote a coherent set of ideals that bring the future into the present and allow urban stakeholders to focus their collective energies on a shared agenda of change (Baker and Blaagaard, 2016). A critical perspective on such imaginaries of improved technological futures is particularly important in today’s global trend of platformisation which incorporates a growing number of digital platforms, data centres, the Internet of things, and the increasing trend and capacity of calculating, analysing, predicting as well as controlling our urban environment through these means (Barns, 2020). Private companies as well as cities and national governments justify the deployment of digital platforms, referring to new modes and arenas of exchange and interaction that require large expenditures to upgrade and improve crumbling and outdated infrastructure services (Söderström et al., 2014). As a result, digital platforms enable and substantiate an urban environment where ongoing technological advancements and innovations become a critical signifier of value (Chun, 2008 (2006); Galloway, 2006 (2004)) and have a significant impact on political processes, policy decisions and power dynamics.
Indicators for such developments are found on a planetary scale but are more evident in concentrated urban environments with an intimately political nature, influencing the design and use of space as well as the life of citizens. This continuously evolving process entails the use of technology embedded in political operations and the daily negotiations between platform urbanisation’s actor networks and citizens. Citizens in this process are at the same time data producers, data repositories and data consumers. Such a merging of technological and political spheres highlights the need to understand and navigate the evolving relationship between technology and the political sphere in order to address the challenges and opportunities which the former presents, in conjunction with citizens as biopolitical subjects and the influence of technology companies on the political landscapes.
This ongoing process of hybrid analogue/digital techno-political infrastructures affects the lives of each individual in terms of biopolitics, since digital platforms interfere profoundly with the modification, monitoring, and sophistication by citizens of their behaviour. In effect, biopolitics determines,
strategies that states use to organize the lives of their citizens not through overt coercion but through the control of reproduction, welfare and health. In bio-politics, human life and human health become something to be monitored and optimized, to ensure the smooth reproduction of the population as a potential workforce. This ordering of life may seem benign, but it imposes considerable controls on human action. This is why the term has been productively used in the analysis of areas where issues of control have major resonance, for example gender, the body, environment, politics, law, social media and surveillance. (Pajević and Marling, 2023: 1)
This definition of the term ‘biopolitics’ provided by Pajević and Marling emphasises on one hand its control and manipulation over citizens by non-violent means, and, on the other hand, its encapsulation into politics. Such a techno-political system that feeds the process of platform urbanisation reveals the power and influence embedded in it and its promises to deliver improved futures for all urban residents.
We therefore seek to investigate the implications of digital platforms as assemblages of infrastructures for citizenship and the resulting techno-political environments. The following section delves into the urban context, shedding light on techno-political operations and tracing a first draft of platform urbanisation as an ongoing planetary process. Furthermore, we highlight the biopolitical nature of this process that is supported by the complex array of infrastructures that further the expansion of platform urbanisation processes. Subsequently, we trace some aspects of platform urbanisation that greatly increased during the pandemic with legacies and impacts that have a consistent long-term effect and exemplify its political turn.
The fourth section delineates the process of platform urbanisation and the need to re-frame the meaning of citizenship, extending it to practices, modes and dimensions. It also sketches the role of platform infrastructures in this turn and how this has a biopolitical facet.
The last section serves as a summing-up of how platform urbanisation can be framed as a change driver of urban citizenship and how its meaning can be enriched in the wake of the fact that the environment we live in is increasingly platformised: it is planetary since it is an urban world, and it is a techno-political setting animated by biopolitical infrastructures.
Urbanisation as a techno-political process: Material and immaterial biopolitical infrastructures of platform urbanisation
In advancing our elaboration of platform urbanisation, and to better understand the material and immaterial dimension of this process, we shall further explore the role of infrastructure in the expansion of digital platforms. In fact, we consider infrastructures as the critical enabler for the biopolitical turn of platform urbanisation.
Infrastructures are themselves things and form the relationship between things, often characterised not by their materiality but their immaterial capacity (Larkin, 2013). They are, however, more than just networks that allow for the provision of services, for they simultaneously have the capacity to collect, store and allow administered access and distribution to the transported content (Constantinides et al., 2018). They form the connecting spine within and across different platforms and platform ecosystems. In this capacity, infrastructures become a techno-spatial reification, to reference David Harvey’s (2001) work on the ‘spatial fix’, and an accumulation and expansion of distinct spaces and territories. Their role therefore needs to be considered in terms of the following: (1) Their technical and functional performance, (2) their political capacity to co-determine the process of platformisation as well as (3) their significance as a semiotic and aesthetic artefact. All three aspects can be considered in both biopolitical and political dimensions of infrastructures which shape the urban environment. They influence the way in which citizenship practices are defined and contested in the following manner:
(a) The technical, functional performance of infrastructures is defined by their processing and networking resources that allow multiple stakeholders to “orchestrate their service and content needs” (Constantinides et al., 2018). Different from platforms which enable and direct different forms of interactions, infrastructures typically include physical assets that support the operationality of digital platforms.
(b) Their capacity to co-determine processes of platformisation is defined by data formats, codes and protocols as well as spatial, capital and political investment that are guiding the distribution of such infrastructures in space. The result is a highly uneven spatial topology (James, 2003) that is concealed by statistics of continuous upgrades of speed connections. The spatial fixation here takes the form of cable poles for Wi-Fi signal distributions that puncture the urban landscape with irregular densities (Wang et al., 2022).
(c) Their semiotic and aesthetic impact is one justified by increased service provision and the endless opportunities afforded by ubiquitous and permanent connectivity. The relationship between platforms and infrastructures is increasingly blurred through a growing platformisation of infrastructures and an increasing infrastructuring of platforms (Plantin et al., 2018; Rolland et al., 2018). In this process, platforms expand their reach, scope and capacity to provide critical services whilst infrastructures continuously expand their representation of critical points of control and governance (Constantinides et al., 2018).
Digital infrastructures have become a key component of the current economic system and, through that, our urban system. In her extensive work on infrastructural citizenship, Lemanski (2020, 2019) shows that usually the urban understanding of infrastructure is a lens for the city, while recognising that political struggles are mediated through infrastructure itself. But discourses of citizenship are rarely employed in this framework. Similarly, while political geography promotes citizenship as crucial to understanding social, political and economic life, often focusing on citizen-led actions at urban level to claim rights and services, critical debates on urban infrastructure are often overlooked. Therefore, despite the growth in studies recognising the politicised nature of urban infrastructure and the centrality of citizenship practices to urban life, the multiple ways that citizenship and infrastructure relate in urban settings has received limited attention. This link between infrastructure and citizenship importantly includes the rights and duties of citizens (Calzada, 2022) which depend on the modes of urban use of infrastructures and the extent to which the use of digital platforms is embedded in locally specific forms of urban governance as well as instrumentalised in the way citizens are considered subjects or co-producers of the urban space and condition (Ceccarini, 2021). Due to the growing presence of platforms and their further hegemonic organisational infrastructures following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become extremely difficult – and to some extent a privilege – to remove oneself from being affected and/or dependent on platforms (Cardullo, 2021; Hanakata and Bignami, 2021).
Consequently, citizenship is introduced to provide a broad framework for critical theorisations and empirical analyses that can include the ways in which institutions and citizens’ experiences of, and interactions with, digital infrastructures (re)produce citizenship identities, perceptions and practices that contribute to the vitality of urban life. Citizenship is embodied in infrastructure for both citizens and institutions (Lemanski, 2020). On one hand, for citizens local institutions are materially represented through everyday access or non-access to public infrastructure and how to establish policies on how to produce urban spaces. On the other hand, urban institutions imagine and plan for citizens through online and offline infrastructure provision and maintenance, often administered and managed by private companies that collect, administer and use data internally. In other words, how infrastructures are used and influence the urban development affects citizenship practices, and this maximal user/citizen underscores the biopolitics at stake (Bratton, 2015).
Adopting an urban citizenship perspective therefore connects the hybrid (online and offline) nature of urban life for citizens that, through practices, actions, coordination and co-operation, could somehow enable cities to guide, manage and even try, if possible, to counteract the biopolitical leverage of platforms and the private and game-changing infrastructures they generate that possess inherent political value.
The pandemic and the political nature of platform urbanisation
During the 2020 pandemic outbreak and well beyond, the extensive use of digital platforms in urban environments experienced a critical acceleration. A few significant examples can render the idea of this acceleration and how platforms turned into being not just technological service providers or operational tools, but also complex infrastructures:
Essential platform workers and services: transportation and delivery platforms played a key role in providing essential services to consumers during the lockdowns, when people were restricted to their homes across the globe. These public and private infrastructural services administered almost always by private companies were increasingly vital for those in quarantine worldwide, while also providing an important option to those particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 to access food, groceries, goods, connections and even medical services. The workers providing such services also played a vital role in connecting consumers with businesses, and contributed towards meeting demands and ensuring business continuity (Rani and Dhir, 2020);
Health monitoring and tele-health platforms: governments and private practitioners deployed online based health services to observe and control the spread of the virus, to minimise exposure of patients to the virus and to reach those unable to travel during that time. Palantir, for example, a data analytics company with a history for working with security and intelligence agencies, monitored and modelled the spread of the pandemic in 2020 to predict the required health service response for the Center for Disease Control in the United States and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and offered its expensive services to other states worldwide (Hatmaker, 2020). This large data volume became de facto a platform when directly merging with completing digital administration concerning zoning, restrictions, forms of surveillance, and so on;
Online work and exchange platforms: professional work and socialising platforms were newly introduced or further developed during the pandemic in the private, research and government service sectors to allow for a continuation of work and exchange (Levy and Stewart, 2021). The total of annual webinar minutes using the video communication platform Zoom, for instance, increased from 2 billion in July 2019 to 42 billion in April 2020 (zoom.com). But also less successful examples such as Houseparty (developed by Life on Air Inc., shut down in October 2021; Infocomm Media Development Authority, 2022), bringing larger groups of people together to socialise, or 1887 Virtual (run by William Grant & Sons in Singapore), which allowed the user to watch a bartender in a physical bar mix drinks which one could then have delivered to one’s doorstep, testify to the persistent need for people to get together and exchange. For example, platforms such as Zoom or Teams have showcased a new way of interacting, living and working. Platforms and technologies which people were previously unfamiliar with or reluctant to use on a regular basis (Florida et al., 2023) are now integral to daily life.
The emergence of these phenomena during the pandemic show how processes of platform urbanisation expanded significantly in format and reach during the global health crisis.
The use and definition of urban environments, digital platforms, forms of urban citizenship and models of governance further changed from 2020 onwards. Accordingly, the platformisation of urban spatial discourse is now advancing following the narrative that technological solutions are applicable everywhere, thus becoming an undisputed techno-optimistic policy-making goal. The rhetorical thrust of this policy is the adoption of digital platforms (devices, apps, sensors, software and the massive deployment of data deriving from these) to fix urban issues and safeguard all aspects of the life of citizens according to a vague idea of technological solutionism (Morozov, 2013). For example, the recent rise in the availability of big data in every sector of city governance and the lucrative labels attached to the management and control of such data have increased the demand for technologies operated and administered by data analysts, software engineers, app developers and creators of urban models. A further step in the making of the process of platform urbanisation is the recent coming together of different forms of expertise, sometimes as the result of academic and industry joint ventures supported by a supranational public funding strategy.
A further example of an assemblage between an acceleration of platformisation and the urban setting, influencing forms of urban citizenship that emerged in the wake of pandemic, is the European supercomputer Leonardo (https://www.cineca.it/en/hot-topics/Leonardo). The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking EuroHPC JU managed by CINECA, officially inaugurated in 2022, is the newest EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputer ranked the fourth fastest in the world, and is based at the Bologna Technopole in Italy. This supercomputer is starting a project to generate digital twins of cities, to prove and prepare virtually their urban governance strategies in the presence of more or less foreseeable problems depending on the data collected over time, including future pandemic events. The ‘material’ city merges with the same ‘immaterial’ city. The trend, in this case, seems therefore to be going towards programmable urban settlements for programmable citizens for programmable urban-digital dimensions of citizenship.
The examples discussed here, particularly the last one, illustrate how platform urbanisation is a process that ubiquitously inflates both the demand and supply sides of any public and private sector. The potential reshaping of private/public geometries in the wake of platform urbanisation is a key emergent issue: urban-digital platform infrastructures can act as political interfaces not just between tech firms, governments and citizens in their instrumental use of such platforms. Rather, and all the more so after the pandemic outbreak, they serve more broadly as a hybrid techno-political environment in which forms of urban citizenship are manifested and articulated. Multiple forms of urban citizenship are thus enacted simultaneously across private and public sectors, individual and collective actions, and online and offline terrains.
Techno-politics and hybrid norms of urban citizenship
Presently, urban space is mediated through and determined by digital platform infrastructures through which we can express ourselves as individuals (from social networks to Metaverse to TikTok) and determine how we perceive our urban environment (as a field of action, as a means, as an offline version of an online experience) and what we can do to plan, manage or participate in what is happening to it (through building information modelling platforms, digital twins or service provision). This is an ongoing process that takes place in a new hybrid, techno-political arena which is set both, and inseparably, offline and online. It leans on digital platforms with a truly political dimension, provoking a new relationship between citizens and their environment by introducing various kinds of digital interfaces that inextricably incorporate the two (politics and platforms), and which call for a reconceptualisation of citizenship in an arena that merges offline and online interactions.
This fundamental change is much more than an increase of technological innovation, and it is more than an alternation of our interactions – rather, it is a transformation of the way we live, as proposed in the concept of platform urbanism (Barns, 2014). It is a multidimensional process through which urbanisation is progressing today.
To understand the implications for citizenship of this new, hybrid urban condition, we need to explore the key characteristics of governing techno-polity created through a seamless merging between digital platforms and urban environments (Calzada, 2021). Here, the individual becomes a recipient for data collection, as well as a new node of information, knowledge and experience (Foley and Miller, 2020). From the perspective of the individual citizen, this assemblage of technology and politics implies new capacities for individualised influence (Leszczynski, 2020: 193), and, at the same time, it creates scattered social and political interactions and productive activities generating a complex and parallel ecosystem managed through a logistics rationality (Cuppini et al., 2022), restricting/selecting access and user capacities.
Edwards and Hecht (2010) describe techno-politics as a hybrid of technical systems and political practices that produce new forms of power and agency. Techno-politics can be approached in two possible ways that differ on the role of digital platforms and the value of their political role and capacity: (1) a centralised approach, where techno-political practices are being applied institutionally, mainly top-down, like the ways in which the local government increases its power using new technologies (Mitchell, 2002), as in the initial use of web-based technologies for traditional politics or services such as e-government or e-politics that are administered and managed often by private tech companies (Livermore, 2011) and (2) a distributed approach, often bottom-up or collaborative, in which information is co-produced and shared by individuals through networks as in a more transformative use of digital platforms for new ways of doing politics (such as assemblies, forms of activism, claims, petitions, and alternative commerce), that can be referred to as cooperative expressions of techno-politics (Calzada and Bustard, 2023). This entanglement of digital platform infrastructures with politics is determined and enabled by taxonomies of national, local, political and social identity with concrete policies and material outcomes, such as biopolitical turns of digital infrastructures that operate public scopes leveraging private ownership and aims, data surveillances and restrictions on the autonomy and agency of urban citizens within the urban space.
This techno-political approach is particularly comprehensive in terms of understanding platforms and politics as an ongoing and co-constitutive process. The entanglement of digital platforms with politics never produces singular responses and it always presumes the multiplicity of positions and interactions when it comes to embedding a platform for political purposes. Hence, the quandary of analysis is the understanding of how the assemblage of infrastructures that fuel the techno-political arena influence alternative dimensions of citizenship that are situated in the urban environment. Although Edwards and Hecht do not formulate the primacy of platforms over politics, they acknowledge the constitutive role that the former covers in terms of political and governing power. In view of the multiplicity of actors and positions in this hybrid techno-political arena, we consider digital infrastructures not merely as the means to an end – rather, they ‘are’ actors/active agents in the co-production and negotiation of urban space. Or at least, we can say, they empower actors with a proper rationality originated from their private nature, scopes and way of operating, thereby transforming politics.
Hughes (2006) expands on the meaning of techno-politics by observing that social and ethical issues emerge from the various uses of digital platforms and generate political controversies. He argues that future techno-political conflicts will be fought over the development, regulation and accessibility of human enhancement and technological infrastructures, and they will bring about fundamentally different conceptions of citizenship, rights and the polity. For Hughes, digital platforms shifted the techno-political field prevalent in the twentieth century that was divided between techno-conservatives and techno-progressives. This shift, he claims, paved the way for an arena that, merging politics and digital platforms, ceaselessly reconfigures relations, interactions and actors while opening up possibilities for new practices and approaches in terms of citizenship dimensions. Services, interactions, campaigning, volunteering, data extraction, and so on, as well as organisations and institutions, are increasingly, in the long term, public services and infrastructures delivered by private companies with their own logics. In reshaping their interaction with the urban environment to create a techno-political arena, digital platforms co-determine the relationship between infrastructures and individuals as well as between individuals and institutions. This inevitably prescribes acts and practices of digital citizenship, through modes of access to services, modes of interaction, modes of political action, modes of mobility, modes of using public and private spaces, and modes of obtaining information, and so on.
This increasing deployment of ‘urban’ technological platform infrastructures, independently from the single use of digital technologies, has significantly transformed modes of interaction, control, exchange and participation, moving them into virtual spaces (Hanakata and Bignami, 2023). This transformation has complex and sometimes contradictory effects on the concept of citizenship and raises questions about its institutions, norms, definitions and practices (Bignami et al., 2023). The phenomenon of growing ‘platformisation’ has profound impacts on both densely populated cities and less inhabited areas, influencing processes of production, operation, distribution, monitoring, control and daily life (Bignami et al., 2023). It not only reminds us of the perennial adjustment of meanings, expectations and experiences of (urban) citizenship through which rights and obligations are continually expanded and eroded (Holston, 2009), but it also highlights the strategic dimensions of the engagement with and the infrastructures of platforms that allow for their pervasive expansion.
The process of platform urbanisation therefore also takes into account this new techno-political dimension of the urban. This extended meaning of citizenship at urban scale potentially allows us to cast democratic and participatory experiments at the planetary scale (including the ‘right to the city’) into this new hybrid techno-political arena. Furthermore, urban citizenship practices could help to create impacts at the urban level, allowing citizens to be empowered through their digital rights while connected with other emerging planetary experiments (Calzada, 2021).
To trace the need for an extended understanding of citizenship, it is necessary to briefly depict three perspectives on citizenship. First, the political and social concept of citizenship is traditionally framed as a ‘nationally bounded membership’ (Fischman and Haas, 2012) in a nation-state. As a legislative and normative term, the notion of citizenship provides people living in nation-states with certain civil, social, political and economic rights and responsibilities. The most important qualities from this perspective are the requirements to obey the laws and norms, work, vote, and pay taxes. This traditional approach to citizenship focusing on rights and responsibilities was developed out of the emergence of the modern nation-state in Western countries during the seventeenth century, following the Westphalian order (Linklater, 1998). In a period when the territorial integrity of nation-states was important, their relative autonomy was fundamentally based on national citizenship.
Second, many scholars dispute this traditional conception of citizenship, arguing that such an approach alone is not capable of catching the substantive facets of citizenship, which is more closely related to context, participation, identity and membership particularly evident in urban settings (Bauböck and Orgad, 2020; Ong, 2006; Sassen, 2009, 2017). These scholars propose ideas that can be defined as additional, and which advocate the scaling down of state boundaries and the exercise of human rights, participation and inclusion as the building blocks of citizenship. Even if traditional conceptions of citizenship are still universal and influential in the field of citizenship studies, these perspectives do not include many politically, linguistically, technologically and culturally different forms of interaction, as expressed, for example, by marginalised and oppressed peoples who live in an urban area and who are sometimes denied formal rights of citizenship. Furthermore, traditional definitions do not include the phenomena of multiculturalism and interaction with digital platforms which are pervasive in the current urban environments. The conception of citizenship is further complicated by increasing migrations across national boundaries, leading to heterogeneous populations and cultural diversity within and across nation-states in both an urban and cosmopolitan direction.
Finally, in a complex setting of citizenship that is embodied in the nation-state beyond its physical confines, and beyond the conception of citizenship based on such confines. It is necessary to identify a suitable material and immaterial signifier. This signifier needs to be dynamic, negotiated and co-constructed through a collectivity and a ‘performative’ interpretation of citizenship (Isin, 2017).
This signifier of citizenship ‘competes’ with nation-states not only for claims over legitimate legislative and normative terms, but also for claims over legitimate citizenship itself, and the capacity to delineate borders. This hybridisation of citizenship can be described by a consolidation of political, cultural and digital platform systems, a realignment of institutions and discourses, and attempts to recognise and engineer their effects and accidents in the urban realm. That is, the design horizon for each layer must be considered in terms both of what it accomplishes as an ideal digital platform and (maybe more important) and of how its undesigned accidents characterise its real outcomes. For example, in this extended conception of citizenship in the digital platforms era, we have to understand what referent of last resort one can count on. An unedited mix of political and technical agreement seems necessary. In other words, if the interfaces of the urban environment itself address everyone as a user/data source, then perhaps one’s status as a user is what really counts. The right/duty to address – and be addressed by – the polity would be understood as some shared and portable, informed and critical, relationship to common digital platforms. Properly scaled and codified, this by itself would be a significant (although accidental) accomplishment of ubiquitous platform infrastructure.
In reaction to diverse pressures (simplistically definable in terms such as neoliberalism, globalisation, digital platformisation, social inequality, economic rescaling, migration flows, spatial segregation and invasive tech corporate control), urban citizenship is emerging to better reflect the hybridisation of identity, participation and entitlement to focus on the concrete capacity to act politically both in material and immaterial realms. Urban citizenship could reflect the political capacity and right to ‘use’ the city and its embedded digital platforms in the presence of different regimes of citizenship (Iyer and Kuriakose, 2023). This is a form of biopolitical governance (Collier, 2011), since if digital platforms seek to shape the behaviour and norms of citizens in the context of platform urbanisation, this process can involve promoting specific forms of participation or citizenship that counteract government objectives. This may lead to tensions between the desire for individual agency and the government’s goal of controlling and shaping urban populations through biopolitical infrastructures based on platforms.
Since the 1960s, the notion of the right to the city coined by Henri Lefebvre occupied an important place in such debates, alternately falling in and out of the favour of social, political, philosophical and legal thinkers dealing with citizenship (Delanty, 2009; Yiftachel, 2015). Given the inadequacy of ‘traditional’ notions of citizenship to include and describe the above-mentioned pressures on socio-political processes, the right to the city needs to be practised in the most direct sense, as a right to configure the urban space in all its material and immaterial manifestations (Harvey, 2012). However, the urban environment has never been a harmonious place free of confusion and conflicts. Considering then that the city hosts intense and highly politicised political and social processes, beyond the configuration of the city through participation and the shaping of common functionality of city spaces and buildings, the right to the city means also the act of claiming and requesting changes and modifications to city policy-making by co-constructing and sharing a political platform able to dispute the legally codified practice, with a view to change it.
The concept of platform urbanisation as an ongoing process therefore captures the critical triad of the urban environment we live in: it is increasingly platformised, as much as it is an urban world and as much as it is a techno-political setting. The result is a hybridisation of dimensions of citizenship. Framing platform urbanisation with a speculative approach of urban-digital citizenship (Antenucci and Tomasello, 2023) can be fruitful to grasp its hybrid essence. Platform urbanisation allows, in effect, to concentrate on the changing attitude towards the use of the city as a set of practices of urban citizenship. In other words, the figure of the citizen refers mainly to governance: how to engage, empower, blandish, coerce, incite, invite or encourage forms of conduct that are already deemed as appropriate for a citizen. Platform urbanisation as a techno-political process re-shaping urban citizenship overcomes this boundary by attempting to frame the citizen as an embodied subject of politics who acts through digital platforms designed for taking political action suitable for the hybrid (techno-political) urban arena, so disrupting pre-cast digital paths.
At the same time, we aim to foreground the importance of infrastructural discourse within the process of platform urbanisation. In effect, this means that urban development has become instrumental to the implementation of infrastructures that shape citizens’ lives in a biopolitical turn and which, ultimately, make possible the process of platform urbanisation itself. The figure of the citizen is consequently not merely a bearer or recipient of rights and duties that already exist, but rather the political actor of a new hybrid (online and offline) techno-political urban arena where active forms of citizenship involve making actions and claims that may or may not yet exist (Isin and Ruppert, 2020).
Conclusion: Towards an elaboration of the defining nature of platform urbanisation
Platform urbanisation is a process rooted on one hand in a truly political setting (Bignami and Hanakata, 2022). On the other hand, it is framed in its citizenship dimension, signifying its mutability, indefiniteness and continuity, that is, moving away from being simply focused on technological aspects of digital platforms. This process is more evident in urban spaces due to its concentration of interconnectedness between online and offline interactions, but the concept of platform urbanisation tries to capture it as a planetary phenomenon affecting every possible territory and individual. It describes an immaterial, global process that increasingly defines everyday life in a physical (offline) and spatial way, while also referring to online political and socio-economic aspects of the urban. It provokes a new relationship between people and their environment, and with that a reconceptualisation of the rights and duties of citizens.
In this process, digital platforms determine the way in which political scenarios are framed and regulated as assemblages of territories, capital accumulation, and financialisation. The result is a new techno-political arena consisting of a merging of digital platforms and politics, based on the ‘institutional logics of platforms in general by considering their technical processes as political technologies’ (Bratton, 2015: 19).
Digital platforms are ideally positioned in the urban realm to proliferate and test innovations, providing new spaces of interaction between individuals, business interests, governments and other organisations. Indeed, governments and businesses have capitalised upon the opportunities offered (Loader, 2007). Underpinning moves towards digitally mediated interactions is the assumption that digital participation is an available and desired option for many citizens (Baker and Blaagaard, 2016). Potentially, citizenship participation through digitally mediated spaces may exclude or limit the participation of some groups (Hintz et al., 2019). The urban environment, then, is the most significant material (offline) and immaterial (online) space where the dimensions of such an extended conception of citizenship are shaped and concretised (Isin, 2007; Nyers and Rygiel, 2012). It enables rights and duties, participation, identity and membership. Furthermore, citizenship ensures the uniformity of rights and duties linked with political participation; therefore, has the potentiality to mitigate political effects of social inequalities.
This ongoing and ubiquitous process has the capacity to shed light on the fact that platforms tend to reproduce rather than oppose existing political and socio-spatial inequalities (Castells, 2002: Schor, 2020), both in terms of the economic benefits that are produced through urban platforms’ ways of operating and of the political presence that forms part of urban governance. The digital platforms that are the ‘engine’ of the platform urbanisation process have their own rationality and represent, in effect, a model of data-driven governance, characterised by infrastructures enabling different kinds of data services (such as data stores, clouds, etc.) that support new assemblages of urban politics and collaborations between private companies and public bodies that capitalise on mass data flows from objects, devices, mobility, flows, zoning, space production, and so on. This commonality is crucial, because it allows for the growing embodiment of hybrid platforms as infrastructures as new forms of politics within urban life. Leszczynski (2020) notes that a significant part of scholarship studying platforms’ territorialisation in the cities is dominated by ‘dystopian critiques of the universal capitalist and/or neoliberal essence of platforms and the platform-mediated city’ (p. 190). The value of platforms in such an evolving techno-political scenario is that they were originally born as a virtual space with the capacity to connect people as peers, on a supposed democratic basis, without predefined hierarchies. In other words, the narrative of platforms was as a harbinger of an even society of peers with concepts like ‘sharing economy’ (Vallas and Schor, 2020). Conversely, in the evolving urban scenarios, platforms have gradually become an intangible private infrastructure with public scope, or, better, for public use and private scope. In these scenarios, large private oligopolies (and sometimes monopolies when the scenarios are dominated by the same private companies) derive immeasurable financial, political and power benefits from individual users, often exploiting public resources.
It is therefore possible to plot some points that characterise the nature of platform urbanisation:
Platform urbanisation is fed by a techno-political hybrid environment that makes the steadily increasing penetration of digital platforms in the urban setting possible through digital and physical infrastructures. Platform urbanisation is therefore a process that moves away from a mere technological focus to assume a directly political force;
Platform urbanisation is, in our understanding, characterised by digital platforms that are infrastructures meant as a mixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, and private technology. Rather than in infrastructure per se or as a made artefact, we are interested in what infrastructure can reveal of practices of urban (digital) citizenship;
Within platform urbanisation, a discussion about citizenship and its urban and digital aspects in advanced digital platform regimes cannot bypass a critical evaluation of the role of data, technology and the deployment of infrastructures associated with them (e.g. the way in which urban space is administered and mapped, and how the governance of such citizens is changing due to the deployment of dashboards, digital platforms and mobility apps);
The definition of platform urbanisation conveys a seemingly paradoxical stance: a planetary move (platformisation happens everywhere) and at the same time, an urban-based move (the process deploys its most visible effects in an urban environment). This apparent contradiction has direct implications on how and on which basis new, extended forms of urban (digital) citizenship are deployed in an inextricably hybrid techno-political arena, where digital forms of ‘being’ are expanding (Isin and Ruppert, 2020), and the concept of citizenship is in flux (Bignami, 2020; Ennaji and Bignami, 2019).
These projections invite further inquiry into the implications of this growing platformisation for urban techno-politics, urban citizenship, and urban infrastructure development, since their interaction and links remain largely unexplored.
Finally, as illustrated earlier, it would also be fruitful to pursue a dialogue between platform urbanisation and biopolitical approaches. Biopolitics, as shown, has much in common with platform urbanisation and urban practices of citizenship mediated by infrastructures, since these are both concepts with deep implications in the dynamics of contemporary cities. Biopolitics refers to the management and control of populations through political and social mechanisms (Pajević and Marling, 2023). Within the dynamics of urbanisation, digital platforms have emerged as the basis of infrastructures that serve as powerful intermediaries shaping many aspects of urban life, such as political influence, participation, interaction, transportation, housing, zoning, employment, and health services. These platforms exert significant influence over urban dwellers by collecting vast amounts of data and implementing algorithms to regulate and govern their behaviour. Forms of biopolitical ‘decisionism’ close to the primitive core of political authority move towards digital platforms and their infrastructures (Bratton, 2015; During, 2010). Consequently, this shift of biopolitics towards the process of platform urbanisation raises crucial political questions about urban citizenship. As platforms become integral to urban living, they redefine notions of belonging, rights, duties and participation in the urban context. Citizenship is no longer solely defined by legal status or physical residence, but is increasingly shaped by individuals’ interactions and engagements with platform-based urban systems. Urban dimensions of citizenship are even more characterised by a shift towards practices and forms of action both online and offline as well as informal forms of presence. This evolution in the relationship between the process of platform urbanisation and its hold on urban citizenship signifies a transformative biopolitical moment in the governance and experience of cities, where power dynamics, inclusion, political and social equity are continually being renegotiated in a new, hybrid, techno-political arena.