Localized processes of platformization: The example of Surabaya

Abstract

This article analyzes how universalist paradigms for platform urbanism are being adapted, modulated, and subverted through an evolving platform ecosystem that is specific to the city of Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city. We examine how processes of urban planning and city management are platformized, how specific groups of professionals and residents act as intermediaries between infrastructure and users and thereby facilitate the platformization process, and how these local iterations of platforms are informed by place-specific colonial and national history. By describing and tracing the genealogy of Surabaya's platform ecosystem, we demonstrate the specific ways in which it rationalizes city governance, shapes discourses on participatory citizenship and spatial planning, and redefine what counts as city infrastructure, innovation, and urban life in general. We argue that the modulation, adaptation, and resistance to platformization can only be understood by paying attention to the singularity of the milieu and tracing how visions of modernity and its sociotechnical assemblages are composed anew every time platform frameworks, tech tools, and discourses hit the ground.

Introduction

In Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city, the public relations division of the city government is in charge of Koridor, a coworking space founded in 2017 during the mandate of mayor Tri Rismaharini (Risma) to make Surabaya “a creative and technological center at the global level” (Koridor, n.d.). Koridor is a free, 24-7 coworking space and start-up incubator that tunnels into an old Dutch colonial building––the Siola––hosting the municipal administration offices and a store selling local products, produced through entrepreneurship programs that emerge from informal economies. Director and head of information services, Yanuar Hermawan told us he was enthusiastic about carrying forward Koridor's mandate to foster a “spirit of entrepreneurship” through high- and low-tech start-ups (Interview). In the past decade, Surabaya ¹ has positioned itself as an innovator in Asian smart city initiatives and a pertinent case study for performance evaluation (Herdiyanti et al., 2019). Together with a variety of reports and planning documents, these initiatives conjure up innovation at the intersection of transnational tech-venture jargon, private–public partnerships, and local desires of urban efficiency.

This article traces and analyzes the interaction among Surabaya's digital platforms that are an integral part of its smart urbanism approach (Bollier, 2016; Dooley, 2017). Ubiquitous sensors and interfaces embed humans into this sociotechnical infrastructure, while the data collected changes the provision of services and, with it, the platform-based ecosystem (Van der Graaf and Ballon, 2019). Following Poell et al. (2019), we call this process platformization, a term that denotes “the inter-penetration of the digital infrastructures, economic processes, and governmental frameworks of platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life” (p. 6). It includes large corporate platforms such as Google Maps, Uber, and AirBnB that are transforming the metropolitan infrastructure for housing, mobility, and other services (Plantin et al., 2018). But it is not limited to them, as the case of Surabaya with its various locally developed and locally deployed platforms demonstrates. While recognizing the enactment of “smartness” mandates and platformization are not the same thing, we argue that they connect and interweave in Surabaya in significant ways to reshape urban environments and social life. In this article, we take the “smartification” of Surabaya as an entry point to specifically investigate processes of platformization, and to examine how the interactions among different kinds of platforms reshape the city and modulate its power relations. Finally, since platforms are rooted in their context (van Dijck et al., 2018:8), we consider sociopolitical actors like city officials and residents integral components of this platform ecosystem.

Surabaya partakes in the “smartness” hype no less than many other aspiring “smart cities” with its government-sponsored platforms, start-ups, and corporate services. Recent scholarship on this phenomenon increasingly engages with the complexities of global capitalism, rejecting universalizing notions of urban innovation by demonstrating how more marginal and Majority World cities compose different political geographies of smartness (Anttiroiko, 2021; Burns et al., 2021; Mouton, 2021; Roy and Ong, 2011). ² Others have pointed out that urban planners who wish to optimize urban space often fail because they begin from one-size-fit-all solutions that cause friction on the ground (Lee et al., 2020: 117).

Our case study seeks to contribute to this growing body of research by tracing how the specific processes of platformization in Surabaya tie technology to local histories of modernity and colonization. Our example offers three insights about the dynamics of platformization and their configurations of power.

Less powerful, nontechnical and noncorporate actors can be key intermediaries in platformization. Platform intermediaries (van Dijck, 2021)––mediators between infrastructure, and platforms and/or users that facilitate the platformization process––connect heterogeneous social and technical components and lend singularity to the system of policy and planning in Surabaya. The dynamics we describe depart from more common configurations of platform urbanism that rely heavily on corporate provisioning of infrastructure (Barns, 2020), instead centralizing power in the municipal administration. We also identify low-income women as important intermediaries who connect platforms and services in the ecosystem.

Platformization cannot be fully grasped without addressing situated knowledges (Haraway, 2013) and, particularly in the Majority World, using a provincialized lens (Chakrabarty, 2008). We account for these knowledges by discussing technology in its operative functioning (Hui, 2016), illustrating how Surabaya's urban character recomposes when platform frameworks, tech tools, and discourses hit an already fertile ground.

Surabaya's platformization undermines digital universalism inherent to top-down approaches to platform urbanism. The specific ontological and epistemological legacies that thread through the sociotechnical arrangements we describe break with the idea that technology can be applied the same way everywhere—an assumption that replicates colonial ideologies of development by assuming that there is only one single path toward the urban future (Amrute and Murillo, 2020; Chan, 2013). Nevertheless, the undermining happens while planners and government strategically mobilize transnational discourses on urban innovation (Burns et al., 2021).

The article is structured as follows: first, we discuss the intermediation of Surabaya's platformization process (“Ecosystem Intermediaries” section) and demonstrate how platforms become essential components of infrastructure and infrastructure, in turn, is platformed to reshape the use of space (“Platforming Infrastructure - Infrastructuring Platforms” section). We then lay out how the discursive mobilization of the “smartness” mandate reorganizes the physical and social infrastructures of Surabaya's kampungs (low-income, often informal, and neighborhoods) (“Discursive Mobilizations” section), while local ontological and epistemological legacies shape the way transnational discourses on smart cities are recuperated in the practices and subjectivities of Surabayans.

Methodology and key concepts

We reach these three insights by drawing on ethnographic data from a 4-week stay in Surabaya, during which the first author of this article conducted ten semistructured interviews with city officials involved in smart city planning and heritage preservation, urban planners, and community organizers (Appendix A). The interviews were accompanied by multiple visits to the sites under discussion. Overall, the interviewees were chosen because of their expertise in local urban planning practices and/or experiences participating in smartification initiatives as experts or as residents. Some of the interviewees kindly shared official policy and planning documents to provide additional insights into the organization and structuring of Surabaya smart city projects.

Renzi also charted the infrastructure of Surabaya by visiting public buildings and control rooms, community organizations and public spaces, new urban developments, historical sites, and attending meetings between the city and project facilitators, as well as official events. This method involved a kind of infrastructure shadowing to account for both material and intangible infrastructure that resulted in a deeper understanding of how social activities connect social and technical platforms. ³

Our understanding of platforms builds on theorizations that foreground the relational composition of platforms, their ability to organize interactions between users (or other platforms), and their broader assemblages that rearrange configurations of power at multiple scales (Bratton, 2015; Gillespie, 2010; van Dijck et al., 2018). As we illustrate in the “Discursive Mobilizations” section, platform intermediaries link social (e.g. offices and units, civil servants) and technical apparatuses (e.g. dashboards and databases) functioning as infrastructure for connection and information circulation (Van Dijck, 2021). At times the intermediaries are corporate digital platforms, at times e-government platforms and, at times, humans that connect various stakeholders and infrastructure.

In the data gathering process, we recognize that our access to the research site was limited by time constraints and by the limited number of interviews. Moreover, most of the subjects interviewed had ties to the government that likely influenced their answers. However, since this study focuses on institutional arrangements, we use the data to examine the configuration of government and planning at the municipal level and not the everyday experiences of residents. We argue that, despite its limitations, our approach can make visible some of the hidden relations that prominent models of platform governance and urbanism efface when they center policy outside of its historical context and universalist understandings of design and algorithmic affordances.

Beyond the fieldwork, the authors also relied heavily on secondary data about Indonesian planning and architecture, and academic studies of Surabaya's smart city initiatives and kampung development. In our analysis, we use the term “platform ecosystem” as a conceptual device to approach the primary and secondary data. Here, we follow Sarah Barns who, building on Van Dijck et al.'s work, argues that an “ecosystem approach” is a useful tool for understanding platforms in the field of urban development by highlighting how multiple actors are connected through technical features, like protocols and interfaces, and through “relatively ‘open’ forms of programmability, their constant evolution and adaptation” (Barns, 2020: 128).

Surabaya: From sentient smart city to Sentosa platform ecosystem

Ecosystem intermediaries

In The Platform Society, José Van Dijck et al. (2018) define the term platform as: “a programmable digital architecture designed to organize interaction between users—not just end users but also corporate entities and public bodies. It is geared towards the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data” (p. 4). To denote the interlinked structures of these various digital architectures, they employ the term “platform ecosystems” (Van Dijck et al., 2018: 4). Both at the level of the platform, and at the level of a platform ecosystem, we find an abstracted systems logic, as well as a tendency of the material platforms to shape some of these systems. At the same time the systems logic also shapes social processes according to the needs of specific platforms, or their interactions. For Benjamin Bratton (2015) “platforms provide an armature and induce processes to conform to it” (p. 42). Such processes are visible in the way platformization unfolds in our case study through a combination of technical protocols with social rules and norms of engagement; planning and urban design that distributes resources; and political discourse. So-called platform intermediaries play a key role in the process of platformization as they mediate between infrastructure and users, and infrastructures and societal services (Van Dijck, 2021: 2806). In Surabaya, digital dashboards and interfaces but also human mediators play the role of the platform intermediaries.

One key component of Surabaya's smart digital architecture is a control center with more than 600 CCTV surveillance cameras showing real-time information about weather, traffic, flooding, and public safety. This digital platform mediates the goings-on in urban space with a physical office space, and between the urban environment and the government. At various workstations, employees of the different city sectors are monitoring activities pertinent to their mandate and coordinate among each other in case of emergency. The system is built for two-way communication, so messages can be broadcast to the locations where monitored activities are taking place. The center is run by the Department of Transportation and is intentionally located in the Siola building to optimize relationships and communication with other municipal departments.

Unlike other smart cities in Indonesia, which work with established corporations for the provision of platform services (Offenhuber, 2019), the software for Surabaya's control center was developed by the municipal government. While not unique, this arrangement constitutes an important departure from the more common configuration of infrastructure for the platformization of cities, heavily dominated by powerful corporate intermediaries (Van Dijck, 2021: 2806). By choosing to develop key platforms that function as communication infrastructure, the government of Surabaya positions itself as an intermediary in the process of platformization, “building a denser presence across one or more layers” of the ecosystem (Van Dijck, 2021: 2809). The arrangement and day-to-day practice of Surabaya's control room platform thus bypasses the centralization of power in the hands of the large tech companies that control the global market. As we discuss later, this presence of the municipal government fosters specific arrangements of power, shaping the city and subjectivizing its residents in ways that are specific to the populist, entrepreneurial political culture of the city.

In line with platform urbanism's foregrounding of citizen involvement in publicly supported innovation programs (Anttiroiko, 2016), Surabaya promotes e-government and online payments options as part of the “smartness” mandate. To discourage corruption, an e-procurement system and a participatory planning interface for citizens, called e-Musrenbang was set up. ⁴ E-Musrenbang is managed by the Surabaya City Development Planning Agency or Bappeko (short for Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Kota) and it allows local authorities to prepare a yearly local government work plan. e-Musrenbang provides information about incoming proposals and is also meant to encourage transparency and accountability of data on proposals received from the community (Rizky, 2017).

In Surabaya, several pre-existing competitions and awards now function as intermediaries to provide services across government platforms and corporate social media, producing data from interaction, optimizing information sharing and formalizing governance. Many interviewees mentioned the Surabaya Green and Clean Program, which was implemented by the City of Surabaya Sanitation and Landscaping Service in 2005. The awards often lead to private and public funding disbursements, as was the case for kampung Maspati, which is now a popular tourist destination (Hayati et al., 2020). Through these awards, residents feel empowered, as shown in a conversation with the leader of a women's association:

So, the women have become so motivated about that event. And ibu Risma also said that the women there have a very important role in the economy, starting from the economy of the household. If they are doing well, they might go beyond the household and do some other economic activities from home. (Rinny, Interview)

Kampung Maspati has won the award multiple times for developing a water purification system that builds on ancient techniques, waste recycling, and entrepreneurship around health and wellness with medicinal plants, that are promoted in other neighborhoods.

The formalization of these kinds of informal practices becomes part of the platforming urban landscape, for instance, when Kampungs are enrolled in programs that develop independently with the supervision of the government, fostering specific strengths of the residents (Rahmawati et al., 2018: 2). Leading these efforts on the ground are so-called “motivators.” The motivators are community members or experts with knowledge in a specific area who mobilize residents and advocate for solutions rooted in local needs and preferences. In many cases, they are tapped because they are already organizing in the community. Instead of relying on a “build it online and they will come” model of participatory citizenship platforms which often remain underused, the motivators build relationships with and among citizens and the municipal government. The competitions and awards embedded them into digital architectures like e-Musrenbang and/or host them in incubators like Koridor––which foster the development of supporting app-based initiatives. These motivators act as intermediaries, “platforming” both residents and officials by facilitating new relationships and modes of interaction in low-income, often informal, neighborhoods of the platformed city. Platform intermediaries act as relays that advance the concentration or distribution of power to distribute resources and simplify information circulation.

Kampung residents have been able to reshape the surveillance role of colonial and authoritarian neighborhood groups into platform intermediaries, connecting residents and officials. Residents self-organize and interface with authorities through networked (social media) neighborhood organizations, the Rukun Tetangga (RT; neighborhood association) and Rukun Warga (RW; citizen association), which harness traditional community cultural values (Barker and Gibbings, 2018: 8) to support new programs. ⁵ Even the RT kecil, the neighborhood association for children, is involved in providing guided tours of the area, creating value both in the form of local pride (Anonymous, Interview) and making urban space legible within a system of economic development. In Surabaya's kampungs, some of the heads of the RT and RW are motivators while they are also part of the kampungs’ social networks across cities and regions of Indonesia to share knowledge and skills. Community organizers are connected daily through WhatsApp ⁶ groups and promote their initiatives on their kampung YouTube channels, subsuming corporate social media platforms into the local urban innovation ecosystem (Sabar, Interview).

Surabaya's independently built digital infrastructure with its integration of multiple offices, two-way communication systems, and its intermediaries “enforce the optimization of exchanges by binding open exchanges” (Bratton, 2015: 42) within its ecosystem. As the “Discursive Mobilizations” section demonstrates, many of the components that come together through platformization already existed before the smart city mandate and were integrated through strategic policy discourse. ⁷ The platform logic behind it––one that attends to the smallest organizational units in the city, like the kampung and the neighborhood associations, as much as to more traditional aspects of the city, like traffic and safety––imbues a form of granular power for the government of populations that reshapes space, and individual and groups subjectivities. This form of power is visible in how platform intermediaries function and will become clearer in the following section that addresses infrastructure. With attention to the most precarious residents of the city, the initiatives structured through a platform logic render the informal kampung legible within the ecosystem, incubate new forms of entrepreneurship and change the relation between the city and working-class areas. Dian Ramawati––a planner working at the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS)–– reminds us that her training emphasized that the kampung is a key component of the city: “if you’re getting rid of kampung, you’re getting rid of the identity of the city. Yes, it's like amnesia, you forget who you are” (Interview). While connecting platforms and users for practical purposes, the awards and social networks also subjectivize residents as entrepreneurs, proud inhabitants of historical neighborhoods, and community members, reshaping the meaning of urban life from the bottom-up as much as top-down.

Platforming infrastructure–infrastructuring platforms

The mayor's vision for 2016 to 2021 presents Surabaya as, “the sentosa ⁸ city, characteristic and globally competitive based on ecology” (Pemerintah Kota Surabaya, 2017). During her tenure as mayor, Risma considerably improved the drainage infrastructure, the cleanliness of the city and the conditions of roads, waste management facilities, transportation, and traffic infrastructure to facilitate integration of old and new services and initiatives, including creating more optimal conditions for grassroots businesses to emerge. One of the first projects, the redevelopment of Taman Bungkul [park Bungkul] with a variety of accessible facilities, leisure infrastructure and free wi-fi brought the mayor into the limelight with the United Nations’ 2013 Asian Townscape Award (Hasti; Kamal Interview).

But since Indonesia has one of the world's highest smartphone penetrations, the creation of several parks with free Wi-Fi has meant for Surabayans that they are easily plugged into an ecosystem of social media platforms that are otherwise costly to access. The infrastructure shadowing methodology clearly demonstrated that the time spent in the parks is now a time of socialization that is happening simultaneously in physical public space and online, especially on social media. The field of platform studies has been a productive space to think about the increasing co-composition of infrastructure and platforms, especially in the context of sensors and sensing platforms (Gabrys, 2017), subjectification (Langlois and Elmer, 2019), and relational dynamics between code, commerce, and corporeality (Halegoua, 2020; Kitchin, 2017).

At the level of the digital platform, services, and components can be integrated within a subecosystem of connected platforms from the same developer, or through application programming interfaces (APIs) that connect third-party companies to the platform (Lee et al., 2020: 117). This is how corporate platforms also integrate low-income earners from the informal economies into formalized circuits of exchange by monetizing the provision of services and everyday activities. Companies like Grab and GoJek, two large motor taxi and delivery services further reorient parks towards service provision because drivers wait for customers in these public spaces. Some of these platforms, for instance Gojek, also offer financial services through the mobile wallet app Gopay. In addition to integrating unbanked workers in the formal financial infrastructure by facilitating their payment, Gopay allows drivers to use their earnings for other services the platform provides, such as GoFood and GoShop (Hamdoun, 2020: 87). Corporate platforms allow residents to easily switch their roles as public space users. Similarly, Food delivery apps make the presence of street vendors legible in a digital landscape of platform urbanism (Bratton, 2015; Wisambodhi, 2021).

Other smaller start-ups are also accelerating infrastructural platformization. For instance, the app Rapel, developed at Koridor, is used to pick up waste by people who run the waste banks in the kampungs (Rapel, 2019). These platforms are filling the gaps left by service provision and are integrating other kinds of infrastructure services into the platform ecosystem from the bottom up. An urban mobility project that caught international attention is the Suroboyo Bus, a public bus where tickets can be bartered for empty plastic containers, promoting recycling practices, making public transportation more accessible (Hantoro, 2018; Humas, 2021), while connecting urban transportation to app-based services.

The valorization of knowledge and agency of kampung residents is crucial to understand the platformization and the creation of infrastructure in Surabaya. Given the focus on centralizing technologies to improve governance, the city is investing heavily in education, whether it is formal schooling, training, or learning to use ICT at the free Broadband Centers around the city. It is in these everyday activities of residents and budding entrepreneurs where the entanglements between institutions, private actors and infrastructure take on original forms and where the agency of residents played out through so-called “informal sovereignties” (Hansen and Stepputat, 2005), like waste repurposing, are subsumed into a platform logic.

This subsumption is mandated in the planning rationales. Local planners Ernawati et al. (2013) research recognizes kampungs as assets and maintains that economic and creative innovation in the kampung can radically improve livability and sustainability, especially if supported efficiently by the government. Here, the affordances of interacting platforms (social media, E-Musrenbang, competitions, etc.) allow planners to vertically integrate infrastructure for household-based production such as recycled marine and sea-derived products, but also grassroots environmental collaborations and garbage banks (bank sampah).

The case of kampung Bulak illustrates these points. Bulak was a coastal kampung that received support to produce local marine products and distribute them through a public market. Since sales at the market were not drawing enough customers, the city built an urban park with a 40-meter-high sculpture to attract more visitors. In addition to leisure facilities, planners added parking space in an adjacent area and encouraged its use by locating a variety of selfie-stations between the parking lot and the park. Selfie-stations––sculptures and benches in the shape of things and animals––are effective generators of excitement and performance of public space use and they are a common sight in Surabaya's parks. While these solutions are still means of formalizing informal arrangements and exercising indirect control, they also intentionally harness technical components that are not an integral part of typical smart city designs.

From a perspective of optimization, one could say that this kind of infrastructure produces different forms of institutional, technical, and informational interoperability (Lee et al., 2020: 122). Interviews in Maspati revealed that women were only able to develop economic activities once a new regulation banning motorbike traffic in the small alleys ensured that children could play outside safely (Rinny, Interview). Projects like the health and wellness services of Maspati increase economic resources for individuals while part of the income goes back to improve the area. Hayati et al. (2020) underline that in these contexts, smartness is achieved while supporting community development instead of implementing generic solutions that apply to the entire city.

The empowerment of women and the care for the family as much as for the environment come together in the ways these programs move and optimize resources across a web of educational initiatives, subsidies, awards, volunteer motivators, public infrastructure (e.g. breast-feeding stations in the parks, playgrounds, space for events, free schools), and business initiatives such as the production of fertilizer that sustains parks and provides income from composting and recycling. Kampungs, and especially their women residents, become a pivotal part in changing urban space, as noted by an interviewee:

So Ibu [Risma] says that Surabaya is a big kampung so if changes happen [here] then it changes the whole state as well as the whole nation…Ibu Ibu, the women [have] a very important role in the process. This is Ibu Risma's policy vision, the role of the kampung in the building of the city […] The very big role of [women], to carry the information—the message. (Rinny, Interview).

Overall, we are witnessing a merging of digital platforms and other layers of infrastructure that is reframing how urban space is perceived but also how populations are governed within it. Morgan Mouton (2021) observes in Manila a dual dynamic where “infrastructure is envisioned as a demonstration, or an indicator, of development” while “infrastructure is also conceived as a medium for development and competitiveness” (p. 5). The same can be said for Surabaya's vision of smart city, which is not simply the result of circulating visions of urban futures and platform capitalism but also “the extension of state aspirations of governmentality, modernity and the control of “‘disorder’” (Datta in Mouton, 2021: 6). At the same time, local knowledge and initiatives do expand both definition and criteria for infrastructure. There is an economy of desires driving this process of transformation that is mediated by sociotechnical infrastructures. In this sense, the notion of “smartness” is mobilized and redefined by different actors in and through platformization processes—or, put differently, platformization is infused with locally specific understandings of “smartness.”

It is important to recognize the agency of city “users” in the process of knowledge translation (Chakrabarty, 2008). The desires and aspirations of those who build and those who use infrastructure here play a crucial role in the local instantiation of platformization. Women wield a significant amount of power, however, in turn, the platform logics we are describing also shapes the stakeholders’ psychosocial investments that foster neoliberal entrepreneurship as a form of governmentality (Foucault, 2008). We observe the processes of platformization and infrastructuralization of existing assets when we follow how visions of modernity translate into urban life––a process that Yuk Hui (2020) calls the “technological becoming of the local” (p. 63). This approach breaks with the understanding of platforms as stable systems that happen upon spaces and brings into view their characteristics as dynamic systems (Bratton, 2015) that are ontologically rooted in cultures (Hui, 2016: 10–11).

Provincializing platformization

Discursive mobilizations

The official brochure “Buku Profil: Smart City Surabaya” offers insights into the discourses and practices of the local brand of smart city platform ecosystem. Its glossy pages illustrate a vision of a smart city described as sentosa—literally tranquil and safe. Sentosa-ness goes together with retaining character––“a wise personality by maintaining local culture, which is reflected in the behaviour of city residents based on the philosophy of the Pencasila” ⁹ (Pemerintah Kota Surabaya, 2017: 17). Of note here is the reference to the ongoing resubjectivation of residents which continues along some of the principles established during independence.

While mobilizing globally recognized smart city criteria, ¹⁰ Surabaya is entangling its own histories, sites of knowledge production, priorities and understanding of infrastructure. As a matter of fact, we argue that, often, already existing planning goals are articulated and interconnected through a new vocabulary (in this case, the jargon of the smart cities and platforms) and become part of what shapes the idea of smartness through a platform logic of optimizing the connections among disparate elements and services (Srnicek, 2017). For instance, e-government is not a new feature of the smart city model and Surabaya has implemented it through e-Musrenbang since 2009 (Rizky, 2017).

At the same time, Surabaya mobilizes the principles of Good Governance proposed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), including the principles of participation, effectiveness and efficiency, transparency, and accountability (Rizky, 2017). This shows how local particularities are often articulated in the language of regional and transnational institutions that prescribe and legitimize urban planning interventions through international relations such as those sponsored by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the United Nations Habitat and the World Bank (Knowledge Management Hub, n.d.; UN Environment, 2018; United Nations, n.d.; World Bank, 2001).

Indeed, the language of official policy documents, PowerPoint presentations at urban planning and development conferences, and planners speaking to the media and in official publications foregrounds a globally oriented discourse of optimization visible particularly in priorities like “Realizing integrated spatial planning; Strengthen[ing] the competitiveness of local economic businesses, product and service innovations, and the development of creative industries; Realizing integrated and effective city infrastructure and utilities” (Pemerintah Kota Surabaya, 2017).

Planners read local knowledges and resources both through the frameworks that appear to express platform urbanism and its thinking in smart city criteria (Giffinger et al., 2007) and through the existing “Detailed Urban Spatial Planning” document for Surabaya (Bappeda Kota Surabaya, 2014, 2018). The tension between local cultures and top-down development work, between community initiatives and those mediated by university researchers and planners are visible in the approaches to infrastructuring discussed previously and in the interviews with planners that are themselves from the kampungs.

This form of strategic discursive mobilization is particularly visible in a study of the central and suburban kampungs in Surabaya, where Rahmawati et al. (2018) identify urban development criteria for kampung, which are matched with, or thought through, smart city discourse. In our interview, Dian Rahmawati emphasized how important it is to adapt global and western perspectives to the local context: “I’m trying to find something beyond this smart city that's happening in Surabaya because I’m sure that Surabaya is beyond smart” (Interview).

Focussed on developing better smart city frameworks and reconciling the tension between top-down development and local assets and needs, Rahmawati and her colleagues designed a participatory platform––Smart Kampung––to foreground and share the work of residents. The Smart Kampung platform ¹¹ uses AI to consolidate and visualize already collected data but it also allows users to perform their own “smartness” assessment by inputting new data. The results can be used to improve infrastructure autonomously or to advocate with the Surabaya Government. This project was developed with an awareness of AI bias and a weariness of technological fixes. Indeed, the research team made sure that the AI component of the platform does not overdetermine the analysis and solutions and that human intelligence still plays a relevant role: “If they need to have a consultation more with us, we are ready. AI cannot give you everything” (Yusuf, Interview). ¹² Users of the platform are supported with research workshops in the kampung to train people to collect their own data and harness the assessments.

Ultimately, this critical approach to technological solutionism and top-down planning approaches is indicative of a certain kind of resistance to the discourses and practices of international development, which increasingly pivot on platforms and digital infrastructure (Barns, 2019). Especially in the Majority World, top-down technological development has been criticized for reproducing colonial and modernist paradigms that are insensitive to local histories and practices, that increase dependence on wealthier countries and transnational aid organizations and lenders. Recently, researchers have drawn attention to forms of data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Thatcher et al., 2016), while others emphasize the unique agencies of decolonial approaches to data and computation (Ali, 2016; Amrute and Murillo, 2020; Ricaurte, 2019).

Therefore, when discussing the specificity of Surabaya, it is important to address the complex relation between coloniality and postcoloniality, neocolonial and nationalist processes specific to Indonesia. Dutch colonialism (1816–1941) has deeply impacted the planning of Indonesian cities (Kusno, 2000). Yet, postcolonial cities like Surabaya also dialogue with their colonial past, in accordance with their own needs and sociocultural norms. As Arjun Appadurai (1995) argues “decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life” (p. 23). Similarly, in its ongoing reinvention, modernity is a global experience; despite the Western origin of the term, it is important to study all sites of modernity on equal terms (Appadurai, 1995: 2).

In their subjectivation, postcolonial subjects are neither mere consumers of coloniality (in its historical or contemporary forms) and modernity, nor are they just constantly resisting western colonial and imperialist powers. Frameworks centering colonial violence, even from the perspective of the colonized, seem ill equipped to address the Indonesian postcolonial experience in its nuances, and how this impacts processes of platformization. Our fieldwork revealed how many of the universalist, and in many cases exploitative, frameworks at the basis of smart city development and platform urbanism, are appropriated and adapted to local needs.

Local ontological and epistemological legacies

Abidin Kusno's work (2000) demonstrates how architecture and urban planning were fundamental for the postcolonial project of nation building. Towards the end of Dutch colonial rule (1920–1940) technological innovation and architecture fostered a new sense of modernity (Mrázek, 2002). An Indo-European architectural and planning movement emerged that, grounded in a liberal critique of colonialism, advanced a vision of syncretic architecture incorporating indigenous elements of culture and uses of space that opposed the traditionally colonial subdivisions of space (Kusno, 2012). The project of nation-building and the subjectivation of its citizens during Suharto's New Order (1967–1998) mostly targeted the preceding 22 years of President Sukarno's rule, whom Suharto replaced through a coup d’état and years of bloody repression (Anderson, 2018).

This history of Indonesia deeply shapes contemporary planning practices and their infrastructure of cultural production like universities and professional organizations. In Surabaya, these institutions have a unique history that further differentiates them from the rest of the country and that are reflected in the government's planning practices and in the pedagogy of the Department of Architecture of the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS). For example, in the kampungs, recent platform innovation initiatives build on a long history of participatory urbanism.

Professor Johan Silas, an architect and planner trained in the Netherlands and at the Bandung Institute of Technology (Institut Teknologi Bandung or ITB), the most important University in Indonesia, emphasized in our interview, some of the key differences between Surabaya and other cities like Jakarta and Bandung. While elite universities in the country focused on planning for the upper and middle classes, the Department of Architecture of ITS––which Silas founded 1967––devoted considerable research and teaching space to the kampungs, as historical sites and vibrant sources of the city's character. The same interest in working class history reflects in how the city's master plan protects kampungs as heritage, while they are often the target of demolitions and paternalistic development programs in other cities (Silas, Interview). ¹³ Many contemporary planners and city officials studied at ITS, including Mayor Risma and some of the interviewees. They carry on this legacy of centering the kampung into their platform urbanism approaches––and Silas is still a consultant (Hasti; Dian; Silas, Interviews).

The participatory approach used in Surabaya's platform urbanism can be traced back to 1969, when ITS students began collecting data to improve living conditions in the kampungs but also learn from the residents. In the following years, collaboration between government and residents was aided by a series of surveys providing data about the work required but also building trust between researchers and community members. The approach included consultations with residents about suggested solutions; once the technical requirements had been decided on, the planners were open to alternative suggestions that were within the available budget. Silas also recounts how, when evictions of kampungs were necessary, they would co-design the buildings for relocation to avoid displacing people to high rise buildings that disrupt community ties based on horizontal uses of space. Silas underlines how this was the first time that residents agreed to being relocated (Silas, Interview). ¹⁴ One could argue that even the drive toward optimization of resources that strongly shapes informal sovereignties has seeped into the technical training of planners through decades of exchanges between kampungs and planners.

From the interviews and looking at the rise to power of Mayor Risma, it also becomes quite clear that priorities like Smart Environment, Smart Mobility, and Smart Living, as they are practiced in Surabaya, did not originate from the global smart city framework. Risma put to work her passion for environmentalism as the Head of Bappeko before she won the first mayoral election by popular vote in 2010 (Wardhani and Dugis, 2020). Risma's approach echoes some of the discussions and practices of the Architectural Regionalism movement of Southeast Asia, spearheaded by ITS professor Josef Prijotomo.

In these approaches, planning moves beyond definitions of sustainability that only focus on “the technical sphere of ‘green’ design, invention and expertise” and consider the “much broader cultural framework of the human interrelationship with nature” (Hidayatun et al., 2015: 146), rooted in relational ontologies between human and nature in Indonesia and the wider region. One striking example of “data collection” that builds on this tradition is the use of plants sensitive to pollutants as air quality sensors in many areas of the city. At Bappeko, Risma increased the green areas and parks to 30% of the city's surface by turning vacant land and land with unclear permits into urban parks. Trees around the city are covered in staghorn ferns and orchids that function as visual indicators of the quality of air, lending peculiarity to the local process of datafication. ¹⁵

With many of the programs and planning initiatives discussed so far, Risma and the women in leadership positions in the government and community alike tap into Indonesian visions of feminism and practices of sustainability that have their own roots in history, architecture, planning, and only recently global climate agendas. While Kurniawati (2017) underlines the influence of transnational ecofeminism on Risma, our fieldwork also pointed to feminist lineages that interpolate community leaders in a dialogue with the City's agenda. Among these influences are Kartini heroism (Beekman, 1984), New Order feminism (Suryakusuma, 2011), and historical and contemporary Indonesian Islamic feminism (Burhanuddin, 2002).

Risma's strong female role model recurred in many interviews: “[She] always has commitment, complete commitment. She is at the house, and she is doing her mother job completely. And when she is at the office, she also [has] a big commitment [to] this community” (Ana, Interview). At the same time, women organizers also draw on their own vision of feminism: “for me, women power is how to take our potential and become the potential to give the best to the community,” and “I wrote a proposal about the rising of the women's power … it is not enough that Kartini Day is a ceremony, using the traditional dress… we should go beyond symbolic things …[I used] the theme of her book for our women in the kampung…from the darkness comes the light. The rising of the women's kampungs power” (Rinny, Interview).

Our insights re-affirm the observation that a culture's relation to technology is shaped by specific cosmologies that are not anthropologically universal (Hui, 2017: 2). The context of the Indonesian archipelago, with its geographical fragmentation, its various indigenous cultures and religions, its layered histories of colonization and cultural exchanges make it particularly difficult to point to a universal cosmology underlying technical thinking. If, against the grain of the traditional Western ontological separation between human and nature, “ecological thinking is not simply about protecting nature, but fundamentally a political thought based on environments and territories” that mediates the environment (Hui, 2020: 60), then we ought to read the thinking and policies that organize Surabaya's platforms ecosystems––for instance, how Risma's ecological visions of care place kampung women in a strategic intermediary position––as a local instantiation of political culture that is inspired by relational thinking, such as the traditional Javanese philosophy of Hamemayu Hayuning Bawana (Ainia, 2021).

Whether they are residual bodies of knowledge that survived anthropocentrization (Choiruzzad, 2020)––the displacement of nonanthropocentric beliefs by colonial and New Order rule––or more intentional moves to revive suppressed knowledge (Hidayatun et al., 2015; Mahaswa and Kim, 2023) these diverse visions shape the logics of platformization. Here, we do not claim to have traced the roots of the Indonesian conceptualization of technology, but we have identified some lineages in the material history and thinking behind architecture and urban planning specifically in Central Java that underlie the technological consciousness that shapes platformization in Surabaya.

Conclusions

The example of Surabaya aimed to characterize the relationships that sustain platformization and modulate forms of soft power that are wielded by urban planners and mediators. Surabaya offers a clear example of the processes of emergence of a singularity that arises from the locally specific interconnections between ecological sustainability, (female) entrepreneurship, relationship building across both pre-existing and new social networks, and the interplay of infrastructural and built environment, heritage, and current interventions.

Exploring the specific platform logics of Surabaya's platform ecosystem revealed the unique ways in which intermediaries and infrastructure are positioned to produce interoperability and integration. Noteworthy is the function of (human) motivators, awards and competitions as intermediaries among platforms and to facilitate vertical and horizontal integration of social and technical components into platforms, even when technical interoperability is absent. This is different from many other instances of platform urbanism (Barns, 2020; Lee et al., 2020), where intermediaries are often major corporate platforms that facilitate data collection and information sharing. Due to their power to shape the standards of interoperability, these corporate intermediaries also produce “lock out effects” that consolidate already powerful actors (Lee et al., 2020: 119). Since many of the connections between components of the ecosystem in Surabaya are not standardized protocols but flexible sociotechnical structures, the city's platform ecosystem reduces the monopolizing effect of large corporations.

However, due to the strategic role played by the municipal government and its collaborating educational institutions, and incubators like Korridor, power is still heavily centralized, affecting how data is collected and used, and how residents can use and benefit from the services provided. Moreover, established apps on smartphones that function as sensors still have the effect of formalizing informal urban configurations, for instance placing motorbike taxis and street food vendors on the map, or creating banking services for the unbanked. Overall, the datafication and optimization logics attend to various socioeconomic layers of the population, investing in the development of poor neighborhoods, and often integrating pre-existing colonial and postcolonial planning elements to connect the components of the ecosystem.

These arrangements have a subjectifying effect as they interpolate individuals and groups into new urban structures and into an interplay of desires and aspirations that modulate new roles and forms of agency for public space users and entrepreneurs. According to one of the interviewees, “Risma has built a movement” rather than a voters’ constituency (Hasti, Interview). At the helm of these community-led initiatives are mostly women. Environmental care is paired with the opportunity to empower women and stimulate female entrepreneurship. While it is clear from the fieldwork that “smart” Surabaya builds on a longer tradition of planning that existed across the succession of mayors, Risma's leadership consolidates this configuration through the political and psychosocial subjectivation that characterize an emergent feminist movement.

In its institutionalization as a set of governmental techniques and technologies, this mode of soft yet granular power that is engendered or bolstered by platform logics produces its own objects and subjects, not unlike the model of the enterprise (Foucault, 2008: 3). However, it inserts into this diagram of power a series of technological variables (Bucher, 2018) that reframe our capacity to “curate” information as much as social interaction and human/machine interaction to produce value. Our study found evidence of this emerging paradigm in the re-articulations of city governance, discourses on women-led participatory citizenship and spatial planning, and the redefinitions of what counts as city infrastructure, innovation, and urban life in general.

As we noted, the strategic mobilizations of previous urban planning frameworks (Detailed Urban Spatial Planning document for Surabaya), as well as fragments of smart city discourse and international development are subsumed into local imaginaries of modernity that, together with the technical knowledge produced at local universities, shape the vision of the city and feed the process of platformization. The forces and factors that platform Surabaya go back more than a century. While the political economy of platform capitalism attends to the multiscalar capital flows in relation to economic trends and technological know-how, and platform/infrastructure studies alert us to the specific characteristic of sociotechnical infrastructures and their policy, it is only by understanding local knowledge and political cultures that we can make sense of its platformization as it is unfolding.

The smart kampung or the Sentosa city are not static and bound objects of study. Foregrounding the emerging relations between humans, technology, and environment uncovers the different agencies (technical and human) of the platform ecosystem in its specificity. It centers the relationship between components of the ecosystem––in our context, certain forms of infrastructuralization and intermediation that make the ecosystem more agile. It follows that, importantly, centering process is not only about paying attention to context but to narrate the processual relations between all components that bind the Surabaya platform ecosystem.

The example of Surabaya confirms that a universalist approach to tech-led urbanism not only does not reflect the realities on the ground, but that pathways to urban futures are shaped through weaving together local histories and practices with the language and concepts of transnational urbanism and development frameworks, resulting in articulations that build on the unique ways of knowing and doing of the city efforts (Amrute and Murillo, 2020; Burns et al., 2021; Chan, 2013). It also demonstrates that the parameters of platform capitalism are always already under contestation. This is why it is crucial to focus attention on the institutional sites of platformization but also on those of modulation, adaptation, and resistance by residents and corporations. In a context where dualisms such as modern/premodern are often the ontological basis for understanding technological innovation in the Majority World, the policies and discourses examined in this article push our analysis to identify practices which are not novel and “disruptive” but build on longer histories.

A provincialization of our understanding of platformization then, requires acknowledging and accounting for locally specific iterations of sociotechnical arrangements (some digital, some a hybrid of digital and analog) that are rooted in intersecting histories of colonialism and nationalism and, simultaneously, a decoupling of notions of power and sociotechnical change from universalist understandings of technology. Ultimately, when seen through a platform studies lens that has been provincialized (Chakrabarty, 2008), platformization becomes an even more dynamic site to investigate technological development in its entanglement with local life, power, and agency.