Platform Urbanization for “Local Life”: Recursive Datafication and Infrastructural Power of Douyin

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how Douyin’s Local Life Service exemplifies the infrastructural turn through recursive datafication process. Combining mixed-methods approach of interface walkthroughs, policy document analysis, and 18 stakeholder interviews, the research moves beyond prevailing analyses of datafication confined to online environments, and examines how digital and physical interfaces are recursively integrated to capture, transduce, and reproduce urban data flows. It reveals that Douyin’ s infrastructural power lies not merely in data extraction, but in its capacity to orchestrates a recursive operational matrix wherein data capture from digital interfaces and physical urban spaces mutually reinforce and reshape each other. The article proposes a novel framework of recursive datafication, theorizing datafication as a tripartite and interconnected process of accumulation, transduction, and reproduction that consolidates infrastructural power. It further advances a relational perspective on infrastructural platforms, demonstrating how platform power derives from and reconfigures the conditions of urban economic practice, spatial mobility, and subject formation. Thus, the study ultimately contributes to platform urbanism and critical data studies by rethinking the connections between platform interfaces, datafication, and infrastructuralization.