What is Platform Urbanism?

Section 1.1 Existing Scholarship: Platform Urbanism And Its Impact On Cities

The field of “platform urbanism” provides relevant context for understanding contemporary local government data sharing mandates and why they matter.

This section provides an overview of platform urbanism, drawing from existing scholarship to lay out key definitions and concepts, explore impacts on cities, and establish the central role of data—its generation by users, its capture by platforms, and its potential and actual reuse by public officials.

What is Platform Urbanism?

Platform urbanism refers to the deployment of private, consumer-facing networked digital technologies that create marketplaces or otherwise foster coordinated user behaviors in the city—often intermediating the exchange of goods and services in ways that take advantage of urban density, infrastructure, and environments.

These technologies are most typified by so-called “sharing economy” or “gig economy” companies: ride-hail apps like Uber and Lyft, short term rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO, and more recently including “micro-mobility” companies like Bird and Lime. However, platform urbanism can also refer more expansively to a broader range of companies including route planning apps like Waze or Google Maps, points of interest or review-based apps like Yelp, delivery apps like GrubHub or Seamless, fitness apps like Strava, localized social networks like NextDoor, dating apps like OK Cupid or Hinge, or AR games like Ingress or Pokemon Go, and many others that utilize digital interfaces to coordinate and/ or augment user behaviors in city space in ways variously dependent on urban infrastructures. As scholars of platform urbanism like Dr. Sarah Barns have noted, building on top of and augmenting physical urban infrastructures with new digital interfaces allows urban platforms to “occupy sites of growing strategic significance in the daily lives of cities” with the “match-making capabilities” of platforms playing a key role in various activities “whether for transportation, shopping, accommodation, dating, or simply public discourse.”4