The past decade has seen an explosion in what is popularly known as the “sharing economy,” perhaps most visibly in the realm of transport. Digital “shared mobility” platforms like Uber, Car2Go, and Mobike, as well as emerging, more sophisticated “mobility-as-a-service” platforms which coordinate multiple discrete services into a single portal, have risen to prominence as modes of reworking everyday urban transport in cities of North America, Europe, and East Asia in particular. This paper aims to explore the driving forces and concrete expressions of this platformization of urban mobility, as a particularly diverse and volatile component of a broader platform urbanism. Based on the construction and analysis of a database consisting of 200 urban mobility platforms drawn from across the globe, we highlight five key trajectories of platform formation, focusing on the firms, institutions, and social interests that have fueled the growth of this sector, and the modes of infrastructural organization, spatial formation, and governance that they entail. We further highlight the fragility of this particular form of “spatial fix,” and the prospects for a more redistributive form of platform urbanism. We conclude by reflecting on implications for future research.

Bicycling for transportation in American cities has grown dramatically in the past 20 years, symbolizing the return of capital investment and commercial vitality to formerly disinvested urban cores. Pucher et al. (2011) note the cycling "renaissance" taking place to the greatest extent in gentrifying neighborhoods, but the processes relating cycling and gentrification have gone largely unexplored. This article examines the early role that bicycle advocacy organizations in San Francisco played in articulating the specifically economic value of bicycle infrastructure investment. This narrative is now commonplace, and widely applied both to neighborhood revitalization and urban competition for "talent." This alliance of bicycle advocacy with the "livable" turn of gentrification raises serious questions for those who would pursue a more democratic and socially just politics of the bicycle.

In recent years, bicycle infrastructure has emerged as a valued part of urban development policy in many American cities, a process that depends on the normalization of cycling practice in three respects. First, the various "less confrontational" mutations of Critical Mass have redefined the politics of cycling in cultural and consumerist terms. Second, this "bike culture" is mediated through Internet networks that generate concepts of proper cycling practice. Third, both spatial models and standards of "correct" ridership circulate through these networks, linking "bike culture" to institutional networks of implementation. While positive from the standpoint of increased ridership, this may reinscribe the exclusions that are constitutive of the contemporary American city and may limit cycling's egalitarian potential.

In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and "urban pioneers" alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates' overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.

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