Background Merwede is an envisioned neighbourhood in Utrecht (the Netherlands) that provides an instructive case to learn about the governance challenges of digital mobility platforms. Unique about Merwede is how the development of a mobility platform is envisioned to be integrated into the development of a new neighbourhood. Methodology This article discusses the case of Merwede and provides insights into its proposed mobility platform and how it is made. It illuminates governance challenges relevant to the design and operation of an unconventional mobility concept by disentangling outstanding practical issues concerning three key governance dimensions—organizational structures, decision-making processes, and instruments. Results The research provides an empirical illustration of governance questions that come up when mobility becomes a service and is integrated into the urban fabric from the very beginning of a development process. Already in the plan development stage, Merwede illustrates that difficult decisions are to be made and competing interests come to the fore.

Urbanites increasingly turn to digital mobility platforms to make use of means of transportation and to plan and book journeys. While these platforms can contribute to making urban travel more sustainable and efficient, they can also lead to governance challenges and have negative external effects, raising questions about how public values can best be safeguarded. In this article, public values are defined as normative concepts that describe both the impact on and democratic control of an affected public. This article aims to initiate a more structured discussion about platform urbanism, specifically how and to what extent public values are incorporated in platform design and operation in the realm of mobility. It introduces an assessment framework for mobility platforms that was developed as part of a transdisciplinary research project in the Netherlands. This framework is grounded in two academic debates regarding 1) the rise of platform urbanism and 2) new forms of mobility that accompany the densification of cities. The paper refers to the mobility pilots Kutsuplus, UbiGo and Whim to illustrate how the safeguarding of public values can be evaluated. In the concluding section, the paper discusses some ways in which the assessment framework can be used for future research, for instance through scenarios.

This panel analyzes the textual and audiovisual discourses in which big tech companies envision social spaces and their platforms’ roles in relation to those spaces. The panel asks: What are the visions of human life and technology that big tech companies narrate in relation to public and social spaces? And how do these tech-generated visions compare to current insights in and critiques of how these companies intervene in and disrupt social spaces? Situated within the field of critical platform studies, the panel’s premise is that the discourses produced by tech companies form an integral part of these companies’ interventions in people’s relations with themselves, others, and their environments. In order to develop a critical understanding of the platform society, it is crucial to examine those discourses through which tech companies present themselves almost as state-like powers that can be trusted with “public” services. Employing methods of textual and visual analysis, this panel offers such perspective. In its analysis of big tech’s spatial visions, the panel moves between different scales of spaces (domestic, educational, urban, extraterrestrial). In relation to these spaces, the panel articulates a discrepancy between the visions of life produced by tech companies and big tech’s invasive, perhaps even extractivist and colonial logic.

This paper examines Google’s green discourse in relation to the ecomodernist movement and $2 . In recent years, tech companies such as Google have taken a more explicit position as actors in the ‘fight’ against the climate crisis. Tech companies often suggest technological innovation as a necessity to deal with the climate crisis, thereby attempting to develop a form of ‘green platform capitalism’ that presents us with a better, greener version of its business model. This paper presents a rhetorical analysis of a selection of the corporate discourse (2019-now) in which Google presents its environmental efforts, in order to understand how the company frames the relation between technology and nature. It argues that technology-nature relations are framed through ‘decoupling’, a term derived from the ecomodernist movement that functions as a rhetorical strategy to highlight positive connections between technology and nature and obscure uneasy connections. Through decoupling, Google is able to present its wish to save ‘nature’ without discussing its use of nature, thus legitimating green platform capitalism. Decoupling, the paper concludes, thus allows Google to create a narrative of green growth as the only logical way for humanity to move forward. While this narrative might be attractive, it does not question the feasibility of decoupling and conflicts with resolutions that centralize degrowth as answer to the climate crisis.

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