Material presences that cue interaction with digital platforms are concentrated in gentrified, gentrifying, and gentrifiable neighbourhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, while being largely absent from established affluent enclaves.• Platformized materialities cue expenditures of digital spatial capital-the capacity to stake claims to space through digital technologies-in the urban spaces where they are visually encountered. • Digital platforms glamorize everyday consumption practices and decouple acts of consumption from face-to-face interactions in ways that fit the spatial, lifestyle, and self-actualization ambitions of advantaged, tech-savvy urban dwellers.This paper reports on the findings of an empirical study of the street-level visual spatialities of urban platforms in three Canadian cities: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Enumerating, typologizing, and spatially analyzing incidences of platforms in these three cities, we find platforms to be concentrated in neighbourhoods classified as "gentrified," "gentrifying," and "gentrifiable," while being largely absent from established affluent enclaves. We theorize the significance of these spatialities in three ways. First, we suggest that the emplaced visibility of platforms functions to cue expenditures of digital spatial capital-the ability to stake claims to space through engagements with digital technologies-in neighbourhoods where these platformized materialities are visually encountered. Second, we argue that these expenditures of spatial capital are associated with the ways in which platforms glamorize mundane urban consumption practices (the aestheticization of consumption) while decoupling acts of consumption from face-to-face interaction (the anaestheticization of social relations). And third, we identify propositions for how these an/aesthetic dynamics may potentially influence the further densification of platforms on city streets in transitioned (gentrified) and transitional (gentrifying and gentrifiable) urban enclaves.

No abstract