Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital in Canadian “platform cities”

Abstract

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.

Distribution, dis-sumption and dis-appointment: The negative geographies of city logistics

“…The potential ramifications are many. As has been observed by media commentators, whilst proclaiming to connect, city logistics may abrade social cohesion, whether through its part in gentrification or its production of cityscapes that are pockmarked and unstable, largely absent of services and experiences bar those facilitating distribution or platformised exchange (Kushner and Lindsay, 2021;Leszczynski and Kong, 2022). In terms of our methods then, we need to be wary of relying exclusively upon dialectical critique.…”

“…Whilst some functions agglomerate on the edges, others are more finely distributed throughout the urban. These include the ‘architectures of fulfilment’ discussed by Shapiro (2022), as well as self-service ‘microhubs’, cargo-bike hubs (Meyer, 2021; Parker, 2022), and the accompanying material and sensory paraphernalia involved in accessing the ‘15-min city’ (Leszczynski and Kong, 2022). Within these imaginaries, previously banal spaces such as the kerb and the doorstep are drawn in as significant thresholds to be modelled, managed and optimised.…”

“…These interfaces work to manage bodily and technical friction, 'producing the possibility of a transition between thresholds at the right time' (Ash et al, 2018(Ash et al, : 1138. Leszczynski (2020) relatedly questions logistics' seamlessness by drawing attention to the 'glitchy' experiences of platform/city interfacesand, with Kong (Leszczynski and Kong, 2022), to the 'street-level' presences of urban platforms. Paché's (2007) work on French supermarket retail describes how, moving away from Time-Based Strategy, the rise of hard discounters has been built instead upon 'slowness logistics' and 'the theatricalization of low prices', staged through an intentionally untidy, warehouselike shopfloor aesthetic, evoking 'disenchanted ' atmospheres (2007: 321).…”

Glitch cities

“…This moment calls not only for widening access to data and code facilitating increased ‘self-management of resources, surplus production, and the urban core’ and the simultaneous ‘withering away of the state’ (Shaw and Graham, 2017: 908), but also for a broadened conceptualization of who is seen as having rights to digitally mediated and mediatized materialities in cities, such as shared bikes and e-scooters. This is increasingly important as logics and imperatives of algorithmic optimization transform previously quotidian activities, such as riding a bicycle, into commodified services to be sold back to deserving – and desired – urban subjects, and to be consumed as rented assets with profits accrued in standardized increments of time (Leszczynski and Kong, 2022; Stehlin et al, 2020).…”

Platforms and/as urban communication: Mediums, content, context

“…Bike‐sharing stations, dockless e‐scooters, billboards and stickers advertising the availability of on‐demand meal and grocery delivery, ride‐hails driving by, delivery bots the size of shoeboxes rolling underfoot on pavements. These and other platformised materialities have established themselves as highly visible fixtures of urban built environments over the last decade, becoming part and parcel of the quotidian tableaus of our everyday visual encounters with urban streetscapes around the world (Leszczynski & Kong, 2022a, 2022b). In this intervention, I move beyond a dominant tendency in geographical and corollary literatures to engage with platforms as infrastructures (e.g., Álvarez et al, 2017; Hodson et al, 2021; Leszczynski & Kong, 2022b; Plantin et al, 2018; Rodgers, 2021).…”