Platform urbanisation, infrastructures and techno-politics: The turn towards urban citizenship

Abstract

This article analyses how digital platforms challenge and redefine the way in which urban forms of citizenship are shaped. What we call ‘platform urbanisation’ accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when digital platforms penetrated with increasing rapidity into every aspect of urban life. While these digital platforms have facilitated new possibilities for engagement, access to services, efficiency in processing data, and customising responses to people online and offline, they also pose political challenges related to inequality, privacy, exclusion and social polarisation. Developing a techno-political urban environment built upon inclusion, equality, and respect for the rights of users, necessitates leveraging the potential of digital platforms to empower citizens and acknowledging and incorporating the political nature of this new urban environment. Furthermore, the intersection between the political influence of platforms on the governance of citizens and everyday life has a biopolitical dimension, since the power of platforms is exercised through policies and practices that affect individuals and collectivities. The article clarifies two essential facets of platform urbanisation: (1) the political nature of such a process, which requires a reframing of citizenship and (2) the role of both material and immaterial infrastructures in this process, which serve thus to constitute it as a new biopolitical territory. This conceptual expansion allows us to interpret digital platforms as an inextricable merging of political rationality, administrative techniques and technology.

Being ‘Platform Citizens’ Today

“…with app-powered mobility, voice-operated domestic assistants, digital implants and bracelets, even remotely controlled dildos. Hence, in the recent years scholarship has gained traction around umbrella terms such as 'platform urbanisation' (Bignami & Hanakata, 2024;Hanakata & Bignami, 2023), platformisation (Törnberg, 2023), platform urbanism (Barns, 2020;Caprotti et al, 2022), AI urbanism (Cugurullo et al, 2023) and, of course, the Smart City (Kitchin, 2014).…”

“…Platforms themselves, then, become the vehicle through which a sense of community involvement is recreated by way of networking people and making resources immediately available. Bignami and Hanakata (2024) too prefer a take on citizenship that opens to novel possibilities, forecasting engagement and participation as active and value-creating possibilities of digital citizenship: "we can identify paths of being not just obedient digital citizens but also 'subversive'".…”