Re-engineering the City: Platform Ecosystems and the Capture of Urban Big Data

Abstract

Today's digital platforms occupy sites of growing strategic significance in the daily lives of cities. Acting as infrastructures of urban exchange, platform services institute basic match-making capabilities between mobile subjects, whether for transportation, shopping, accommodation, dating, or, simply, public discourse. As is increasingly recognized, the nature of value exchange traded via these platforms extends beyond their immediate domain of service provision, whether transportation or accommodation, for example, to wider "data ecosystems" of users, producers, and consumers. It is the conditions instituted by platform services to govern data ecosystems that are the focus of this article and are, I argue, of critical importance to how big data can be leveraged in ways that expand new frontiers of urban science and more broadly, urban sustainability policy. The rise in platform urbanism means that urban big data are not simply as a diagnostic tool for monitoring and evaluating complex urban behaviors but can be co-opted in ways that actively engineers the scaling of data-driven platform services and their myriad codependencies. These conditions present significant challenges not only to informational policy but increasingly also to urban governance settings, where platform-mediated interactions facilitate powerful but unevenly shared territories of urban intelligence.

Discovering Urban Governance Parameters for Online Learning in Saudi Arabia During COVID-19 Using Topic Modeling of Twitter Data

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Data Co-Operatives through Data Sovereignty

“…Discussions on smart cities and recent literature on data governance and [100,101], more broadly, digital economy, society, and citizenship are already employing concepts, including data co-operatives [11,17,52,53,66,78,83,84], data sovereignty [12,18,19,46,49,50,65,68,78], data colonialism [21,80,82], and data devolution [14,20,22,69,71] (Figure 1). This article articulates this intertwined relationship by suggesting a more distinct interrelated conceptual angle that could be seen as an emerging trend in the field of smart cities [102].…”

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City as a Growth Platform: Responses of the Cities of Helsinki Metropolitan Area to Global Digital Economy

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