Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities

242 Pages·2020·2.946 MB·English

by  Sarah Barns

GEOGRAPHIES OF MEDIA
Platform Urbanism
Negotiating Platform Ecosystems
in Connected Cities
Sarah Barns
Geographies of Media
Series Editors
Torsten Wissmann
Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning
University of Applied Sciences
Erfurt, Germany
Joseph Palis
Department of Geography
University of the Philippines Diliman
Quezon, Philippines
Media is always spatial: spaces extend from all kinds of media, from
newspaper columns to Facebook profiles, from global destination
branding to individually experienced environments, and from classroom
methods to GIS measurement techniques. Crucially, the way informa-
tion is produced in an increasingly globalised world has resulted in the
bridging of space between various scalar terrains. Being and engaging
with media means being linked to people and places both within and
beyond traditional political borders. As a result, media shapes and facil-
itates the formation of new geographies and other space-constituting
and place-based configurations. The Geographies of Media series serves
as a forum to engage with the shape-shifting dimensions of mediascapes
from an array of methodological, critical and analytical perspectives.
The series welcomes proposals for monographs and edited volumes
exploring the cultural and social impact of multi-modal media on the
creation of space, place, and everyday life.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15003
Sarah Barns
Platform Urbanism
Negotiating Platform Ecosystems
in Connected Cities
Sarah Barns
Sitelines Media
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Geographies of Media
ISBN 978-981-32-9724-1 ISBN 978-981-32-9725-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9725-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte
Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
Series Editors’ Preface
Please Mind the Gap Between the Brain
and the Platform
Before we board the train leading us into Sarah Barns’ investigation
into platform urbanism, let us linger in our train station’s book store
for a second. If we pick up Boos’ Inhabiting Cyberspace and Emerging
Cyberplaces, the first volume of our Geographies of Media series, from
the shelves, we recall reading about how communities reinvented them-
selves digitally at the end of the 1990s. The related preface stated, that
‘digital spaces can also be used to carry existing sociocultural offline
boundaries into a Twenty first century society’ (2017, vi).
Some twenty years later the offline-online divide seems to have van-
ished in many aspects. In highly digitalised urban environments it
is nigh on impossible to detect where one ends and the other starts.
Smartphone users have already become cyborgs, using the iPhone or
similar devices as technological extensions to the human brain. If it
were up to companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, our bodies would
soon obtain an internal interface to render many of today’s manual
v
vi Series Editors’ Preface
inputs redundant. In the words of Haraway (1991), our cyborg world is
about ‘the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet’ (154).
Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century, communication
methods are generally different. ‘[T]raditional “one to many” modes of
media communication [have been replaced by] “many to many” forms
of content sharing’, as Sarah Barns elucidates. This is certainly true
for contemporary podcasting productions, that have evolved from sta-
tion-based radio, and that are characterised by social interaction and
ubiquitous availability. Putting volume one of the series back on the
shelf and turning towards our second volume, Peters’ Sound, Space and
Society, we learn about the impact of such ‘one to many’ media in the
form of pirate radio stations. In predigital era fashion, Peters’ revealed
how content was transported via soundwaves, that, ‘as a natural phe-
nomenon, elude the grasp of geopolitical conformities’ (2018, viii).
The ‘downside’ of white noise and bad reception came with a freedom
of transmission today’s YouTube channels and internet radio can only
dream of.
In Sarah Barns’ Platform Urbanism, we depart from the future of
urbanism and urbanisation, and explore the complex entanglements of
consumer, government, society, big business and various relationalities.
In her Introduction, Barns proposes a provocation in relation to the
ubiquitous human practice of being inextricably linked to their rectan-
gular devices: ‘Is … a mass display of smartphone-addled attention in
fact an emergent kind of urban observation, blending platform, context,
algorithmically-finessed demographic?’ The co-constitutive becomings
of various elements that produce an urban experience aided by digital
platforms create micro-cosmologies from engendering a ‘city of bits’ and
‘Uberisation of everything’ to urban apptivism and various configura-
tions of ‘crowd-based capitalism’.
If scientific research gets picked up not only by the media but finally
political discourse, it gets transformed into a meme that is hard to over-
look. Political campaigns in Europe and the 2020 US-presidential elec-
tion have not only discovered climate change as one of those memes.
The alleged need for digitalisation and 5G-networks, social media
companies not paying taxes and threats of automation all point to
an entanglement of digital and physical spaces as never seen before.
Series Editors’ Preface vii
As Barns states: ‘Quaint distinctions between the “built” and the “dig-
ital” are collapsing, just as software makers are literally becoming “city
builders”’.
This last remark points to many of this book’s case studies on how
digital platforms like Facebook, Uber and Airbnb impact urban life
and its social and physical structures. This is not only because of how
people organise themselves and how they construct their own imagined
geographies, but also because of the ‘constant discursive struggles over
[the urban terrain’s] representation’, as Chapter 3 asserts. The impact
of corporations to shape the city to its needs using smart technology,
is contrasted by the bottom-up potential of smart handheld devices,
potentially enabling novel governance structures and a new maturity of
urban dwellers.
It is not the mixture of both corporate and bottom-up approaches
that make platforms so intriguing for urban development, but the
potential of a third outlet, that is often being overlooked (or deliberately
neglected). There are not only two elements, like buy and sell, or search
and advertise, that constitute digital (social or economic) exchange. The
platform itself consists of a much higher potential, and it is spreading
into our real-life environment. Yet as much as platforms are increasingly
intrinsic to urban living, one must recognise a multiplicity of urban
experience and sense-making that exceed or resist the codification of our
lives that question digital and technological governance of platforms.
Thus, we are very excited to present you with Sarah Barns’ Platform
Urbanism as the third instalment of the Geographies of Media series.
Platform intermediation, data sovereignty and cooperative business
models are trajectories already taken but still in need of further expan-
sion. The future appears simultaneously knowable and unpredictable,
volatile and impermeable. So, let’s now leave the station and jump on
the Platform Urbanism train. Or, as Bruce Springsteen puts it: ‘The light
from the oncoming train focuses the mind’.
Torsten Wissmann
Joseph Palis
viii Series Editors’ Preface
References
Boos, T. (2017). Inhabiting Cyberspace and Emerging Cyberplaces: The Case of
Siena, Italy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge.
Peters, K. (2018). Sound, Space and Society: Rebel Radio. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Acknowledgements
This book reflects the support of a number of institutions and indi-
viduals, without which the ideas in this book would not have made it
to the page. In late 2013 I was awarded an Urban Studies Foundation
(USF) Postdoctoral Fellowship for a three-year postdoctoral project
titled Platform Urbanism: The role of city labs, data infomediaries and
open data experiments in urban governance. Support from Professor
Donald McNeill at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western
Sydney University was critical to the award of my postdoctoral fellow-
ship proposal by the USF, and I am grateful to his ongoing support over
the following years. Particular thanks to representatives of the Urban
Studies Foundation who supported me in the transition from the world
of policy and practice to that of urban research, in particular thanks to
Chris Philo from the University of Glasgow. I benefited greatly from
the opportunity to engage with fellows and their mentors throughout
the course of the Fellowship and thank the USF for this opportunity.
My Fellowship was supported by the Institute for Culture and Society
at Western Sydney University and I am grateful for this institutional
support, along with the opportunity to work with Data61, in particular
Colin Griffith, in the development of urban data strategies for a number
ix