Platforms are changing city life — for better and for worse
In record time, tiny apps have transformed the urban fabric. That comes with trade-offs
This piece was previously published in Apolitical.
Not so long ago, pundits and academics predicted that, in a world tightly connected by technology, distance would no longer matter.
Thomas Friedman called it a "Flat World". Being close to each other physically — cities’ main value proposition — would soon become irrelevant. Since this thesis first saw the light of day, millions of people have moved to cities and continue to do so every year. Whether this will change after COVID-19 is unknown, but cities and their density have survived other epidemics before.
One thing is clear, the prediction about the flat world was wrong.
If anything, new technologies have increased the need for cities. They have also reshaped urban life. The evolution of cities cannot be understood without the advances in defensive walls, the improvement of sewage systems and high-rise buildings, or the invention of the car.
It is in this light that we should read Sarah Barns’ recent book, Platform Urbanism. From her perspective as a digital strategist, policy researcher, practitioner and scholar, Barns investigates how one of the most important technological developments of the last decades, the emergence of platforms, are transforming cities today.
Nearly every city in the world has seen platform-enabled companies like Uber or Airbnb shape their physical and economic landscapes. Despite their explosive growth, there is a lack of understanding in the general population about the key aspects of platforms, their operations and business models, and how these interact with urban dynamics.
Platform optimism
The book starts this exploration by tracking the origins of the platform concept in the computer industry and its later adoption by internet businesses who sought to change communication models from the ‘one to many’ to the ‘many to many’ paradigm.
In their beginnings, platforms such as Facebook opened opportunities for expanded decentralisation and non-mediated participation, but the hopes for new political possibilities and the sharing of power quickly receded when it became clear that platforms were anything but neutral.
Purely ‘technical’ decisions over the design of the content, its prioritisation or the sharing mechanisms were, essentially, political choices made by platform owners. In this fashion, the merry first wave of platform optimism was hit by a clear realisation: code is performative and shapes the — digital or physical — spaces that it opens.
This wavering enthusiasm in the digital space gave way to a refill of optimism with the emergence of the ‘sharing economy’ movement. Platforms moved from the virtual reality to the world of goods and services, with very tangible impacts in city life. Progressive urbanism welcomed what seemed a more bottom-up and distributed alternative to the ‘top down’ images of the technocratic and corporate-driven visions of the smart city. Combined with the movement for open data and what Barns aptly calls urban apptivism, platforms arrived in cities full of promises.
Will platforms change the world?
Just as the first wave of platform optimism had paid scarce attention to the performativity of code and data architecture, the cheerful narrative over the sharing economy overlooked the role of platforms as market creators and shapers.
The prevailing view of sharing platforms as neutral enablers of two-sided markets drove attention away from platform businesses’ active and conscious shaping of the transactions that they enable. For example, car-sharing companies were often portrayed as simple matchmakers of drivers and users that enabled a more efficient utilisation of unused car capacity.
Yet, there was nothing neutral on how these businesses broke into, spread across and dominated urban markets. The governance aspects of the apparently collaborative businesses determined how and where value was created and allocated (and increasingly, extracted).
Over time, platforms’ value extraction tendencies have increased, ignited by two main factors: data and their financing model.
First, platforms realised their dominant position to learn from and exploit the information of all the activity ‘happening’ on them. Through the design and control of the infrastructure where this activity occurs, platform owners can repurpose data for its monetisation.
Interestingly, while the production of the data is largely in the hands of users, the control and exploitation of this data is basically in the hands of the platform.
Second, many of these businesses are fuelled by venture financiers, whose logic of investment is based on the expectations of market expansion leading to vast reservoirs of data to be exploited with minimal competition, even if the sustainability of the platform’s business model has not been proved.
Platform Urbanism’s description of the evolution of these platforms, from the digital to the physical space, and from optimism to deceit, is one of its most valuable contributions. In the book, Barns, an urbanist by training, sets out to investigate in more detail how platform governance also acts powerfully to reshape perceptions and representations of mobility, connection, transaction and spatial awareness in cities. This is one of the least studied aspects of platforms’ impacts on urban spaces, and the book points to some promising avenues of research such as platforms’ reshaping of urban behaviour or the emergence of uneven platformed geographies of information.
Urban laboratories of public value
Despite its promises, however, the book fails to deliver a thorough assessment of these urban impacts of platforms. One can understand that.
The book describes a phenomenon that morphed as it was being written. Yet, Barns could have, for example, looked at the recent studies that have identified car-sharing’s impact on mobility patterns across US cities or the very tangible consequences for urban infrastructure of the consumption behaviors fostered by Amazon’s same-day delivery or Deliveroo’s takeaways.
The closing reflection on an ethics of public value also leaves the reader wanting more. Barns’ argument that the traditional defence of the public interest through competition, consumer privacy and relevant markets is not fit for purpose is tremendously suggestive, but the alternative direction is not clearly delineated. The examples of data governance in Barcelona or the co-operative model of Fairbnb shed some light on the direction of travel, but as Mariana Mazzucato compellingly argued in her book The Value of Everything, there is still a lot of work to do in order to re-conceptualise the idea of value. And cities may be an ideal place to test and research new ideas.
In the past, regulation of new technologies happened at the national or supranational level, but emerging platform business models are now impacted by local regulations such as mobility ordinances or building codes. Some cities, like Los Angeles, have gone further, developing their own data platforms through the mobility data specification, sparking an interesting debate.
That is why Barns’ book is so relevant and timely. If our planet continues to become an essentially urban world, the key to solving our greatest challenges, be it climate change, pandemics or social disparity, will have an essentially urban dimension. Our daily interactions with the world through our smartphones and the boundless data they generate is full of opportunities and risks. As Barns argues, Platform Urbanism will bring open spaces that enable new forms of value creation and interactions, but will also witness attempts to enclose, control and exploit the value of those same interactions. Anyone willing to understand these forces and shape them towards a greater common good in cities would be wise to read it.