This book reflects on what it means to live as urban citizens in a world increasingly shaped by the business and organisational logics of digital platforms. Where smart city strategies promote the roll-out of internet of things (IoT) technologies and big data analytics by city governments worldwide, platform urbanism responds to the deep and pervasive entanglements that exist between urban citizens, city services and platform ecosystems today.
Recent years have witnessed a backlash against major global platforms, evidenced by burgeoning literatures on platform capitalism, the platform society, platform surveillance and platform governance, as well as regulatory attention towards the market power of platforms in their dominance of global data infrastructure.
This book responds to these developments and asks: How do platform ecosystems reshape connected cities? How do urban researchers and policy makers respond to the logics of platform ecosystems and platform intermediation? What sorts of multisensory urban engagements are rendered through platform interfaces and modalities? And what sorts of governance challenges and responses are needed to cultivate and champion the digital public spaces of our connected lives.
Sarah Barns is a digital strategist, policy researcher, practitioner and scholar, with a career-long commitment to cultivating digital public spaces in connected cities. Having worked as policy adviser, digital strategist, urban consultant and creative producer, Sarah completed a PhD on the history of digital urbanism in 2010, using mobile media as a platform for experiential histories of urban activism. In 2014 Sarah was awarded an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project 'Platform Urbanism: data infomediaries, city labs and open data experiments in urban governance', based at Western Sydney University and Australia's national data science agency Data61. Today Sarah develops urban data policy and strategy for a range of public and private organisations, as well as being one half of Sydney digital placemaking practice Esem Projects.
