STADSSALONSURBAINS 2019/20 lecture series Platform Urbanism

Data Commons, Citizen Contestations ans Governance of Cities

Digitally enabled platforms are reshaping cities in the twenty-first century. Platform-based activities are spatially concentrated in cities and build upon existing uneven geographies while feeding into wider urbanization dynamics of economic development, environmental action, and everyday life. Urban platforms connect people and resources in new ways, recasting infrastructures as services, and make it possible for big data and monitoring logics to steer urban development. This raises questions about who determines such connections, who has the power to shape data-driven decision-making and what are possible modalities of contestation. This public lecture series investigates the logics and rationales of digital platforms, the role of data and code in urban governance and surveillance, the infrastructural channeling of urban knowledge, and the progressive potential of platforms to facilitate sharing and the commoning of data.