Abstract
Today’s digital platforms occupy sites of strategic exchange in the daily lives of cities. Whether in domains like transportation, shopping, accommodation, dating, or simply, public discourse, the value exchanged and traded via platforms today extends beyond basic urban services to include wider ‘data ecosystems’ of users, producers and consumers. In this article I am principally concerned with how platform services institute and govern data ecosystems, and why these are critical to the future of data-driven urban science and sustainability policy. While urban big data is important as a diagnostic tool for monitoring and evaluating complex urban behaviours, the rise of platform urbanism also points to the co-optation of urban data in the service of platform scale and its co-dependencies. These poses significant challenges not only to informational policy, but also for urban governance settings, in which platform-mediated interactions facilitate powerful but unevenly shared territories of urban intelligence.
Highlights
Sarah Barns*Reviewed by: Robert Cowley, King’s College London, United Kingdom Shenja Van Der Graaf, Imec, Netherlands
Today’s cities operate as complex informational ecosystems that are brokered and facilitated by myriad digital platforms and services
Many critics have argued that it is the very incapacity for technology actors to properly understand and accommodate the messy complexities of cities and their human actors that have led to failures of smart city implementation, including an incapacity to scale up prototypes to form enduring innovations in urban decision making and governance (Greenfield and Kim, 2013; Hill, 2013; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2015; Shelton et al, 2015; Morozov and Bria, 2018)
Summary
Reviewed by: Robert Cowley, King’s College London, United Kingdom Shenja Van Der Graaf, Imec, Netherlands. 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 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 to informational policy but increasingly to urban governance settings, where platform-mediated interactions facilitate powerful but unevenly shared territories of urban intelligence
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