Participatory Infrastructures
The Politics of Mobility Platforms
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22018405 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter T Dunn (0000-0003-3971-6041, University of Washington, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 335-346 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Urban Planning (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2183-7635 • E-ISSN: 2183-7635 |
| Publisher | Cogitatio (PUBLISHER • PT) |
| DOI | 10.17645/up.v5i4.3483 |
| OpenAlex | W3112348980 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 40 |
Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out
Citizen journalism · Deliberation · Everyday life · Internet of Things · Internet privacy · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Smart city · Sociology · Transactional leadership · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Sharing Economy and Platforms · Transportation and Mobility Innovations
Platform Urbanism
The Platform Society
Standards
When Tourists Move In
Platform Logic
From API to AI
Do Artifacts Have Politics
Code/Space
Socialization in an Open Source Software Community
The cultural work of microwork
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Patches don’t have gender’
Engineering a platform
Platforms and public participation
Digital turn, digital geographies
Regulate, replicate, and resist – the conjunctural geographies of platform urbanism
Platform methods
Coordinating the city
The politics of mapping platforms
The automatic production of space
Platform affects of geolocation
Feminist digital geographies
The politics of 'platforms
Negotiating the platform pivot
Can an Algorithm be Agonistic? Ten Scenes from Life in Calculated Publics
Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism
Political Infrastructures
Users as Agents of Technological Change
Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
Platform capitalism
The Platformization of the Web
Life beyond big data
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |