Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Petter Törnberg, University of Amsterdam

; John Boy, Leiden University

Description:

Platform placemaking 2:
Cultures of platform urbanism through the lens of digital data

AAG Annual Meeting, New York, February 25 - March 1, 2022, NYC

Session organizers: Petter Törnberg, University of Amsterdam; John Boy, Leiden University; Jay Lee, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Daniel Trottier, Erasmus University Rotterdam

As we increasingly experience cities through the interfaces of digital platforms like Google Maps, Twitter, Instagram, TripAdvisor, and Airbnb, their code “mediates, supplements, augments, monitors, regulates, operates and facilitates many everyday task and routines related to domestic living, travel, work, communication, and consumption” (Dodge and Kitchin 2005). The digital mediation of urban life has become so ubiquitous that urban space must be considered hybrid – partially physical and partially digital (De Souza e Silva 2006). These platforms enable not only rent extraction from their proprietary markets, but also govern the social world through the extraction of user data (Sadowski 2020). Thus, data has acquired the role of a central commodity of contemporary capitalism, its value premised on its capacity to analyze, predict, and control the social world, thereby enabling the appropriation of new aspects of human life for capital (Couldry and Mejias 2020; Sadowski 2019). A growing literature on platform urbanism emphasizes the particular entanglement between platform capitalism and the city – with platforms coming to increasingly govern urban life.

Through data, urban platforms engage in what we may call platform placemaking, mobilizing their users as “discursive investors” (Zukin, Lindeman, and Hurson 2017) who shape spatial imaginaries of urban place. Platforms curate social infrastructures that enable users to participate discursively in the process of making “place”, while nudging and directing them to shape the city according to the platform's interests.

Concretely, platforms like Google Maps, Instagram, Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Airbnb mobilize and curate the production of user data in the forms of posts, reviews, and descriptions, whose words and images are both reflexive and generative of the social world (e.g., Törnberg and Chiappini 2020). These representations shape and direct, hurt and empower, how lives – and the material landscapes housing those lives – are planned, enacted, altered, and obliterated (McGeachan and Philo 2014:546). As Kanngieser puts it, their language is “inseparable from… political, cultural and economic landscapes”, and geographers therefore explore how “space, time and social constructions are productive of, and produced by, languages and their usage” (Kanngieser 2012).

With the rise of platform urbanism, the study of the city is thus increasingly becoming the study of digital data – and text data in particular. Representational cultural geography thereby acquires a distinctly digital touch. Such study is enabled by the emergence of computational methods such as natural language processing – but these methods also come with important epistemological challenges for critical scholars. Platform urbanism requires us to study digital data not as unfiltered representations of human life, but rather as commodities whose critical examination can be informative of the processes that produce them (Törnberg and Uitermark 2021).






References
Couldry, Nick and Ulises A. Mejias. 2020. “The Costs of Connection: How Data Are Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism.”
Dodge, Martin and Rob Kitchin. 2005. “Code and the Transduction of Space.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(1):162–80.
Kanngieser, Anja. 2012. “A Sonic Geography of Voice: Towards an Affective Politics.” Progress in Human Geography 36(3):336–53.
McGeachan, Cheryl and Chris Philo. 2014. “Words.”
Sadowski, Jathan. 2019. “When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction.” Big Data & Society 6(1):2053951718820549.
Sadowski, Jathan. 2020. “The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism.” Antipode 52(2):562–80.
De Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2006. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9(3):261–78.
Törnberg, Petter and Letizia Chiappini. 2020. “Selling Black Places on Airbnb: Colonial Discourse and the Marketing of Black Communities in New York City.” Environment and Planning A 52(3).
Törnberg, Petter and Justus Uitermark. 2021. “Towards a Heterodox Computational Social Science.” Big Data & Society Forthcomin.
Zukin, Sharon, Scarlett Lindeman, and Laurie Hurson. 2017. “The Omnivore’s Neighborhood? Online Restaurant Reviews, Race, and Gentrification.” Journal of Consumer Culture 0(0):1–21.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda