This research sets out to develop the concept of ‘platform urbanism’ and inaugurate it as a research agenda within urban studies. The project asserts that although digital platforms both depend, and have explicit effects, on the urban, urban studies has not comprehensively investigated these emerging infrastructures. Meanwhile other disciplines are making theoretical advances by conceiving of society and capitalism in relation to platforms. However, such work frequently fails to engage with the materiality of the city, the spatiality of digital platforms, and platform-related governance effects. Extant research often emphasises monopolistic and exploitative tendencies of platforms at the expense of considering their emancipatory potential. Our ambition is therefore to work toward a genuinely new concept of platform urbanism that recognises key qualities of platforms and cities, retaining a critical focus without sacrificing progressive possibility.

We aim to tackle platforms as an issue of pressing importance to urban societies and political economies. The advances in knowledge we seek depend on input from varied fields beyond urban studies, including law, media studies, and geography, philosophy of science, and sociology. To begin to establish a new agenda for urban scholarship on the logics, mechanisms, and political-economic and societal effects of urban platforms, we shall cultivate cross-disciplinary exchange between urbanists and those researching platforms in the aforementioned fields, as well as with reflexive practitioners. The project consists of a 2.5-day workshop at the University of Sheffield, to include plenaries, paper presentations, discussion, and demonstrations of participatory or cooperative platforms. Project outputs shall consist of an agenda-setting journal article and a co-authored edited book to progress conceptual and empirical understanding of urban platforms. Generating these outputs will help to meet our longer-term objectives of establishing an international group of researchers to progress the platform urbanism agenda and to stimulate debate within urban studies and related fields.