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Top1. Introduction
This article discusses the impact of platformization on urban planning. The question is, to what extent we may assume that the emerging platform logic fits with the requirements of urban planning. Let us start by elaborating this issue further.
The obvious starting point is the emergence of platforms as a new model on which the cutting-edge businesses are built. Platformization has started to change the foundations of social organization, most notably in the economy, revolving around social media and sharing platform business model. The claim that we have witnessed a platform revolution in business (Parker et al., 2017), the emergence of a platform society (Nash et al., 2017), and the beginning of the new era called the age of platforms (Simon, 2013; Barns, 2018a), depicts the pervasive impact of platformization on almost every sphere of the contemporary world. The most radical interpretation of this transformation is the hypothesis that platform logic is spreading to various realms of society just like industrial logic did in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The previous point leads us to another facet revolving around the forces or drivers behind the surge of platforms, that of digitalization that has given platform logic an extra-local nature and immense power to reach wide audiences and generate global high value-added processes, as in the cases of social networks such as Facebook, media content-sharing platforms like YouTube, and sharing economy platforms, such as Uber or Airbnb. This is a particularly interesting issue regarding digital urban platforms, as the scalability and network effect associated with digitalization is challenged by the location specific aspects of urban life.
The third element worth a closer look is localness, or more precisely, the question of what is the role of localness and the urban dimension in the utilization of platforms. How the existence of the composite logic of the urban land nexus with private and public interests and their historical interplay actually condition urban planning, design and development, including the emergence and utilization of urban platforms.
And lastly, the fourth layer relating to our question is about urban planning, or more generally, of how the internal and external factors affect cities’ ability to plan and design their structures and functions in terms of the demands of their inner logic and of the need to adjust to contextual changes. Here we can make the relationship of the institutional features of urban planning and the platform logic our focal point. In short, what is the capacity of rising urban platforms to mediate local-global processes and serve strategic urban planning, design and development functions, and what are the conditions for the realization of their potential?
On the basis of the previous discussion the research objective of this article is formulated as follows: How are locally and digitally embedded urban platforms able to serve critical urban planning functions? This overall objective is broken down into four research questions.
- a)
How is platformization – understood here as the widening influence of the logic of the platform economy – changing the preconditions for social organization in the advanced capitalist societies?
- b)
How is digitalization enabling platforms and how does it affect the premises of the establishment and the functioning of urban platforms?
- c)
How are locational and urban dimensions of urban communities conditioning the value creation within digital urban platforms?
- d)
How can digital urban platforms be utilized in urban planning?
There is an obvious lack of research on the above research problem. Relevant research is rare and thematically dispersed, often focusing on narrow themes outside the core issue of the impact of platform logic on urban planning.
The interest in the above research questions is primarily of theoretical nature. The topic discussed here is novel in the sense that it describes phenomenon that has neither become widespread nor matured yet. There is need to theorize about the complex relationships between key analytical categories used in describing this phenomenon, such as platformization, digitalization and local embeddedness as well as their interplay. Thus, this article presents an exploratory institutionally-oriented meso-level analysis of digital urban platforms.