Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformations in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge and Everyday Life

This title takes the broadest possible scope to interrogate the emergence of “platform urbanism”, examining how it transforms urban infrastructure, governance, knowledge production, and everyday life, and brings together leading scholars and early-career researchers from across five continents and multiple disciplines.

The volume advances theoretical debates at the leading edge of the intersection between urbanism, governance, and the digital economy, by drawing on a range of empirically detailed cases from which to theorize the multiplicity of forms that platform urbanism takes. It draws international comparisons between urban platforms across sites, with attention to the leading edges of theory and practice and explores the potential for a renewal of civic life, engagement, and participatory governance through “platform cooperativism” and related movements. A breadth of tangible and diverse examples of platform urbanism provides critical insights to scholars examining the interface of digital technologies and urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban knowledge production, and everyday urban life.

The book will be invaluable on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for academics and researchers in these fields, including anthropology, geography, innovation studies, politics, public policy, science and technology studies, sociology, sustainable development, urban planning, and urban studies. It will also appeal to an engaged, academia-adjacent readership, including city and regional planners, policymakers, and third-sector researchers in the realms of citizen engagement, industrial strategy, regeneration, sustainable development, and transport.

Mike Hodson is senior research fellow in the Sustainable Consumption Institute, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester and a member of the Manchester Urban Institute, UK.

Julia Kasmire researches and teaches on how to use new forms of data for social scientists with the UK Data Service and the Cathie Marsh Institute at the University of Manchester, UK.

Andrew McMeekin is Professor of Innovation at the Alliance Manchester Business School and the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI), UK.

John G. Stehlin is Assistant Professor in the department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.

Kevin Ward is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Director of the Manchester Urban Institute at the University of Manchester, UK.