A new article, authored by Federico Caprotti and Liu Dong, has been published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. The paper, titled ‘Emerging platform urbanism in China: Reconfigurations of data, citizenship and materialities‘, charts the rise of urban platforms as a new development of the smart city.

From the paper’s introduction: ‘Urban platforms are a key way in which Chinese cities are developing into digitally-enhanced and governed urban areas. We define urban platforms as digital software and hardware-based interfaces that: enable multiple users to interact and multiple (financial and other) transactions to be carried out in real time or near-real time; are centrally focused on leveraging the ability to analyse, manipulate and (sometimes) monetise large flows of digital data; have an effect, or multiple effects, on the way urban life, broadly understood, is conducted. While the smart city, as defined above, is generally focused on a range of data-centred technologies, platform urbanism can be described as an extension of smart urbanism that focuses on digital platforms, in various iterations and typologies, as the key interfaces between growing amounts of urban economic, social, cultural and political data and approaches to processing, managing, operationalising, commodifying and controlling this data.’