Platform Urbanization, its recent acceleration, and implications on citizenship. The case of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms operating on a global scale (social media, commerce, services, e-government and e-management services) are increasingly critical means for communication, exchange, and daily life, even without a direct use of platforms or connected devices. Their growing ecosystem and locally specific variations increase possibilities for data collection and targeting specific user profiles. Work life has become increasingly dependent on platforms including, for example, Microsoft's power platform, Google cloud, or the Apple iOS system. But also within community services and urban development, platforms are increasingly forming a firm component that may be for submitting taxes, getting health services, reporting suspicious activities in the neighborhood, profiling a political campaign, monitoring energy performances, or providing new employment opportunities. We argue that these processes in fact describe a specific kind of urbanization that is driven and administered through the digital means of platform technologies. This process of platform urbanization imbues every aspect of the urban environment and has experienced an acceleration during the recent pandemic. This contribution introduces the concept of platform urbanization and investigates the implications on citizenship and its digital realm, followed by an attempt to expand its conception. To bolster our argument, we discuss the case of Singapore, where the monitoring and control of the virus spread expedited the nation’s digitization efforts and where platform corollaries of the pandemic were seamlessly incorporated into an increasingly digital urban environment. In what follows, the last section brings about a series of questions addressing an urban digital citizenship scenario within platform urbanization as a space of empowerment, inclusion and participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Platform urbanization
• citizenship
• COVID-19
• Singapore
• Planetary urbanization

1. Introducing Platform Urbanization

The urban realm is increasingly defined by platform infrastructures shifting many modes of interaction and production, of urban governance and identity, to a virtual space (Kitchin 2014). Platform urbanization captures planetary phenomena and their various dimensions, creating heterogeneous conditions within and among national territories. It is creating in itself an uneven geography of power, access and capacities to partake in shaping this process by ‘[blurring] the lines between “makers” and “consumers” of digital content’ (Barns 2020, 37), on the one hand, and creating dependencies of users on the interest of producers on the other. The concept of platform urbanization seizes a new mode of spatial production that is increasingly defining the urban condition as a result. It also aims to contribute to an enriched vocabulary of urbanization processes that is needed to enable urban scholars to better understand empirically and theoretically the plethora of urbanization processes shaping the urban condition today (Schmid et al. 2017). It also changes the way people come together and interact, creating a multidimensional process that is affecting our everyday life and the way our urban environment is perceived and governed including the key actors behind.

Platform urbanization focuses on the processes that constitute the urban and urban life, instigated by platform infrastructures, which propel the digitization of our environment. Platforms, in our definition of platform urbanization, are the infrastructure by which a particular global process increasingly defines everyday life in a physical and spatial way. This includes digital platforms for social media, commerce, government services and work management and ranges from bespoke solutions to global platform ecosystems, such as Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Meta Platforms (facebook). As such, they are also determining ways of defining the political scenario, capital accumulation, urban regulation, and financialization. More precisely, we refer to the ‘institutional logics of platforms in general by considering their technical processes as political technologies’ (Bratton 2015, 19).

1.1. Platform urbanization and platform urbanism

To capture the wide range of implications and their transformative capacities, this contribution looks beyond urban form and platforms as a new form of urbanism (Barns 2014) but at the related processes that are emerging as a result. Platform urbanism engages with the ‘many registers of urban life and experience that platforms act upon’ (Barns 2018), and focuses on capturing new kinds of spaces the digital is creating (Barns 2020). As such, platform urbanism serves as a fruitful inquiry for platform ecosystems and the changing role of data in meaning, significance, and application within cities (Barns 2020a). Platform urbanization on the other hand focuses on the process of urbanization, which defines new standards and protocols of interaction and exchange on a planetary scale, extending beyond the city. They are driven by data without any limitation to specific categories and not confined to specific types of settlement structures. Platform urbanization also changes the way we can express ourselves as individuals (from metoomvmt.org to tiktok.com), how we think of our urban environment (as an intermediator, as an offline version of an online experience), and what we can do to plan, manage, or predict its development (through building information, modeling platforms or digital twins). It also expedites the production and dissemination of information and knowledge as well as new learning experiences (by creating unexplored set of skills and cybernetic urban-systems, as Reijers et al. explore in this issue). We consider platform urbanization as one step in the continuous production of urban nature as a process of ‘social and bio-physical change in which new kinds of spaces are created and destroyed’ (Gandy 2005, 63) including technological networks that give sustenance to the modern city.

1.2. Platform urbanization and smart city narratives

The current discourse on cities that have incorporated platform technologies for entrepreneurial and regulatory purposes focuses largely on ‘the effects of ICT on urban form, processes and modes of living’ (Kitchin 2014, 1) as well as ‘new expectations of network flexibility, demand responsiveness, green growth, new services and connected communities’ (Luque-Ayala, McFarlane, and Marvin 2016). The subject of these discourses, which can be subsumed under the wide label of ‘smart cities’, largely focuses on the technological, governance and human resource dimensions of the urban (Meijer and Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar 2016). Neither, however, do they capture the increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous influence of platforms as a planetary process nor its implications on citizenship. Smart cities hinge on material infrastructures that have propelled the industry of smart technology producers, pursuing a technological solutionism that often dismisses the multilayered implications of their implementation (Calzada 2021; Kitchin 2015). They are embedded in ‘hyper-connected societies that enthusiastically embrace Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a key component of the infrastructure of modern cities’ (Calzada and Cobo 2015, 24). While the definition of smart cities initially focused on ‘(…) the potential of the city as a platform where people could interact and access city services in a range of ways’ (Calzada 2021, 45) it has increasingly been stretched to incorporate manifold definitions of smart cities that are contingent on technological components. Technology is then usually defined as a normatively neutral and strictly functional device, to be applied to several infrastructures, enabling smart grids, healthcare, transportation, mobility and logistics, and governance (Morozov and Bria 2018). From this viewpoint, a city can be considered smart when it has ‘integrated wireless communication platforms’, which enable the interconnection and sharing of information between ‘sensing and actuating devices (…) through a unified framework’ (Hashem et al. 2016, 750). This increasing relevance of information technologies for urban economies raises questions about the spatial dimension of knowledge and ICT technologies and the specific processes of urbanization that informational technologies have undergone (Shelton and Lodato 2019). Within that new spatial dimension, the emerging discourses on platform urbanization ‘captures the specificities of platform materialities beyond smart city formations’ (Leszczynski 2020, 190), and highlight the changing relationship between technology, capital, and cities (Sadowski 2020, 449).

In the context of smart cities, the participation of citizens is usually postulated as the ability to mobilise human capital, sufficient skills, access and usage to digital platforms (Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2011). This understanding of participation suggests the ‘(…) imaginary of a citizen as a subject who is often submissive (if not obedient) and is active only in ways recognized by government policies and programmes’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020, 73). Furthermore, the concept of smart cities always captures a particular urban condition that is generated through technologies, rather than capturing a process of urban transformation. Latter is our aim with the introduction of platform urbanization. The concept aims at a holistic description of a process affecting the urban and its material and immaterial dimensions, including the regulatory and institutional sphere; the physical environment and modes in which it is produced; as well as social and political aspects defining citizenship.

1.3. Dimensions of platform urbanization

Our socio-political theorization of platform urbanization neither focuses on its modus operandi or physical constellation, nor its technical and specific structure. Rather, we are concerned with the planetary as well as geographically specific implications of platforms on our urban environment and citizenship in particular. To generate a productive exploration, we therefore suggest thinking about platforms as a capacity to drive and transform the political and social urban landscape that we will focus on in this contribution.

For the analysis of platform-driven urban processes, we focus on three dimensions deployed throughout the article and framing the Singapore case-study: firstly, the urban environment in its material and immaterial dimension; secondly, urban governance and means of regulation and control; and lastly citizenship and related rights, duties, practices and modes of participation (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Theoretical dimensions of platform urbanization.

Urban Environment: Platform urbanization processes engender a new relationship between people and their urban environment by way of introducing various kinds of digital interfaces and sensors linking the two. Furthermore, they provide a new, digital urban realm for action as well as control. The digital urban realm and its relationship to the urban is not only one of acceleration and augmentation but also one of competition and contestation. The urban space is subsequently increasingly bereaved of some of its core functions that are shifting to the digital realm while others are being lost entirely.

Urban Governance: Platform urbanization is a conceptual tool to further a dialogue between technological, social, political and economic dimensions. It captures modes of policy making and implementation, urban planning models as well as urban life, which, together, have brought about a shift in citizenship practices. In a process of dematerialization, abstraction and disassociation, platform urbanization implies a form of governance that is introducing new techno-politics of data (Calzada 2021). As a result, the urban becomes a new techno-political arena where the individual is a site for data collection as well as a node of flows of information, knowledge and expertise (Foley and Miller 2020) and urban governance a matter of managing and policing administrative procedures (Swyngedouw 2019) as well as urban life by itself.

Citizenship: While citizens are often involved in providing responses or reactions to practical issues of platform infrastructures, they are, however, seldom included in the actual change of the underlying political rationale (implemented through platforms). The increasing relevance of platforms for the production of urban spaces therefore raises questions about the dissemination and exchange of knowledge (Bauriedl and Strüver 2020) and the specific processes of urbanization that platforms and their technologies are promoting (Shaw and Graham 2017). Individual skill sets are no longer unique but feed processes of algorithmic reorganization and augmentation of data aggregation. This entails a non-articulate form of exploitation of the individual value and, as a result, a ‘deprivation’ of individual skills. This also includes new capacities for individualized influence (Leszczynski 2020, 193) but at the same time, it is rendered by dispossession of individual voices, antagonistic subjectivation (Cuppini, Frapporti, and Pirone 2015), and restricted access and user capacities.

2. Platform urbanization and the pandemic accelerator

Platform urbanization has experienced a worldwide acceleration during the global pandemic starting in 2020 and the subsequent lockdown. During this pandemic, platform technologies were introduced in large numbers by national governments to monitor ‘safe distancing’ interaction in a variety of realms (work, commerce, education, culture, etc.), including people’s movement and the spread of the virus itself (Levy and Stewart 2021). In the realm of work, commerce and education in particular, platform services have exponentially grown, as, for example, the drastic increase of annual zoom meeting minutes from 79 billion in the second quarter of 2020 to 3.3 trillion in the third quarter of 2021 shows (https://backlinko.com/zoom-users), or the growth of e-commerce in 2021 (UNCTAD 2021). During their varying periods of lockdown, 190 countries have faced complete or partial closures of their physical educational institutions and as a result, more than 1.7 billion students have been affected by a shift to online teaching (https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/edutech/brief/lessons-for-education-during-covid-19-crisis). From an educational perspective, COVID-19 thus implies more than a disruption that needs to be addressed with digital learning models offered by platforms; it is also an opportunity to query and debate the relevance and appropriateness of their globalized pedagogical model (Adeela and Ayaz Naseem 2021; Fischman and Estellés 2020). In addition, numerous new platforms have become available to track and report one’s own health condition or vaccination status. Depending on the regionally specific IT infrastructures in place, such platforms had to be developed from scratch, a process that was often accompanied with vocal public debates around concerns of privacy and a growing state surveillance (Storeng and de Bengy Puyvallée 2021).

2.1. Controlling the urban environment

Authorities at an urban, regional, national or supranational levels have adopted ways to control, surveille, and monitor through platforms and IT infrastructures. This has mobilized questions regarding inequality, data sovereignty, and the authorization of policy making (Katapally 2020). These practices of platforms-driven surveillance vary from particular ways of citizenship practice (as elaborated by Reijers et al. in this issue for the case of China) to inflating processes of digitized administrative services to map individual access and ways of usage (frequency, timing, scopes). In other cases, the same surveillance practices were created as an expansion of existing platform ecosystems, leveraging widespread digital literacy and compliance with data transparency. The latter is the case for Singapore, where necessary means to allow for a safe distancing interaction and monitoring of health conditions was swiftly implemented at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

The relation between the global pandemic and its implications on the urban realm reflects, in fact, the close entanglement of urban transformation and urban health (Gandy 2004). The modern city around the mid-19th century in Europe was the result of epidemiological advances and the necessary engineering responses to creating a healthy urban environment. Efforts to ensure an urban environment that allows a concentration of people to live and interact without compromising human health has historically always been closely tied to physical urban transformation, as we can see from the restructuring of Paris, London or Berlin in the second half of the 19th century. These urban restructuring processes served as means to maintain and/or control urban health with ‘combined processes of political-ecological transformation and socio-cultural reconstruction’ (Swyngedouw 2005, 22).

In light of this recent accelerated expansion of platform urbanization and a growing dependence on its infrastructures that perform extraction and execution operations (Zuboff 2019) we argue, that these processes of urban (re-)production demand a thorough investigation and understanding of their contingencies and corollaries in particular with regards to citizenship. With the introduction of platform urbanization we aim to address its growing influence on the nature, structure and production of the city and the practice of citizenship and capture its multidimensionality as well as pervasive character affecting every possible territory, and individual.

2.2. The techno-political rise

Regarding its territorial dimension, platform urbanization advances regardless of the existence of the nation-state, as many of its infrastructures extend seamlessly beyond any boundaries on the ground. More so, and as elaborated by Calzada as well as Bustard and Calzada in this issue, it propels us to consider a rescaling of the nation-state entity in the context of new citizenship regimes expedited through digitization and called for by new possibilities for democratic accountability. Processes of platform urbanization actuate and consolidate networks of global flows, extending conveniences of communication and mobility but also of traces left. Platform urbanization also coincides and enables a true techno-political scenario. Within such a techno-political scenario, political practice becomes a matter of governance, managing and policing administrative procedures (Swyngedouw 2019), a phenomenon that has become particularly eminent during the recent pandemic. Further, the proliferation of platforms, of new modes of urban production, and the re-conceptualization of political, economic and social interaction reifies a techno-political framework (Calzada 2021) which compels to revisit the concept of citizenship and to extend it (Hanakata and Bignami 2021). This requires a new theoretical approach to include on one hand a new citizenship taxonomy (see Calzada; Reijers et al.; Bustard & Calzada in this issue) and on other hand a conceptual grounding (see Kylasam Iyer & Kuriakose; Antenucci & Tomasello in this issue) of the heterogeneous regimes of urban digital citizenship. The idea of a techno-political scenario is particularly appropriated in the contexts of the urban environment impacted by COVID-19, where platformization processes, and technology in a wider sense, constitute, substantiate, and enact political aims, repositioning the city and opening a discussion about urban techno-politics (Foley and Miller 2020). Such a techno-political environment uncovers relationships that are often hidden behind complex arrangements of platform infrastructure, actors and organizations (see Calzada in this issue). This development, however, is not determined by the technology itself, but by those who create, deploy and control its use. While platforms provide the structures that enable and connect goods and services (Barns 2018; Leszczynski 2020), their application requires specialized knowledge and access to resources. A significant trait characterizing processes of platform urbanization therefore, is a centralized mode of control and the rapid development of algorithmic driven management in urban environments that increased at the end of the second decade of the 21st century (Huws 2017). Despite the opportunities for technology cooptation as well as platform-enabled co-creation, and a certain liberation of participation through open sourcing of data and tools, impact at a large scale remains dependent on access to resources and the capacities to obtain and direct data as well as users. A centralized control is also dominant in many smart city projects (Hemment and Townsend 2013), conceived as a ‘top-down, master planned vision shaped around the needs of suppliers rather than the needs of citizens’ (Calzada and Cobo 2015, 30) and also discussed as attempts of ‘smart urbanism’ (Sadowski and Bendor 2019; Wiig and Wyly 2016). This can be illustrated with recent greenfield developments which have been called out as the new platform city: major examples include the Pungol Digital District in Singapore, by JTC; Toronto Tomorrow in Canada, by Alphabet’s Sidewalk Lab (project cancelled); Woven City in Japan, by Toyota; NEOM in Saudi Arabia, by NEOM Company; Dholera in India, by a large conglomerate of public and private stakeholders. All these projects are relying on customized or all-in-one offered solutions by industry partners, such as Horizon Digital Platform (Huawei); Future X Cities Solutions (Nokia); or entirely virtual, platform-based projects such as Zuckerberg (Facebook). All of them are driven by or in collaboration with major digital market actors, and they provide smart infrastructures that are promoted as neutral facilitators for a more efficient living (Leszczynski 2020, 192). They focus on pragmatic and functional aspects of a top-down techno-utopia, such as the one of the sharing economy (Džankić 2018), and less on the social and political consequences including questions of citizenship, labour, mobility and the overarching techno-political framework that are all, however, an integral part of platform urbanization.

The following section explores the case of Singapore as a site for deeply entrenched and pervasive platform practices considering the recent pandemic. Drawing from that case study, we will investigate the implications on citizenship and the need to expand its contemporary understanding.

3. The changing digital urban landscape of Singapore

Singapore is a 720 square kilometer large island and city state with 5.7 million inhabitants. With that, it has one of the world’s highest population densities (The Straits Times 2018) and it has increased its population size since its independence 1965 by more than 300%, with every square meter of its terrestrial and maritime territory urbanized. It experienced a GDP growth of $517 per capita in 1965 to $65,641 in 2019 (The World Bank 2021) with an economy largely based on export of electronics, oil refining and financial services (The Commonwealth.org n.d.). Singapore presents an example where the government has implemented very aggressive and effective measures in the attempt to fight the spread of COVID-19 (Abdullah and Kim 2020; Das and Zhang 2021). It built its expertise on experiences over the past decades with previous pandemics in the region, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003 or the H1N1 in 2009 but also in light of its particular vulnerability with a highly globally connected population and its function as an international exchange and trading hub. Its response strategy is embedded in a ‘unique geographical, technological and policy landscape’ (Chang and Das 2020) which has been established since its independence. Today, Singapore ranks among the countries with the highest percentage of households with internet access with 91% after the Republic of Korea and Japan (The World Bank 2016) and it has the highest fixed broadband speed in a global comparison (Speedtest 2019).

3.1. Singapore´s response during the pandemic

In its response to the pandemic, the Singapore Government deployed various technological means and services ranging from a nationwide, interlinked health status monitoring system of every citizen, to contact tracing apps. This approach has to be situated in the context of government-driven digitization efforts since the 1980s and the continuous fostering of knowledge and information in an otherwise resource-deprived country. Singapore released its first National Computerization Masterplan in 1981 and declared its aim to become an ‘intelligent island’ in 1992. Today, the government continues to pursue this agenda under the Smart Nation initiative that was established in 2014 and aims at improving people’s lives by creating more opportunities through ICT (Lee 2014). Since 2010, the government has made particular efforts to foster and encourage technology start-ups to sustain the nationwide platform-driven industry by providing seed funding and special mentoring programs (Chua 2019). More importantly, however, government officials started to call for a more aggressive, techno-entrepreneurial attitude among the younger generation in order not to fall under the wheels of the technological disruption taking place but be the one leading this shift (Lee 2016). This has created new ‘national sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 120) and a portrait of Singapore as a place ‘thriving by creating newer, more technologically innovative and hence, more commercially profitable enterprises’ (Chua 2019, 532). It also includes a redefinition of citizenship in terms of an identity from a hard working, skilled and obedient worker to a tech savvy techno-entrepreneur, contributing to Singapore’s global success narrative (Quah 2018) in this time and age.

In order to further develop the nation’s digitization and platform ecosystem, the Singapore Government has created a broad network of agencies, private companies and funding schemes. Supporting the Smart Nation initiative, research institutions (including the University of Singapore, the Nanyang Technological University and A*STAR, the government” Agency for Science, Technology and Research) form tight collaborations with technoparks hosting startup clusters (Chang and Das 2020) as well as other start-up clusters directly hosted by the government’s agency for industrial estates, the JTC Corporation. To fund the various platform-related efforts, SG Innovate, a private company founded in 2017 and owned by the Singapore Government to support technological innovation and start-ups, set aside US$250 Million in 2020 over three years for tech focused companies alone (SG Innovate 2020). Another program coined as ‘SMEs Go Digital’ aims to help SMEs specifically to use ‘digital technologies and build stronger digital capabilities to seize growth opportunities in the digital economy’ (Infocomm Media Development Authority 2021). This also includes the growing number of e-commerce platforms on the island. To illustrate this shift, we may look at the case of food delivery services in Singapore for which an increasing demand was registered since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Street food stalls and eating outside forms an important part of everyday life in Singapore (Henderson et al. 2012). The 5943 government licensed food stalls (Data.gov.sg 2021) form an important element in the urban landscape and central space for social gathering and exchange. The closure of these facilities during lockdown and people being bound to home drastically increased the demand for food delivery by 35.7% in 2020 (Statistica 2020). Enabling these hawker stalls and other F&B services to go online was part of the SME support program by the local government through e-commerce subsidy schemes (Tjendro 2021). Furthermore, Singapore Enterprise, a government statutory board to support SMEs, is subsidizing food delivery platforms, such as Grab Food, Deliveroo and FoodPanda to reduce additional costs particularly for smaller establishments (Tjendro 2021). As a corollary, gathering places for eating and central places of congregation have become deserted and fenced off. Scenes of zoning could be witnessed in other areas of the city, where the size of groups and the number of total people allowed was always strictly monitored through the digital check-in station, placed at the entrance of every eatery, shop or office, which demanded visitors to check in via their smartphones and the government’s digital passport app in the beginning and since May 2021 the compulsory TraceTogether app, the world’s first COVID-19 contact tracing application (Levy and Stewart 2021). The Bluetooth-based app developed by the Government Technology Agency is also automatically informed of people’s vaccination status from the Ministry of Health and shows any recent COVID-19 test results, information that every visitor is requested to provide upon entering any mall, food and beverage establishments.

Together, the various initiatives and tools present a very comprehensive and targeted effort towards the clear goal of sustaining Singapore’s urban economy and controlling the spread of COVID-19. The welter of different relevant statutory boards and government agencies in charge underpin the government’s central role in directing, monitoring, and funding this process. It presents Singapore as an example of pervasive, government-led platformization efforts that has been gradually built up providing the necessary infrastructures for a pandemic response already in place. In its continuous struggle for economic survival given its limited size and resources and with that its efforts to wield power over its people – and platform users – the Singapore government has been extremely visionary in introducing a socio-technical and techno-political imaginary for the nation and its narrative, determining modes of urban production as well as a specific understanding of urban digital citizenship.

3.2. An advanced platform urbanization scenario

Singapore’s efforts in response to the pandemic and the authoritarian practices with which the government was able to impose the necessary platform infrastructures, as well as a general data obedience among Singapore residents makes Singapore a territory of highly advanced platform urbanization and digital citizenship. Singapore epitomizes a state of platform urbanization that is far ahead in a planetary comparison. While some of these exceptional circumstances pose certain limitations on taking Singapore as a model (Christiaanse, Gasco, and Hanakata 2019), and/or deriving from its case more broadly applicable insights into modes that enable platform urbanization to progress and the ways it is conceded by citizens, it provides a glimpse of possible scenarios of future urban conditions elsewhere.

Within the context of a politically censorious and highly regulated society (Lee 2010) and in a space where digital management, communication and control is so pervasive, the question of digital literacy and access, however, becomes even more critical. Particularly among low-income households, differently abled, and senior citizens, digital literacy remains an issue and its shortcomings have been aggravated during the pandemic when working from home and home based learning became the default. Digital literacy and access to necessary devices became a decisive factor that ultimately increased the digital divide on the island (Ong 2020). With that, the pandemic has exposed the cracks and fault lines caused by perennial issues like inequality and equity in relation to access to technology in Singapore. These need to be urgently addressed in order to keep up with the rapidly expanding process of platform urbanization and the push towards a smart nation.Singapore, being infused by a ‘platform-based infrastructure and economy’ (Leong and Lee 2021), presents an interesting case study to investigate the pervasiveness of platform urbanization penetrating the realm of urban governance and control as much as everyday practices in an interconnected way. It illustrates central aspects of a techno-political scenario, with a governmentality that is highly effective and efficient in the way it is managing its subjects through platform infrastructures. It also allows one to better understand the kinds of urban citizenship that are the prerequisite and or result of platform urbanization processes, and the unevenness, with which it is unfolding over any socio-economic dimension of the urban.

4. Implications on citizenship

The concept of platform urbanization, as outlined in section 1 and 2, is based on an understanding of the urban as a dynamic, material and immaterial space where the pervasive use of platforms influences the modes of production of the urban itself. The making of the urban can therefore be described as a techno-political process (Calzada 2021; Foley and Miller 2020), which requires a closer look to understand the peculiar linkages between citizenship and technology (Dumbrava 2017). In this process, platforms are becoming a new ‘boundary condition’ for citizenship and space (beside and beyond the nation-state) in a techno-political condition, within which the individual and collectivity must re-learn to position themselves (see Calzada in this issue). This techno-political process merges digital and political, personal and collective arenas, and with that defines the way in which platforms infuse and unfold within the urban. Grasping this process also requires an understanding of how citizenship is being continuously re‐organized by platforms in urban spaces: through a complex interplay of socio-political variables that shape offline and online practices, including distortions of political representations (Milan 2018). In effect, a distinction between online space and platform interaction and physical offline space and human interaction continues to exist (Isin and Ruppert 2020). The line between the two, however, remains dynamic. To capture this line requires delving into the essence and modes of production, control, use and effects of data, softwares (including artificial intelligence), digital processes (for example, cloud computing or blockchain), hardware, and digital infrastructures.

The case of Singapore allows to substantiate the theorization of platform urbanization, since this city-state embodies both a pandemic citizenship scenario (Calzada in this issue) and an example of governance aimed at a truly platform-driven urban production with a techno-optimistic understanding of digital citizens. Singapore corroborates a vision of the urban where – facilitated by the local government and through the power and control over data – platforms are able to enter cities’ ‘control rooms’ (Söderström and Mermet 2020). Even before the pandemic, Singapore envisioned a city-state with advanced digital infrastructure for communication and service provision that was accepted and supported by an educated and technologically savvy workforce and urban dwellers.

As the case of Singapore elucidates, the city is a techno-political environment of platform urbanization where various layers and actors interplay within a territory of urban digital citizenship. In the case of nation-states creating and controlling platform ecosystems, their incentives sometimes clash with global tech market players that design, produce, sell and profit from platforms. On the one hand, nation-states in some cases, try to support and exploit market players, since technological development is also a matter of political choices and consensus (Cardullo 2021). Platform providers, on the other hand, competing much alike nation-states, often demand national support and protection, in spite of their global-scale operations and their substantial detachment from nationally bound rules and norms. Subsequently, there are many intersections between nation-states and platform providers in the realm of politics, economy and technology. These intersections also highlight the necessity to find an adequate space (both material and immaterial) within the urban realm ‘able to exploit the opportunities or cope with the fallout of tectonic movements and frictions’ (Minas 2020, 66). In this complex techno-political scenario, there is a particular kind of political leverage inherent (including the power to decide on data, coalesce rule-making, etc.) that is unattainable for individual citizens. Benjamin Bratton´s (2015) notion of ‘platform sovereignty’ corroborates the emergence of techno-political environments. His notion is a particularly influential instance of this trend, and substantiates our viewpoint by investigating platforms from a geopolitical angle. Bratton suggests that platforms not only engender a political scenario infused by technological layers, but he also observes that platforms themselves are gradually becoming actors in this new environment claiming agency and taking political actions that have consequences. Within such a techno-political scenario, citizenship remains a dynamic parameter and to grasp it requires a broader and more complex political framework. Such a framework rests on social rights and redistribution of urban resources (Cardullo 2021). In fact, if we simply refer to techno-political ecosystems as digital platforms, we lose sight of a complex situation. As platforms leverage artificial intelligent (AI) applications to improve their actions and ecosystem, they further fortify the functional superiority of their services. This makes platforms no longer mere infrastructures for online shopping, or contact tracing to limit pandemic spread but it makes them politically powerful tools. These are yielded by platform companies that emerge with a kind of ‘functional sovereignty’ (Pasquale 2017), which may indeed threaten the logic of territorial sovereignty associated with that of the nation-state.

In such a multifaceted and intricate present, where analog political processes are crossed and inflated by digital politics, a certain level of ‘sovereignty’ on both sides seems necessary to foster democracy, equality and a balance in (digital) citizenship. In other terms, we are confronted with a scenario where institutional sovereignty at multiple levels (urban, nation-states and supra-national), big-tech companies, and economic forces deeply affect and continuously challenge the notion of citizenship. This is due to an imbalance:, on the one hand, organizers and providers of this scenario are private oligopolies, which are built on technical and restricted know-how, creating growth as well as deprivation, wealth and exploitation. On the other hand, users and supposedly digital citizens are often ill-informed regarding the platform ecosystem they navigate through on a daily basis, voluntarily or not. Imbalances like this one are inherent in all ‘technological turns’ (Tomasello 2022) and present a profound and game-changing technological step. This is the case despite the fact that citizens are dependent on technologies to participate in today’s digital society, and require access to digital information to make informed social, political, cultural, and economic decisions (Oyedemi 2015). In other words, online spaces should be conceived as digitally mediated inter-relational spaces where citizens perform political and social co-constructed citizenship practices (Quodling 2016). The case of Singapore shows, however, that this does not come by itself. Such practices require a deliberate intervention, activation, and participation from the bottom. The role of the pandemic, in Singapore’s case, plays a critical role, since it furthered platform urbanization processes away from such practices of co-construction.

4.1. Citizenship framed in the urban digital environment

The current techno-political scenario of platform urbanization has disrupted conventional politics based on nation-states and, further, is creating new kinds of politics without precedence. Platforms have given rise to new spaces and subjects of politics, highlighting how ‘historical’ assemblages of territory, authority and rights linked to nation-states have been re-settled and re-organized (Sassen 2006, 2016). Furthermore, these re-assemblages have created the need to extend the concept of citizenship (Hanakata and Bignami 2021) in three main directions: (a) regarding inclusion of many politically, linguistically, technologically and culturally different forms of interaction; (b) in consideration of different typologies of citizen communities: urban, international and, increasingly, platform based; and c) with respect to a validity beyond the nation-state as a physical anchorage and beyond a formal conceptual contour. These three directions are also derived from the fact that urban citizenship started to be discussed more vigorously at the beginning of the 21st Century, when the nation-state was no longer sufficient to address and collocate the notion of citizenship (Sassen 2002; Bauböck and Orgad 2020). The urban environment seems a suitable locus where additional forms of citizenship can be co-constructed, negotiated and set apart from a collectivity aiming towards a ‘performative’ interpretation of citizenship (Isin 2017). This urban citizenship reflects the political capacity and right to shape the city in presence of different regimes of citizenship (Kylasam Iyer 2019), including the digital. This, however, also implies the need for a further enrichment of the citizenship concept, but also poses the question on how a socio-political debate is able to include citizens and their capacity to co-operate, to participate in the making of the urban, and to mark a presence (Ennaji et al. 2021) both offline and online. In light of the above depicted urban citizenship, what is now at stake are forms of political mediation that are necessary to participate in a platform-driven urban environment. This is not a technical matter, but rather a political and governmental concern, since it pertains to finding a space that allows both, online and offline urban space to conjoin. In these terms, online spaces can be thought of as platform-mediated interrelational spaces where citizens co-create and perform citizenship practices (Atif and Chou 2018). The digital, therefore, may be conceptualized as a further extension of platform-mediated citizenship.

Platform urbanization processes, as mentioned above, are characterized by disjunctions between a formal notion of citizenship in terms of deservingness and the practical realities of how citizenship is embodied. Such disjunctions create instances in which trade-offs must be accepted (e.g. less freedom and more security; less responsibility and more perceived comfort, etc.) which often result in comfortable but exclusive forms of citizenship (limited for some groups, for some neighborhoods, for some surveilled behaviors, for some economic conditions, for some markets, for some services, for some forms of participations, etc.). COVID-19 has further aggravated such disjunctions. As a corollary already existing forms of ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012) are increased, and new ones are being created, including new rules and bans that are generating shifting borders that offer latitudes for the few and restrictions for the many (Shachar 2020). Such an unbalanced techno-political scenario deeply affects urban citizenship, where an essential role is played by the single citizen as the nexus between individual and collectivity. Such nexus needs to be defined at the urban level, since it postulates a practical ground of fruition (Hanakata and Bignami 2021).

4.2. Evidence from Singapore on urban (digital) citizenship

Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, platform-driven urban production has been experiencing a significant increase in intensity and expansion: platforms have not only been facilitating social and economic life in times of physical contact restrictions but have resignified urban governance by creating additional political relations among people, institutions and global economic flows. The social and political narrative of a ‘techno-entrepreneurialism’ like in Singapore is indicative of governments’ efforts to promote tech business experimentalism (Laurent et al. 2021). Such top-down efforts are in this specific case modifying established notions of citizenship and nationhood (Chua 2019), and are penetrating almost every aspect of urban politics. The citizenry of Singapore is now imagined in a way that presupposes a different kind of self-understanding and relationship among citizens. The new narrative of national survival demands citizens to regard one another less as fellow bearers of a single socio-economic endeavour but as disparate and contending business ventures (Chua 2019). This makes an imbalance in the process of platform urbanization between organizers and providers and supposed digital citizens evident in Singapore. The persistence of a differentiation and separation between online and offline seems worthless in claiming political, social, digital, or data justice in Singapore, since citizens act through platforms, and create a continuous space of action that should be co-constructed in a cooperative way. But the conception of a digital savvy citizen can thus be seen to not only promote and encourage innovation but also to reimagine the urban realm. It calls on citizens to understand Singapore as a different kind of social, political and economic entity, which institutes a different kind of relation among its citizens. Instead of seeing the urban as a collectivity, whose members are bound together by their common investment in a single endeavour, this urban citizenship regime asks citizens to adopt a more individualistic conception of their efforts and outcomes. It retracts the collectivist promise that the activity of the individual citizen will be rewarded by the improved well-being of the urban realm as a whole and replaces it with the vision of citizens who are continuously engaged in their own, disparate business ventures, and whose ‘levels of wealth and well-being are thus continuously rising above and falling below one another’s’ (Chua 2019:541).

The case of Singapore therefore demonstrates the challenges to define a space for digital citizenship that allows for a co-creation in light of the ubiquitous presence of platforms, both online and offline. As such, it illustrates how the concentrated urban condition (opposed to extended urban territories) precedes a global monoculture with platformized citizens. The border between the physical and the digital in this urban scenario is blurred. Digital citizenship, no longer a link between political and social dimensions, is situated in a material and immaterial space. Such a space slowly but steadily tends to mutate into a technological and political development, which blurs the meaning of citizenship, and the significance of its co-construction and participation. The spread of platforms accelerated by the pandemic has further challenged a sense of collectivity in Singapore by replacing physical gathering places for a culturally diverse community that is based on shared norms and interests located in digitally mediated spaces. As platforms are opening up new spaces for citizenship, new ways of being and enacting citizenship have been made possible. However, Singapore demonstrates that differentiating digital citizenship from citizenship is questionable, since online digital spaces are anchored in offline material environments that are mediated through platforms and digital technologies (McCosker, Vivienne, and Johns 2016). This contribution has investigated the link between the urban environment and governance by broaching (digital) citizenship issues. The concept of platform urbanization focuses on the process that emerges through this particular juxtaposition and emphasizes the complex standing of citizens in a digital and political space. It addresses the changing modes of production of urban space and an extended definition of citizenship. They are the results of ubiquitous platform infrastructures, a growing regulation of collective action, communication and exchange through platforms, accelerated by COVID-19, and an outdated notion of citizenship framed only by a nation-state paradigm. It is worthwhile stressing that the aim of this contribution is less to investigate the operational modes of platform infrastructures, their formation and defining characters. Rather, we aim to examine the multilayered implications of platform urbanization on the urban realm and digital citizenship.

Moving forward, we believe that the conception of platform urbanization theorized as a process, in dialogue with concepts like smart city and platform urbanism in particular, can facilitate an understanding of the urban as more than an intermediator of user requests, data collection and provision. It can also further an understanding of the urban as a site of continuous transformation, collaboration and co-construction, and as a space in which urban society is more than the result of a nation-state’s socio-technical imaginaries. Crafted by capacitated and foresightful governments, platforms, firstly, need to be leveraged on as skill-enabler rather than abstract structures that dispossess the individual of skills. Considering digital citizenship not just from a technological angle but as a complex assemblage emphasizes again the pronounced political dimension of platform urbanization. Digital citizenship means enabling cooperation and co-construction of urban material and immaterial space, while fostering technical and digital literacy. The latter is necessary to avoid becoming a casualty of technological disruption but partaking in, and co-directing the shift that is taking place (Bignami and Hanakata 2022). This postulates a platform urbanization process that is informed and driven by the aim of civic value generation, not just in the interest of urban citizens, but in the interest of a sustainable and lasting transformation of our urban environment. This is a complex endeavor that demands more than optimized algorithms but a comprehensive approach including new modes of governance, and an extended conception of citizenship, succinctly captured by Kitchin when he claims that ‘technologies need to be complemented with a range of other instruments, policies and practices that are sensitive to the diverse ways in which cities are structured’ (2014:10).

Secondly, we need to ensure that platform urbanization also allows for what Calzada and Cobo refer to as ‘unplugging’ in regard to the smart city paradigm, notably, a corrective from the corporate, top-down direction of the smart city mainstream in favor of a transition towards the critical use of digital technologies enabling dimensions that can contribute to ‘(…) deconstruct our understanding of a smart city (…)’ (2021:17) in favor of a more democratic form of citizenship.

Thirdly, by bringing the content of a ‘new’ urban citizenship scenario to the centre of concern, we try to avoid a deterministic and techno-optimistic viewpoint of platforms and the conception of citizens as passive data subjects. Instead, we attend to how political subjectivities are always acting in relation to techno-political arrangements and technological urban infrastructures. We also shun libertarian analyses of platforms and their positivist assertions of sovereign subjects. We believe, however, that a focus on the capacities of participating, interacting and performing citizenship (Isin 2017) in the context of platform urbanization, rather than on how we are being controlled and potentially deprived by it, opens up a productive way forward in leveraging inherent possibilities. We contend that if we shift our focus from how we are being ‘controlled’ to the complexities of participating, interacting and performing citizenship acts (Isin 2017) by foregrounding citizen subjects not in isolation but in relation to the arrangements of which they are a part of, we can identify paths of being not just obedient digital citizens but also ‘subversive’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020).

Fourth, with this contribution, we also intended to respond to Ananya Roy’s call (Roy 2009, 820) noting that ‘it is time to blast open theoretical geographies, to produce a new set of concepts in the crucible of a new repertoire of cities’, we introduce platform urbanization in the hope to contribute to a global and at the same time more differentiated vocabulary of urbanization (Schmid et al. 2017). The conceptual introduction of platform urbanization aims to contribute to a more nuanced vocabulary of planetary urbanization (Schmid and Brenner 2011; Brenner 2018) by focusing on one particular aspect in which urbanization progresses. We hope this is understood as an invitation to debate and further an exploration in light of a highly dynamic urban condition.

Lastly, the concept of platform urbanization shows the ambivalence in the tension between the historical situation and embodiment of platforms’ attractive power as an immaterial political arena on the one hand, and its openness to be co-constructed on the other hand. This ambivalence emerges with new forms of polarization between authentic and inauthentic forms of being-together across and beyond physical boundaries and legal fixations. Polarizations between individual and collective spaces of action are being instrumentalized for political and economic interests. Considering the internet as a truly ‘global institution’ (Mathiason 2008), platforms are operative tools and offer reproductive approaches to access to power. Simultaneously, they enable knowledge production, which, in platform urbanization processes is constituted through the datafication of actions (Isin and Ruppert 2020) and the making of both data subjects and people as a materialization of data. The result is not always some kind of apparent freedom in the platform world but different kinds of platform warfare. Using the concept of citizenship based on its ‘modern’ definition in the physical world and translating it into the context of platform environments might lead to new elements of digital citizenship (see Antenucci and Tomasello in this issue), but it also bears the risk of creating a homogenized techno-political society. We hope to contribute to an understanding of what it might mean to speak of an augmented urban experience (see Reijers et al.; Kylasam Iyer & Kuriakose in this issue), of digital citizenship regimes in times of post-pandemic (see Calzada in this issue), and platform urbanization for that matter, and what these concepts entail for extant discussions of situated cities and citizenship alike.

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Notes on contributors

Filippo Bignami

Naomi C. Hanakata is an Assistant Professor for Architecture and Urban Design at the College of Design and Engineering at the National University of Singapore. She is also Co-Founder and consultant of HANAKATA, a research and planning practice based in Singapore.

Her work focuses on the research and development of adaptive planning strategies to deal with uncertainties and dynamic urban futures in urban development and planning. Addressing challenges of planetary urbanization, decarbonization, decentralization of resources and digitalization in planning practice are central in her work towards sustainable and equitable urban futures. She has practiced in Zurich, Tokyo, New York and Singapore as planner and consultant. She has taught at Rice University and ETH Zurich and was educated at ETH, Tokyo University and LSE, and holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich.

Filippo Bignami holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences. He is a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland, Department of Economics, Health and Social Sciences (SUPSI-DEASS), LUCI (Labour, Urbanscape and Citizenship) research area. Among many scientific appointments, he has been external scientific consultant for UN-ILO International Labour Organization and project visiting professor at the Asia-Europe Institute, State University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His main scientific interest and expertise is in citizenship social and political theories and applied studies on citizenship policies and education.