The chapter critically examines platform urbanism and explores possible democratic interventions aimed at enhancing technical citizenship.The evolving concept of 'platform urbanism' highlights market-driven efficiencies within the smart cities discourse and the pervasive influence of corporate-owned infrastructures, applications, and services that datafy, commodify and reshape interactions with urban spaces.Adopting a socio-technical perspective, the chapter interrogates current imaginaries of platform urbanism and proposes a reconceptualization that foregrounds a citizeninformed, rights-based approach rooted in meaningful participation and empowerment.Integrating insights from media and communication studies, platform studies, urban geography, and the critical constructivism of technology, the chapter draws on ongoing research across Europe to reimagine platform urbanism through civic agency and rights assertion. IntroductionThis introductory overview chapter sets the scene for the final part of the handbook, and presents several critical perspectives on platform urbanism and examples of democratic interventions to enhance technical citizenship.As introduced by Caprotti (2025) earlier in this volume), the notion of 'platform urbanism' is still under development but draws our attention to the largely market led imaginaries of efficiency that underpin the smart cities discourse in many parts of the world and the increasing penetration of corporate owned infrastructures, applications and services that are datafying, commodifying and reshaping our interactions with public and private urban spaces.This chapter takes a critical socio-technical perspective on the current imaginaries around platform urbanism and ask if this concept can be (re)conceptualised to enable a citizen-informed and rights-based perspective based on meaningful participation and empowerment.The argument is based on integrating insights from media and communication studies, platform studies, urban geography and critical constructivism of technology and ongoing research in different European countries.What follows firstly explores the different conceptualisations and meanings of 'platforms' and platformisation in the media and communications field and in platform urbanism.These are addressed from a social as well as a technical perspective, examining the ways in which private for-profit platforms constrain and govern the activities of audiences and creators.Next, the chapter outlines the evolving history of citizen rights in relation to platform urbanism, considering the longer history of digital 'urbanism', and its impact on citizens (as workers and consumers) and their rights in the city from a critical geography and socio-spatial perspective.Citizen rights seem to be under threat by both top-down city and corporate policies and bottom-up individual practices which frame them merely as consumers and passive users of urban technologies within the neo-liberal technocratic perspective of smart cities.The third part investigates the potential of participatory methods to create spaces which might enable city inhabitants to (re)gain rights and agency in the design, development, implementation, and usage of datafied urban ecosystems.This section builds on Feenberg's critical theory of technology and his notion of technical citizenship.It elaborates on how public interest values, like data privacy, could be meaningfully embedded in urban platforms and how both normative and practical non-technological interventions might provide space to engage with alternative conceptions, perceptions and practices of spatial platforming.These types of democratic interventions of technical citizenship could lead to alternative forms of platform urbanism that are more inclusive and empowering.The chapter concludes with a discussion on future research possibilities and challenges.
Aphra Kerr (Wed,) studied this question.