In recent weeks I’ve shared, tweeted and retweeted ever so frequently about the ‘Platform Urbanism’ roundtable that Susan Moore and I edited in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. So much so, that I thought a blog post would have been redundant.

Yet with the dust now more or less settled, I thought I’d point to the roundtable one more time, now that all of the essay and responses have been published by us and our contributors: Lizzie Richardson, Maroš Krivý, Sarah Barns, Matthew Wilson and John Stehlin. As a whole, the roundtable focused on the ‘urbanity’ of digitally-mediated, cloud-based, data-driven platforms. In other words, it considered how the urban shows up in, through and as platforms; and at the same time, how platforms show up in, through and as urban.

I have linked below each of initial short essays – which respond to the roundtable introduction – as well as the response essays, in which the contributors engaged with one another and elaborated on their ideas. I was really pleased with the high quality of the contributions, and I would also say, if somewhat immodestly, pleased too with the concluding essay that Susan and I wrote as guest editors.

Platform Urbanism: An Introduction (23 October 2018)
In this roundtable introduction, Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore introduce the main thematic issues and questions to be addressed.

Platforms and the Publicness of Urban Markets (24 October 2018)
Lizzie Richardson rethinks our assumptions about digital platforms like Uber and the privatization of public urban space.

Becoming-Platform, the Urban and the City (25 October 2018)
Maroš Krivý presents platforms as coextensive with the late neoliberal smart city, asking both what is the smart city, and also what is the smart city?

We Are All Platform Urbanists Now (26 October 2018)
Sarah Barns argues that a platform urbanism should be more than a focus of academic critique, but also a site for radical appropriations of urban space.

Quantified Self-City-Nation (27 October 2018)
Matthew W. Wilson explores the ways in which platforms enable what bodies might think and do, through the lens of the map and its myriad ‘troubles’.

Urban Platforms, Rent, and the Digital Built Environment (28 October 2018)
John Stehlin argues that the relationships of the urban and the platform are more than empirical: mutually entwined both create landscapes of locational advantage bridging the physical and the digital.

Platforms as Urban Technology? (5 November 2018)
In the first roundtable response, Lizzie Richardson suggests our critiques of platforms should be set within an historical and genealogical analysis of urban technologies.

We Are All Platform Urbanists, But Not All in the Same Way (6 November 2018)
Maroš Krivý responds by suggesting that if we are all platform urbanists, we need to distinguish between those in a position to design platforms, and those compelled to be platform users.

Platform Urbanism Rejoinder: Why now? What now? (7 November 2018)
Sarah Barns responds by arguing that we should not reduce our understanding of platform urbanism to the simple extraction of capital, but should also conceive of platforms as valued social ecosystems that facilitate everyday urban interventions.

On the Slippages in Platform Urbanisms (8 November 2018)
Matthew Wilson argues that, as a form of “self-city-nation,” platform urbanisms enable slippages between the self and outside organizing forces that expand logics of quantification.

“Highest and Best Use” from the Plan to the Platform (9 November 2018)
For the penultimate response of the roundtable, John Stehlin considers the historical resonances and specificity of platform urbanism.

The Horizons of Platformed Urban Politics (10 November 2018)
In this wrap up to the Platform Urbanism roundtable, Scott Rodgers and Susan Moore argue that the horizons of a platformed urban politics should entail critical engagement and practice.