ABSTRACT
Platform urbanism may look toward the high-tech city of the future, but it is also already embedded in—and reliant on—the ubiquitous digital systems permeating the landscape. This chapter theorizes platform urbanism broadly, as the form, function, and governance of cities through digital augmentation. It offers an overview of Lower North Philadelphia’s evolution and present condition to contextualize platform spaces. The chapter discusses the digital infrastructure that underlies platform services and platform spaces’ need for connectivity and information processing, before turning to several key municipal and private platform services directly. It concludes by drawing attention to the unevenness of platform urbanization, arguing that this “era” of the city is marked by a patchwork evolution of ubiquitous connectivity and haphazard service accessibility, compounded by the emergence of exclusive spaces of platform capitalism amid the ongoing disinvestment in neighborhood-based civic infrastructure, services, and spaces.
