Platform Urbanism

Sarah Barns is a digital strategist, policy researcher, practitioner and scholar, with a career-long commitment to cultivating digital public spaces in connected cities. Having worked as policy adviser, digital strategist, urban consultant and creative producer, Sarah completed a PhD on the history of digital urbanism in 2010, using mobile media as a platform for experiential histories of urban activism. In 2014 Sarah was awarded an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project ‘Platform Urbanism: data infomediaries, city labs and open data experiments in urban governance’, based at Western Sydney University and Australia’s national data science agency Data61. Today Sarah develops urban data policy and strategy for a range of public and private organisations, as well as being one half of Sydney digital placemaking practice Esem Projects.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: When digital became platform.- Chapter 3: City reverberations.- Chapter 4: The Uberisation of Everything.- Chapter 5: Making sense of platform intermediation.- Chapter 6: Platform intermediation as recombinatory urban governance.- Chapter 7: Intimate entanglements.- Chapter 8: City bricolage: Imagining the city as a platform.- Chapter 9: Conclusion: Rethinking public value in an era of platform scale.