Urban Platforms: Uploading the City

Part three of our four-part series on cities and technology attempts to grapple with the urban platform, platform urbanism, and the messy consequences of implementing these approaches in cities. Is a city like a platform, or is it a platform? What kinds of data do urban platforms need to operate, and what kinds of subjects do those data make? This episode features excerpts from all six scholars in the series who untangle these threads and challenge the assumptions of tech-driven policies.

Guests 

David Banks, SUNY, University at Albany 

Ryan Burns, University of Calgary 

Ayonna Datta, University College London 

Shannon Mattern, University of Pennsylvania 

Erin McElroy, University of Washington 

John Stehlin, University of North Carolina at Greensboro 

Reading List 

David Banks (2023), The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America

Ryan Burns & Preston Welker (2022), “’Make our communities better through data’: The moral economy of smart city labor,” Big Data & Society 9:1.

Ayona Datta (2020), “The ‘smart safe city’: Gendered time, speed, and violence in the margins of India’s urban age,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110:5.

Ayona Datta & Nabeela Ahmed (2020), “Intimate infrastructures: The rubrics of gendered safety and urban violence in Kerala, India,” Geoforum 110.

Shannon Mattern (2018), “Maintenance and care,” Places.

Erin McElroy (2017), “Mediating the tech boom: Temporalities of displacement and resistance,” Media-N 13:1.

Erin McElroy (2022), “Digital cartographies of displacement: Data as property and property as data,” Acme: An international journal for critical geographies 21:4.

Erin McElroy (2023), “Dis/Possessory data politics: From tenant screening to anti-eviction organizing,” IJURR 47:1.

Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, John Stehlin, Kevin Ward (Eds.) (2020), Urban platforms and the future city: Transformations in infrastructure, governance, knowledge and everyday life. Routledge.

Dillon Mahmoudi, Anthony M. Levenda, John Stehlin (2020), “Political economies of platform urbanism: digital labor and data,” in Urban Platforms and the Future City, pp. 40-52.

John Stehlin & Will Payne (2022), “Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas,” Urban Studies.

Credits 

Many thanks to the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University, the managing editors at Urban Affairs Review, and our guests for sharing their time and insights with us. The show’s music is “Hundred Mile” by K2, courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions. 

Producer and sound engineer: David Weems, Drexel University 

Executive Producer and writer: Emily Holloway, Associate Managing Editor, Urban Affairs Review.  

  • John Stehlin

    A company like Facebook convenes this social world right and then generates revenue based on privileged access to this consumer pool, right, And their data. And so that sounds like a city in a way. It's happening in a different register? The digital world is physical, but it's differently physical. It's happening in cloud servers in in Washington state and you know all of these kind of distributed data infrastructures, but it's still ultimately about having a scarce asset right that you can charge a rent for the use of right. And so that's what made me start to think about, OK, well, there's a really a lot of overlaps between how we think about cities, right?

    Emily Holloway

    Hi, this is Emily Holloway. You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. In this four-part series, we’re taking a wide-angled look at the relationship between cities and technology. This week, we’re exploring the rather fuzzy idea of the platform. This term – much like technology or infrastructure – has been stretched and reworked to accommodate a wide range of uses and contexts. To complicate this even further, scholars have introduced the idea of “platform urbanism” to tease out the conceptual, material, and spatial continuities between the two. John Stehlin, an assistant professor of geography at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, fell into these debates while researching bike sharing programs.

    John Stehlin

    So, my dissertation when I was doing my PhD at Berkeley was focused on really on bicycle infrastructure, but kind of placing that in the context of kind of regional transformations of homework, leisure etc, the gentrification of urban poor neighborhoods, how bicycle and infrastructure kind of intersected with patterns of gentrification. But I was really focusing on the San Francisco Bay area which was sort of slow to kind of slow to get kind of a regional bike share system.

    And as I was doing field work in Austin, the dockless bike share companies and the dockless scooter companies sort of came out of nowhere and in between me planning the research and actually doing it like several months, the whole landscape had completely changed. Like people were like, is this going to be the end of station-based bike share? What do like how do we respond to this, basically now being targeted for disruption, right? Having been a sort of very vanilla, boring service contract that cities that's basically kind of tied up with street furniture advertising, that's sort of where it came from, right to suddenly being the sort of the Wild West of the sort of platforms, right. And so, yeah, that's how I sort of ended up looking at platforms, I think also simply being in the San Francisco Bay area from 2008 to about 2018, you witnessed the sort of the tremendous transformation under the tech economy, right?

    Emily Holloway

    You’ve written on how the urban and the platform share a fundamental logic of rent. Can you talk about that a bit, maybe explain what you mean, first by the term rent, and then how that unfolds in cities and in the platform?

    John Stehlin

    I mean that's a great question. And I feel like I stumbled into that as well, like I was in some panel at the AAG like as a participant or not as a participant, right? Just as a viewer. And I was sort of like, the way that they're describing platform sounds a lot like cities, right? So, to back up, when I'm thinking about rent in the sort of the kind of obviously, within the Marxist tradition, but wider than just ground rent, right, like thinking about the fee that is paid to the owner of a scarce asset for the use of that Asset right? That said, a Marxist can get on board with that, sort of neoclassical can get on board with that, right? But the, you know, rent is kind of the organizing principle of urban accumulation, right? That's where you have these concentration of activities, the concentration of activity, activities, grants, the owners of that Land sort of a class monopoly over the use of land, right? And gives them the power to charge access for the use of that land. In the in that kind of the classic, you know the Adam Smith’s of Trinity formula, right, that Marx borrows, you have labor capital and landlords, right, rentiers, right. And you would see this even in in the San Francisco Bay area where you had you know, tech companies like Twitter, who started to see the owners of land, but really kind of the you know, like single family homeowners, as these kind of enemies who were driving up the costs that they had to pay their workers in order to attract them to the city. Right. So there's an element of the landlords, of the rentiers own the space where activities convene. But don't actually have to do anything to make those activities happen, right? They just charge an access fee, right?

    You could call the New York Stock Exchange one of the original platforms, right, because you have to come there to trade right and then they take a percentage or I don't exactly know how the New York Stock is, is funded specifically especially today but you know it's a trading floor right. The person who owns that floor has privileged access to the revenue, just like the landlord that owns a commercial building charges rent for its use, right? Also, because all the sort of the logic of platforms, especially growing through network effects, right, bringing more and more people and there's a sort of cumulative causation to that, right? It's a kind of a nonlinear growth in users. It's a non-linear growth in potential revenue and it's inherently monopolistic. Right, it's monopolistic competition kind of par excellence.

    Emily Holloway

    Last time, we started digging into smart cities – how they maybe start out or appear to be these kind of utopian projects that can optimize resource efficiency, improve our productivity, maybe mitigate our environmental impacts. One thing that all of our guests brought up, though, is that smart cities depend on a technical infrastructure, or platform, to get these developments up and running. You need something in place to generate, monitor, and interpret all the data that smart cities collect. Where does your work fall across these concepts?

    John Stehlin

    Of the idea of smart cities, where like the, maybe the archetypal smart city idea, maybe like drawing on like Andy Carbon and or something like that is like OK, we're installing this operating system, right? Andres Lucaya Ayala talks about it as like an urban operating system, right? So Microsoft is your vendor and they're going to provide you with this sort of like total urban monitoring platform, right? And so like the user of the platform is the city, right? And it felt like by the time that I was starting to look really intensively at this, there had been a little bit of a shift where it's sort of like, oh, that's like big and expensive, and actually what's been going on is companies like Uber and Airbnb and all these other companies, Yelp, even, you know, are already actually generating tons and tons of data. Instead of getting some big operating system where we're generating all our new data and we're, you know we've got sensor like, everything is kind of networked and sensors, it's like the sensors are already there, right, all the all the that consumers of those services are you have the sensors, right? So if we can use those sensors right? It's basically like the companies are already kind of providing different windows into what's going on in the city, right? So those need to be kind of harnessed. And what that means and kind of drawing from Sarah Barnes here is like that You need to, like give them as much freedom to, like, use this city as a kind of a sandbox as possible. Right. So long as you get the opportunity to benefit from the data in a way that helps you like improve municipal services or something like that, right? That's sort of the bargain with platform urbanism in a way and that that feels different to me from the we're going to install an operating system.

    Emily Holloway

    Speaking of data...during our interview with Ryan Burns, we learned a little bit about Calgary’s Open Data program and how it related to the Smart cities initiative. But we didn’t really get to spend enough time discussing data itself. It’s hard to understand what a platform – or a smart city, really – is constituted by without fully understanding the data that it runs on. Ryan, can you explain this dilemma a bit?

    Ryan Burns

    Yeah, open data are so fascinating to think about because they are partial like any other data set in the entire world. All data are partial. They're abstractions from reality and they capture a very narrow slice of any kind of a phenomenon. Like if you think about what makes me me, for example, you could name a few demographic profile items, male, age, and you know sex or gender, and perhaps height, or places I've lived. You know, you can get pretty deep and with a lot of facts about what makes me. But you're not going to get what makes me me, you're just going to get a lot of things that outwardly manifest in particular ways or latch on to particular ways of knowing the world. You might think my personality is being shaped by where I've lived in my life, and that's very true for a lot of in a lot of ways, just like my age is true or my sex or gender is true. But it's a very, very narrow slice of what makes me me, and same for anyone else, or any place in the world, or any phenomenon like a park. What is a park? What is involved in making a park a park? Is it about just carving out a plot of land and saying in the official city documents this is a park? Yeah, that's a big part of it. But it's also about forming community. It's also about getting to know what a city is about and so on and so on. So it can be a really complex, very, very nuanced process. And so open data, like any other data set, are partial, they're limited, and they are shot through with all kinds of politics, as I said, you mentioned that open data are only open in certain regards and that's so important.

    Emily Holloway

    So how did this unfold in Calgary? What kinds of constraints did you face in your research on their open data platform?

    Ryan Burns

    We don't -- you and I don't -- decide what goes on at city government open data platform. One of the exceptions/nuances, is that Calgary did have a platform where you could make suggestions, but that turned out to be pretty interesting. I noticed that I could ask for a data set that the city is charging a few hundred dollars for I could ask for that to be placed on the open data platform and they would respond, sorry, we can't release it because we're charging $500.00 for it. So that's a large source of revenue. And but then somebody else comes along and they say, can you list all the locations of brew pubs? And the open data administrator, I saw the conversation just like this happen, get really excited about this. They were like yeah, that sounds like a great idea, brew pubs. So there are nuances about where you can suggest data sets to go on, but for the large part this is determined before it ever reaches us. We also don't determine the visualization software that's used, the platform that's used. We don't determine which data sets get categorized under which categories, and linked up with other kinds of data sets, and so on.

    These platforms are typically paid for in terms of the actual platform itself and the service as well as collection and maintenance of data, analysis of data. Most of this is paid for by the city government budget. This is actually one of their line items. What I find really interesting is when a lot of the labor involved in this becomes outsourced in particular ways. We don't have the ability to upload our own data sets or to even say strictly you need to put this data set on the platform and then have it be put up, but at the same time municipal governments do often hold consultation events where people are expected to show up and sometimes do analyses in real time in data-thons and hackathons, and that kind of thing. They're not paid for those activities and not only are they not paid for that, but typically, it's men who show up for these because there's somebody who has to take care of the, you know, the child care at home, somebody has to watch the kids, somebody has to cook dinner and so on, and there's still a very real and very substantial gender division of labor in North America. So again, you know, paid for by city government budgets, but still a lot of people are recruited to do this labor for free and even beyond that, there's the anticipation that somebody is going to be analyzing these data and then acting on it. If the city government wants to claim that somebody's going to come in and hold them accountable by using their open data platform, then there's somebody who has to do that, there's somebody who has to analyze those data sets again, usually for free, and then have the social and political knowledge of how to actually implement those, how to actualize them in the City Hall, City Council, and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of cultural and political assumptions that go into open data, not to say that any of it Is wrong or bad, but it shapes how we approach technology in the city.

    Emily Holloway

    The assumptions that Ryan is talking about are pervasive, and they end up influencing not only the kinds of data that are generated and analyzed, but also the platform products that operationalize and reproduce those data models. Ayona Datta, from the University College London, approaches these questions by looking at how gender and power intersect with smart city planning – especially surveillance tools.

    Ayona Datta

    Yeah, gender’s always been part of all my questions around urban and it was obviously the same thing when I was looking at Smart City and thinking, what is it going to do, where across the different social. It grows particularly intersectional gender power relations. So one of my projects that I had and was actually quite -- it circulated a lot because of some of the outputs we created -- was called gendering the smart city and was taking the approach like what is in the in there for gendered subjects in this particular smart city, given like you said it's presented as an apolitical tool of resource efficiency, making everybody's lives better in the city. So gendering in the smart city project, we particularly looked at women's access to public space and the role of technology in women's access to public space, we looked across Delhi and Bangalore. I mean, of course, Delhi has been known very well as and popularized for negative reasons, for some of its really well-known violence against women cases. Bangalore, of course, is the Silicon Valley of India.

    So some of the smart cities initiatives, particularly in Delhi, because of its notoriety, so to speak around violence against women, has been smart safe city programs and in most of that, the smart city safe city programs is about surveillance, increased use of CCTV cameras, increased use of safety apps for women, increased use of police, surveillance, cars etcetera, etcetera, and one of the things that we found talking to again working-class women, marginalized women in informal settlements or in slum rehabilitation settlements, is that they don't really see that as their security, because often some of the most difficult struggles they have is in convincing police that a crime has happened. So increasing police presence actually doesn't really increase safety for them. So to us it was a really interesting question around if the smart technologies are claiming to make cities safe for women, how do women actually see their safety or actually, how do women actually negotiate their safety within this kind of technology push?

    Emily Holloway

    So what did you and your colleagues learn? How do women in these informal settlements actually utilize these apps and platforms?

    Ayona Datta

    And so what we found actually none of them used the apps particularly working-class women. They use the mobile phone actually as a tool of documentation and evidence taking, so they would take photos all the time. They would tell their friends where they are and continuously using this as a tool of witnessing. It led to some creative outputs with us, so we kind of created a hip hop song with the women talking about safety in the cities. We created an exhibition, again written by the women, with a lot of multimedia inputs by the women.

    So yeah, I mean, the gendered citizenship is a very different aspect of the smart cities in which smart city again has a very kind of patronizing attitude, I would say, towards gendered safety in increasing monitoring and surveillance. But for women, actually, surveillance is the problem of safety, because they're surveilled by their families. They're surveilled in the society, and so it sort of extends the surveillance that the families have over them into the city at large, which doesn't really help.

    And so we kind of proposed different ways of thinking about safety that would not necessarily have to do with technology or even if it has to do with technology, it's not necessarily that smart apps are the answer or CCTV cameras are the answer. It is more about how can we use low-cost technologies to think about how women might navigate spaces safely. And of course, a large part of that is education, education of young boys and men, which the smart city does not address. So I mean, I would say generally with all smart cities initiatives, whether it is we're thinking about gender or ethnicity or caste or religion, I think it's important to understand that technology cannot be a silver bullet for all sorts of social problems and certainly cannot be a silver bullet for any social problem.

    Technology is basically a complement to doing things right in terms of governance, in terms of implementation, in terms of, you know, law enforcement. And but it cannot be a substitute for all of that and certainly with really complex issues around intersectional marginalization, women, low-income neighborhoods, etcetera. This is it's so complex that technology is not the solution to that complexity at all.

    Emily Holloway

    There is an important, but maybe subtle distinction between the platform and the dashboard. In our previous episodes, Shannon Mattern from the University of Pennsylvania shared some really important insights on the function of the dashboard, both historically and today, in smart cities.

    Shannon Mattern

    So I traced the genealogy backwards, looking at things like just the whole history of the control room, for instance, which we do see in kind of Space Flight, the whole Chilean Cybersyn experiment under Allende. I also tracked back through the history of air flights. You know, the jet, the cockpit of the jet and the airplane, the dashboard of the car. But the earliest manifestation, at least at kind of in terms of its linguistic use, would be a mud flap on the back of the carriage that prevents mud from being splashed up into the vehicle. And there that seems to be kind of denotationally very different from the dashboard as we think of as an interactive screen, but it also has a kind of a very helpful resonance because it reminds us that when we frame what we want to know about the world, when we frame data streams in ways that are supposed to make them easy for consumption or actionable for us as users of digital dashboards, we're in a way, kind of keeping the mud out. The mud is anything that would sully our perception or our judgment. So that mud, that kind of bracketing out or shielding the mud, is something that happens in both that earliest manifestation of the dashboard on a horse drawn carriage and even our contemporary uses of dashboards today.

    Emily Holloway

    Okay. So we have the dashboard, which helps us to filter out the noise and focus on the data – which is now information – that we need to make decisions, whether it’s identifying a broken signal in the subway system, or maybe even a map of heat islands in a city, or maybe, as Erin McElroy will explain to us, a digitized database that landlords use to vet prospective tenants.

    Erin McElroy

    So I've been really interested in these different ways in which people and land and also data about people and land are made property through technology even before the real estate industry came to be and how property as a concept is a technology that in my mind reproduces contexts of racial capitalism and dispossession and carcerality.

    Emily Holloway

    Erin, you bundle these landlord tools under the umbrella of what you call proptech. Can you unpack that term for us?

    Erin McElroy

    I guess there are few things that I mean by that but for one I guess as a precursor to that I began studying property technologies. So, the different technologies that landlords and property managers use contemporarily to manage and administer different properties. And so, the real estate industry calls this prop tech. It's the subset of the real estate industry, kind of like fin tech is to the finance industry. So -- and both of those really—fin tech and prop tech were these areas that that kind of boomed in the aftermaths of the foreclosure crisis in different ways, but with real estate, it was this idea that real estate could be innovated by bringing in new technologies and you know, after 2008 as well, homes were foreclosed upon throughout the US but also beyond, and certain investment companies, Wall Street investment companies like Blackstone bought up, swapped tens of thousands of properties that have been foreclosed and they needed these big investment companies, the corporate landlords needed new tools and technologies in order to administer those properties, and so there was this this need, that large scale landlordism had and this prop tech industry kind of grows to meet that, so I've been calling prop tech, I should say, also applies to the management, and even acquisition of residential, commercial and industrial properties, I've been really focusing on residential applications, particularly landlord applications.

    So landlords and property managers basically installing different technological systems often without the consent of tenants and in ways in which tenant lives and data and information actually become property themselves for the real estate industry. So as an example, tenant screening, which is actually an industry that predates the foreclosure crisis, tenant screening is when landlords basically gather different data about tenants and then arbitrate whether or not a tenant can move into a property, based upon whether they're considered a, quote-unquote good or bad tenant based upon these different points of data, the first tenant screening company actually started in the mid 70s in California, a company called UD Registry. And it used to be that just eviction data was collected, and if so, if a tenant had a prior eviction notice, they would be potentially barred from being able to move into a unit. Today, the industry has changed a ton and nine out of ten landlords in the US use some sort of tenant screening system. And it's not just eviction data, but it's also credit data. It's any sort of criminal record. Sometimes other factors get inputted into this sort of algorithm, and then there's an output that's often a thumbs up or thumbs down output based upon a really faulty data matching system. But anyway, all of this happens, and then landlords are basically like you can either move in or you're not allowed to move in and so with tenant screening, there's a big issue because if somebody's been locked up or evicted or is already sort of subjected to the carceral state or to housing precarity, it's going to be harder going forward to find housing. So it's a way that housing injustice gets reproduced through technology.

    Emily Holloway

    Platforms don’t just measure value – whether economic or, as Erin just explained, social – they can also generate it. In our previous episodes, you heard from David Banks, who recently published a book on the attention economy in cities.

    David Banks

    The elevator pitch for my book is, you know, Ohh you wrote a book. What's it about? It's about how cities act like reality TV stars for money, is what I usually tell people. Right, but it's not, but I'm being facetious because they're not acting like reality TV stars. They are responding in the same way that famous people are responding to an attention economy that is, equal parts like the financial incentives, the new technologies that are available, and social and cultural and political trends.

    Emily Holloway

    So David, how does that work, exactly? Are economic development officials becoming Instagram influencers all of a sudden? How do these agencies and public private partnerships leverage social media platforms to generate interest and value in their cities?

    David Banks

    So there there's a lot of interesting stuff happening here, right? Essentially, what seems to have happened is that there was first a market on social media of like attention to place, right, where you could stuff like a place could go viral, right? Especially these places or backdrops that look really good on visual apps like Instagram, and Snapchat and TikTok, where the images image heavy platforms. So you get like these what are sometimes called like Instagram playgrounds, just these like sumptuous, very rich environments that you can take lots of nice pictures of. But what, what was lagging really kind of almost up to the pandemic was a way for a faraway company or real estate interest to be able to see that and then put it within their portfolio of holdings, right? And then like be able to adapt and change different neighborhoods in connection with the trends that they're seeing in social graphs, and what begun to take shape are a lot of this platform real estate tools that, yeah, make all sorts of connections across the whole fire industry, right. So it's landlords, screening tenants, it's landlords screening properties, it's banks screening landlords.

    It's connecting all of these different groups of people, it’s connecting data either about property or about the economy or potential customers and connecting all of these things together and what the end result is this breaking down of regional markets into national and international markets. Because with the technology available now, something like a private equity company or private equity firm can have the sort of detailed information about a region that was really only possible if you like lived there and you could scout it out with humans. And now you don't need to do that and so you can, you know, buy up these like critical pluralities of real estate in in markets and manipulate prices, right?

    Emily Holloway

    Yeah, and that’s kind of what Erin was saying earlier, too, maybe just approaching it from a different angle. You also talked about some of the real estate influencers in New York State in your book – how did they get into this? How is this starting to change the role of regional or urban development agencies – is this just a new kind of entrepreneurialism, maybe along the lines of what David Harvey and other economic geographers were observing 30 or 40 years ago?

    David Banks

    What some of the cutting edge does is they they'll hire influencers. Homegrown is probably best because they read is more authentic, but they can also go to like a talent agency. And say like, you know we would like someone with you know, a nice Instagram following, to take a vacation in our city or town, or and show people that they could have fun just like the person that they follow does right, because usually you follow an influencer because they speak to some aspect of your identity. You identify with them in some way, and so to watch them have a good time in Schenectady, right? Would say like, oh, I too could actually have a good time in Schenectady. You know, like, whatever preconceived notions I have, I should reconsider them, stuff like that. That's what some of the better ones are doing. Others will, you know, put together ad campaigns that or maybe fall a little flat, you know, like hashtags on social media don't quite feel the same way that they that they used to. It has to be a little bit more sophisticated with algorithmic sorting, especially on apps like TikTok and stuff like that. But now there's also stuff where you know, like sponsored content can be like the apartment that you live in. I forget her name. She started Rookie. I don't quite remember her name, but for a while she was doing, she was like living in an apartment that was sponsored content, which meant that she would like, advertise that you could party with her if you lived in her apartment complex with her. And that was actually an actual amenity of the apartment complex from the developer, right, and so stuff like that is happening with increasing frequency, but a lot of it is pretty difficult because economic development professionals don't always know what a lot of people want, and a lot of what their pitch goes through three different people. So it's a very difficult pitch to make because usually what they're doing is they'll create a package, a media package, and then they'll hand it to the HR department of a major employer. And say when you go head hunting, when you go recruit a new middle manager, here you can give them this to make it, make the case that moving here is a good thing, right? And so, like there, they there there's it's hard to make the direct ask of people. It's usually through like playing phone- like game of telephone or something. So it is a chicken and egg thing. But what I think it might better described as right? Like there are factors that that change lots of different industries, right?

    And like all of these things just sort of change all of these different industries and so. You know, real estate agents definitely feel the pressure to have a good Instagram presence because of like essentially the way that their profession has always been, which is this relationship of trust with their client, either the one selling or buying, they have to have a pretty significant amount of trust. And they have to be outgoing and like, be the person that like you could come to with like the biggest financial decision of your life. Right. You have to, like, have a really good relationship once you have the contract. But then you also have to like be welcoming to new people as well. It's very difficult sort of public persona to put on, and now you and now you do that persona on Instagram. It's just like the new place where you do that instead of like having your smiling face on the sign in the front lawn. Right. You know, like you do that too. But that's not enough now. Right. And so that's why you know, shows like Selling Sunset exist is because this has become such an influencer-heavy kind of job that it was only a matter of time that we would make not one, but several reality TV shows based on the real estate industry, or even better like the like the home remodeling stuff, right like that? Also becomes very influencer heavy again, not only because it makes good television and people are interested in in like, you know how to redo your bathroom or something like that? But it's also because, like, this is marketing. This is just how marketing happens now.

    Emily Holloway

    The platform still seems like a pretty abstract concept – all of our guests approach it in slightly different ways. But like technology in general, the platform and the dashboard seem to just build on existing social and economic and political inequalities. In our next and final episode of the miniseries, we’re going to revisit these ideas – technology, platforms, dashboards – from a more grounded perspective. We’ll be thinking through the civic intelligences that Shannon highlights, the grassroots digital organizing that Erin and her collaborators have led with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and the radical premise of maintenance and repair.

    Shannon Mattern

    I'm just looking at kind of the crossovers between the discourses about maintenance, repair, mending, care, which in some cases are those terms are prevalent in different disciplines or different kind of discourse communities. But we could think productively about how they should and could inform each other. So if we want to maintain, I don't know, a big infrastructural system, we actually also have to think about caring for the workers and the communities that supply them.

    Emily Holloway

    You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was produced and mixed by David Weems and written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.

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