Digitally enabled platforms are reshaping cities in the twenty-first century. Platform-based activities are spatially concentrated in cities and build upon existing uneven geographies while feeding into wider urbanization dynamics of economic development, environmental action, and everyday life. Urban platforms connect people and resources in new ways, recasting infrastructures as services, and make it possible for big data and monitoring logics to steer urban development. This raises questions about who determines such connections, who has the power to shape data-driven decision-making and what are possible modalities of contestation.

This public lecture series investigates the logics and rationales of digital platforms, the role of data and code in urban governance and surveillance, the infrastructural channeling of urban knowledge, and the progressive potential of platforms to facilitate sharing and the commoning of data.

Organized by BCUS, LSTS, SMIT, Cosmopolis, CRIS & Brussels Academy

04.10.19: Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam)
Beta-testing democracy? Platforms forging citizens & how to resist them 

25.10.19: Mark Graham (University of Oxford)
Cartographic Attributes of the Invisible: Geographies of the Platform Economy

06.12.19: Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)
Security Technology and the Politics of Failure

20.03.20: Nanna Verhoeff, Michiel de Lange and Sigrid Merx (Utrecht University)
Urban Interfaces: Media, Art and Performance as Platforms for Creativity and Criticality

24.04.20: Dominique Boullier (EPFL Lausanne)
Pluralism for data-driven cities and the division of learning