Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities - Paperback

by Anke Strüver (Editor), Sybille Bauriedl (Editor)

The increasing platformization of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange.

Author Biography

Anke Strüver is a professor of human geography with a focus on urban studies at the University of Graz (Austria). In 2004 she completed her PhD at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (Netherlands) on the socio-cultural production of cross-border spaces and their effects on everyday practices. Her research focuses on embodied human-environment relations in the city, especially along the themes of health, food, and active mobility, as well as digitalization and sustainable co-laboration.
Sybille Bauriedl is a professor of integrative geography at Europa-Universität Flensburg (Germany). She has been researching and teaching sustainable urban development and global environmental conflicts since the 1990s. She is engaged in scientific networks of political ecology and feminist geography and is involved in the right to the city movement. Current research projects deal with local energy transition, smart urbanism, colonial infrastructure in European port cities, and climate justice.