When the essay The Californian Ideology was published in 1995, the world of the internet was not exactly the same as it is now, but the authors Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron were already sure: behind the promise of free spaces to be conquered, there lay the neoliberal spirit with its ambition to open new markets for the exploitation of knowledge and information. Crews of hackers and creatives surfed through these new frontiers while the spectrum of capitalism appeared much too weak to totally colonise the new digital continent.

Attracted by the promise of new lands to be conquered, the world of finance rapidly invested in the growth of so-called dotcoms, the first digital enterprises that tried to benefit from world-wide-web development. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, it was clear that these companies could not survive without a clear business plan and a more tangible foothold.

The enterprises improved their strategy and located their core in logistical power, which meant creating an infrastructure to organise and coordinate a huge amount of flows and data: and thus the platform model was born. Simultaneously, they began rooting themselves on multiple levels and scales; indeed, a key feature of digital spaces is to not be closed into themselves as they communicate and overlap with other geographical dimensions: think about a server hub or a click farm.

Nevertheless, there is a specific geographical level that seems to be perfect for platforms’ placement: urban areas. In cities, masses of users can be easily converted into both customers and workers through infrastructures that facilitate circulation and information flows, and through peculiarities that can be offered as products or experiences with an aura of uniqueness. As David Harvey has argued, since the end of the 1980s, city administrations have increasingly moved from managerialism of urban resources to entrepreneurialism aimed at attracting investments and valorise assets. Platforms represent the perfect partner in this mission.

The encounter between platforms and cities can be framed as a constant process of de/codification: platforms specify their general operations into a tangible background, as the city is transformed by the action of the platforms. We may identify two movements that overlap, that of territorialisation and that of dematerialisation. For instance, food delivery platforms generate thousands of flows of commodities each night in the city streets, while the labour process that moves these commodities is completely directed via mobile phones and the rider never sees his/her boss in person.

Manuel Castells stressed how the city is a combination of spaces of flows and spaces of places, and highlighted that the former are dominating the latter. Today, platform urbanisation concentrates this tendency in the hands, or better, in the algorithms, of a few subjects. Houses are transformed into working spaces, streets into commodity lanes, leisure into working time. The entire city is mapped, codified, hierarchised according to the major or minor possibilities of being included in the platform. In order to be included, the city must change appearance and morphology: dark kitchens appear in parking areas and under bridges, whole residential districts become tourist areas, infrastructures are built to facilitate digitalisation. The city-dwellers are no exception. Contingents of precarious dwellers are enrolled as urban entrepreneurs who can make profit from their activation on platforms. Citizens became users who share contents and info useful for making earnings.

Not all the processes of codification go smoothly. In the transfer, there is a risk of losing something, that the source and the output could express themselves in incompatible codes. Translation is always a sort of treason; it implies a gap. Think about who is on the border. Every day, suburban citizens move from the periphery to downtown, hunting for platforms’ opportunities on Uber or Deliveroo. Or consider old neighbourhood squares transformed into visitors’ attractions because of a review on Airbnb. Codification does not mean equal reciprocity; one side of the translation can be more powerful that the other.

This translation can generate urban frictions that assume different forms. Traditional sectors may adopt a conservative approach towards platform innovation considered as a sort of unfair competition. Local inhabitants can oppose transnational enterprises to avoid their expulsion from the city. Municipalities may complain about the unequal redistribution of profits. Nomad workers may block streets when striking against platform working conditions.

One of the key questions generated by urban conflicts and unequal development is who drives this codification. And who benefits from this process. Old actors meet and sometimes clash with new actors. Local players deal with transnational players. Democratic institutions and social claims can smack up against the invisible and opaque walls of algorithms. Urban areas can easily transform into battlefields between differing forces. Put another way, platforms’ expansion challenges the future of cities and their dwellers, making a public issue of the kind of space we want and need to live in.