In a 2021 online exhibition for the RISD Museum, the Swedish collective Mapping the Unjust City explores the transfer of infrastructural ownership in Sweden from public to private entities through a digital map focusing on the ownership structures of the district centres around each of the stops on the Stockholm subway system.[1] Ownership histories, zoning plans, and media/press archives tell a depressing story, aggregating publicly available data that is typically not presented to a local public (e.g., citizens, commuters, community members) who are not investors in or employees of the private concerns now owning and operating these centres.

But there’s a small footnote that I can’t get out of my head. The use of these district centres as a visual framing device to explore the pervasiveness of privatisation misses something. The infrastructural connection between them is drawn but these lines are not explored beyond the static nodes dotted along them. There is something perhaps more speculative and complex in the privatisation of the subway system operations carried out by the MTR Nordic group since 2009, which has now, according to its promotional materials, become Stockholm’s third largest employer. If ‘MTR’ sounds familiar to those outside Sweden, this may be because of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests. The parent MTR Corporation is a majority state-owned Hong Kong company running Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR), and was a target of and later actor in suppressing the protests. (An aside: I am surprised when I see solidarity actions in Stockholm presenting Hong Kong as a faraway site to be lobbied through governmental and popular pressure, not as an operator of the local transportation system and employer of 5,300 people locally.) The most interesting aspect of MTR’s business model is its current ‘rail plus property’ element, which has seen the company recently specialise in the expansion of rail stations into mall and residential properties, or as the website states: ‘Going beyond railway delivery and operation, MTR also creates and manages dynamic communities around its network through seamless integration of rail, commercial and property development.’[2] While it remains as yet unrealised, the clear model for MTR’s expansion into the Nordics is toward this sort of property development and management, meaning that the operation of rail services is not an end in itself but a means toward another goal. In a report for K2 (Swedish Knowledge Centre for Public Transport), MTR proposes that the Rail+Property model be used to ‘capture the value’ in public transport systems as a source of financing. The report cites Hong Kong public transport revenues in 2013, 24 percent of which were generated by railway operations, while the rest came from property rental (31%), property development (14%), and station commercial (31%).[3]

If we are talking about platforms, perhaps I might begin with a physical platform, the railway platform, which in this model parlays the large numbers of people passing through into housing, offices, retail and entertainment – a destination unto itself or what MTR calls a dynamic community. The company is not only extracting profit from its core business but using its role in this business to leverage access and expertise relating to adjacent real estate development, property retail, and retail points, pointing to the normalisation of the concept that the private operation of public utilities such as transportation networks should be motivated by such speculation, or, alternatively, that funding for public services and infrastructure should be embedded in a logic of development and retail expansion – concepts normalised to the extent that to oppose development or oppose shopping malls now means one can be accused of opposing necessary financing of the subways. At the time of writing, I note that fares have just been increased once again for passengers on the MTR-operated subways in Stockholm, to say nothing of longstanding complaints from populations in the suburbs that these fares were already prohibitively high and have played a causal role in creating what is by several measures Europe’s most segregated capital city (steep competition).

When talking of platform urbanism, then, one could start not with the slickness and promise of app-based aesthetics but with a physical structure such as the Stockholm tunnelbana (subway), or Hong Kong’s transport system, where mobility and flow meet strategies of profitable capture in housing, office space, and retail based on location and circulation. People need to move through, but stick around long enough. A service is delivered, but here the reason to keep coming back is motivated by everyday life (until it is not: beyond the current pandemic and reasons of broader physical health or fare savings that lead, for example, to cycling, see the parasitic indifference of e-scooters to traditional forms of public mass transportation). The metro station is both a refuge from tear gas, a potential means of escape, and a place to be trapped or caught up. In Hong Kong, protests targeted MTR to demand the release of footage of police violence against passengers, with the company being forced to comply only by court order in a damages case. Late in the protests, stations were close ostensibly to prevent damage, but the reason was clearly to reduce protestor mobility and allow crowds to be physically contained. So it seems there is a parallel to be teased out concerning de-platforming more broadly: the promise of access to all, being trapped inside the train, the closure of the gate.

There are of course differences when it comes to app-based platforms, but what I’m particularly interested in here is the role of subcontracting and privatisation in public services as state accountability becomes next to impossible. As the provision of services becomes increasingly technologised and fragmented between increasingly specialised subcontractors, there ceases to be an entity that can be addressed as a public one: for example, one can easily grasp the presence and function of utilities such as water, street cleaning, and electricity, or the role of a postal service and residential delivery whether public or private. Schools, roads, and sanitation are often the most visible manifestation of state infrastructure. Power plants, sewage facilities, and post sorting are often visible if in peripheral, industrial, and non-residential areas. How we visualise the data/IT infrastructure required to administer contemporary ‘smart city’ projects becomes much more slippery. The recent transition necessitated by to online schooling in countries like the United States, where internet services are not regulated as a public utility federally, reinvigorated discussions around municipal broadband projects. The assumption of connectivity proved highly flawed for students in the New York City public school system and university students attending the City University of New York. According to a city report, close to 2.2 million city residents lack broadband, a number made up of 30 percent of black and Latinx, 20 percent of white, and 22 percent of Asian city residents.[4] So the notion of access as a form of equality across platforms reveals itself as inherently flawed. Moreover, on a larger infrastructural level, understanding the integration of platform logics into spatial planning and mobility also poses difficulties for a public seeking traction to engage. One might say the slickness of the platform is performative, in the sense that it coaxes only certain engagements and interactions to the detriment of others. We travel in this direction and not another, we get off here and not there. In the same way that Mapping the Unjust City peels back the layers of ownership, property transfer, and zoning regulation, the unidirectional nature of user data (I may consent to share, but this sharing is toward a corporation which rarely shares back to the public) makes questions of public access to data and the adoption of ostensibly public platforms very difficult to resolve. It is perhaps the narrative of ease and fluidity of access, of data as always and equally available, which also needs to be critiqued. We may argue that the transnational link between a Stockholm tunnelbana passenger and a tear-gassed or beaten Hong Kong student protester is direct rather than merely abstract, but it is not perceived as such. The same goes for the credit history, economy, infrastructure, and housing hurdles necessary to clear in order to ‘opt in’ to systems widely perceived as available to all: smartphones, data, broadband. We are each privately responsible for maintaining our network access, even as the public and private infrastructure underpinning these networks remains obscured from popular view.

Here’s a fun experiment: try asking someone in an affluent neighbourhood to borrow their smartphone to make a phone call or to check something on a map. I am betting it will be difficult to find someone willing to share. I think my own attachment to my own device is problematic, and that I would be perhaps momentarily unwilling to share or at least initially a bit suspicious. What does it say about a resource operated visibly in shared urban space that its operators are unwilling to share it, primarily for reasons of attachment or personification? I suspect this unwillingness to share has nothing to do with scarcity and more to do with our relationship to expressions and mobilisations of personhood via networks and, by extension, the devices with which we access them.