From Platform Governance to Platformed Cities: Corporate-State Entanglements in Europe

The fundamental responsibilities of governments in industrialised economies have evolved, and dependencies on ‘sharing’ or ‘platform’ economies have proliferated. In the housing and transport sectors, platform companies such as Sidewalk Labs (Alphabet), AirBnB and Uber are increasingly shaping the governance of cities, fueling a new politics that involves complex relationships and dependencies between governments, companies and citizens. Today’s data governance and public accountability issues (especially around data collection, control, ownership, and privacy), along with the mounting challenges posed by platformisation and privatisation, reveal a major tension between public and private goals and demand new interdisciplinary approaches to doing urban public policy. Drawing together the disciplines of international political economy, urban studies, platform studies, and law, this paper will explore how structural and discursive power is created, negotiated and contested by both platform companies and the state, in the process of re-regulation or “regulated deregulation” (Aalbers, 2016) in cities. It aims to map the current regulatory responses to platforms such as AirBnB and Uber in specific cities, with a particular focus on data governance issues, and poses the question if the current short-term, reactive regulatory arrangements in this area are compatible with the long-term strategies and goals of democratic urban governance. Further, it explores both the entanglements and multi-layered governance in how urban data-decision-making and rule making take place, as well as the forms of power and knowledge asymmetry that emerge, by analysing whether existing legal frameworks are able to adequately govern these social, economic and political relations. How can the processes and outcomes of rule-setting in the “platform city” properly reflect the public interest?