Critics of platform urbanism almost invariably refer to digital platforms, thus to the urbanisation of platforms so understood. As the media scholar Jathan Sadowski[1] recently put it,[2] taking stock of the emerging field of study, platform urbanism 'is centered around the growing presence and power of digital platforms in cities'. But what if there are other aspects to the unprecedented momentum around platforms? In this short reflection, I want to think about the usefulness of staying with the metaphor to reveal a set of contemporary imaginaries around platforms. This is certainly not because I wish to advocate platform capitalism, but rather to suggest that we should be more careful with using 'platform' as a dead metaphor ('platforms such as Uber...'), so as, instead of contributing to its literalisation, to 'denaturalise' the metaphor by taking it seriously.

I am not going to repeat definitions and etymologies of 'platforms' convincingly explored by others.[3] Rather I want to begin by an observation that very similar etymologies and definitions (chief among which is platform being a raised level surface) have been used again and again by different authors in different contexts. This observation has prompted me to begin tracing the work of “platform” across disparate fields of knowledge. And while there is an element of idiosyncrasy in my approach (for reasons not fully clear to me, I have been always interested in the encounters and elective affinities between seemingly unrelated fields), I think what 'platform' does across these fields is that it registers a distinctively topographical conception of power, which, I would argue, speaks equally to Marxian, [4]Foucauldian[5] and queer[6] analyses of power. Due to the limited space I will limit my evidence to two texts from the fields, respectively, of economy and architecture.

First, here is a quote from a working paper, written by the economists Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard, titled The Architecture of Platforms: A Unified View[7]: 'Platform architectures are modularisations of complex systems in which certain components (the platform itself) remain stable, while others (the complements) are encouraged to vary in crosssection or over time.' The paper explores the use of the term in the fields of product development, technology strategy and industrial economics to offer a generalized theory of economic platforms that varies a great deal in appearance and scope: the examples mentioned are a singles bar and a social networking website, and it is argued that platforms can be contained within a single firm as well as extend over an 'ecosystem' (another metaphor worthy of scrutiny) of thousands of firms. While platform architecture certainly thrives in the context of digital economy, what defines platforms is ultimately not that they are digital but that there is a low-variety “core” which operates as a design rule governing the relationships among high-variety 'peripheral' components, and bears on the evolution of platform systems over time. In fact, the term 'digital' doesn’t even appear in the paper. Although the paper is written from an 'insider' perspective, it allows us to avoid a tendency toward 'exceptionalism' of the digital era (as Evgeny Morozov would argue) and thus situate digital platforms within a broader history of capitalist economy.

And here is another quote, from the essay Platforms: Architecture and the Use of the Ground[8], penned by the architects Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, of the office DOGMA: platform 'is an architecture that defines space without enclosing it'. The essay harks back to a 1962 reflection by Jørn Utzon, the architect of the Sydney Opera House, titled Platforms and Plateaus, who argued that platforms 'cut through like a knife' to separate primary and secondary functions (which is what Utzon attempted in the Sydney project). According to Aureli and Tattara the platform manipulates the ground so that it both enables and restricts activities happening on it, facilitating and conditioning use. They explore historical examples ranging from Neolithic domestic architecture to Mies van der Rohe and Aldo van Eyck to show how architectural platforms embody power relations and how they could challenge them. They refer to and depart from the political meaning of platform as a set of policies or a party line: rather, according to the DOGMA architects, platforms are potential spaces of the political, 'defined and yet-unbound'.

Note how these otherwise very different texts operate with a similar topology of power, one in which a core or a ground is constructed so as to enable or facilitate the production of difference. I think there is a potential to broaden the critical debate around platform urbanism by situating the critical study of digital platforms in cities within a broader transformations of capitalist urbanism that touches more fundamentally on the history of economy, urban design and architectural politics. For example, my PhD student Nina Jørgensen currently investigates[9] intertwined genealogies of participatory and cybernetic urbanisms in the 1960s, situating them in the context of seemingly mundane transformation within fields such as business management.

Today, the surge in popularity of (what Arup evangelizes as) 'walkonomics'[10] and companies such as Walk Score makes clear that there is much to be said about the relations of digital platforms to the fabrication of attractive public spaces (complete with the normalization of certain rather than other ideals of what counts as attractive public space) and real estate value. As I have recently suggested[11], there is much overlapping between platform urbanism and so-called liveable urbanism paradigm in the contemporary neoliberal city. The ideas of urbanists such as Jane Jacobs, William Foote Whyte or Jan Gehl – popularized against the backdrop of urban competitiveness pressures[12] and virtually uncontested among officials, experts and the broader public—are premised on a deterministic link between physical space and human behaviour, therefore consistent with the notion of the measurable, computable and 'simulatable' city, despite the paeans with which these authors worship the spontaneity of urban life. The examination of platform as a topology of power in the contemporary city should be inclusive of, but not limited to, the examination of Big Tech, while still remaining specific enough to make the concept analytically meaningful.