'Rude waiters!' flashes an alert on tourists’ smartphones as they approach the terrace of a famous Parisian café. This is the near future according to Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect and the founding director of the MIT Senseable City Lab (SCL). Recounted to Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper in 2014, Ratti’s vision was prompted by his rental bicycle being demonstratively removed from a café terrace, where he sat down with the journalist to discuss future cities.[1] Annoyed by the incident, the Italian architect envisioned the city of tomorrow in which rating would function as a watchdog against impolite behaviour, instilling courtesy in service workers while empowering customers. 'Already, says Ratti, hotels are becoming more polite because they need good ratings,' writes Kuper.

Why recall this unexciting episode about something as commonplace as complaining about poor service? It draws attention to what I argue is the power of contemporary urbanists to shape the public imagination of urbanism, by foregrounding the perspective of an idealised, ahistorical city user and occluding the realities of labour, subjectivity and power relations animating it. In doing so, the episode usefully illustrates two meanings of ‘platform urbanism.’ This term usually refers to an emerging way of urban life under platform capitalism, but could – and should, as I contend – be extended to urbanism as a discipline, hence to those experts whom I call 'platform urbanists’ and to forms of institutionalised knowledge production that justify and give a semblance of irresistibility to certain, rather than other varied vectors along which the future will unfold.

Ratti’s influence on how the broader (liberal) public understands urbanism cannot be overestimated: he has been dubbed 'the unconventional smart city philosopher,'[2] Featured in Wired’s ‘Smart List: 50 people who will change the world,'[3] Ratti has trotted the globe as a visionary for the networked city of tomorrow, moving effortlessly between master-planning and product development, between Biennale curating and academic publishing (as of September 2020 he is listed as a co-author on 678 papers published by the SCL).

According to his view, rating has a much more expansive sense than starring and reviewing restaurants. Rather, it has to do with the notion of data-driven participation, and the real-time interplay between, and integration of, individual and aggregate user behaviour. This is best captured by SCL's Copenhagen Wheel, a sensing-unit prototype attachable to a bicycle wheel that records your cycling performance, monitors road conditions in real-time, and collects information about ambient temperature, air pollution, and noise. Commissioned by the municipality of the Danish capital and now commercially available under the brand name of Superpedestrian, the Copenhagen Wheel allows you, the website boasts, to 'plan healthier bike routes, achieve your exercise goals, and meet up with friends on the go' while 'contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.' [4] While the Copenhagen Wheel is in itself innocuous and hardly objectionable, it illustrates how the power of platform urbanists is premised on the extrapolation of the neoliberal notion of markets-as-computers into the urban political arena.

Time and again, Ratti has invoked modernist urban planning as a foil to evangelise the emerging 'digital civilisation'.[5] In a 2018 debate, for example, he locked horns with Antoine Picon, a Harvard architectural historian and the chairman of the Le Corbusier Foundation, taking issue with his continuing championship of the legacy of the Swiss architect who made decisions singlehandedly and 'without any data'. Despite (or because of) Ratti’s humanist streak, his urbanism comes across as similarly apolitical. If Le Corbusier saw architecture as a means by which revolution can be avoided, the very structure of evidence on which the MIT urbanist builds his argument, heavily biased towards aggregate data around customer feedback and traffic flows, seems to be similarly absent of political conflict and contestation. In fact, Ratti’s imaginaries might be politically significant as a form of anti-politics in that they transmute conflict and contestation into what Cambridge gurus evangelise as disruptive innovation. 'Could tomorrow's smart city spark creativity by incorporating a measure of hackability?', asked Ratti in his 2016 manifesto The City of Tomorrow (co-authored with Matthew Claudel).[6]

I believe the purpose of critically analysing the work of urbanists such as Ratti is neither to engage in a polemic, nor to lament how surveillance capitalism destroys urban spontaneity, as liberal critics from Richard Sennett to Shoshana Zuboff point out, restating Max Weber’s modernity and disenchantment thesis for the 21st century. Rather, it is to start teasing out the ways in which platform urbanism has assumed the status of a powerful (what the science and technology scholars Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim would call) sociotechnical imaginary.[7] Building on Jasanoff and Kim’s inquiry into the role of science and technology in shaping ideas about industrial modernity and progress, platform urbanism can be seen as an imaginary about techno-utopian progress under digital capitalism, but also one in which that progress appears oddly nostalgic, turning to nature and the pre-modern city. As an imaginary, platform urbanism is in tune with the imaginaries of sustainable and liveable urbanisms, which equally centre around humanity in general.

This brings me back to the episode recounted in the Financial Times, in which smartphones, data platforms, Parisian cafés and rental bicycles are enmeshed so as to normalise the fabrication of power in the contemporary city. Disseminated by an influential urbanist, the idea of rating as intrinsically progressive helps to occlude the role of what the philosopher Michel Feher calls 'rated agency' in contemporary urbanised capitalism.[8] Although institutions such as Ratti’s SCL cannot be said to be implicated in that form of capitalism the way corporations such as Uber are, urbanists are implicated in it by imaginaries they produce: from explaining away the role of capitalist power by thinking technological progress through biological analogies, to circulating vague speculations about 'optimisation inflected with humanisation',[9] and actual research and development collaboration with these corporations.[10] While the power of urbanists to shape cities certainly pales in comparison with the influence of finance, real estate, and tech industries, the imaginaries they are so good at inventing need to confront, rather than extrapolate from, the terrain of the contemporary urban arena dictated by the latter.