Cribbed from biology, the idea that flows of capital can materially regenerate the interconnective tissue of the environment has had a powerful hold on policymakers over the last three decades. But the metaphor of 'urban regeneration' has a range that goes well beyond new postindustrial uses for warehouses, canals and docklands. Urbanisation demonstrates a seemingly infinite capacity to regenerate age-old practices of extortion, usually through the violent exploitation of the social need for space.

The first half of this audio essay, posted a few days ago, explored Phase 1 and Phase 2 in the development of technology capital as its power is consolidated in cities. In the second half, we enter Phase 3 – the final phase? – as planetary platforms like Alphabet and Amazon have reached the point where they possess the power and desire to do far more than just takeover operating services or consult on managerial changes to governance. Tech companies are now struggling against the last remaining binds that limit their full ascension to sovereignty. We have a future to win – or lose.

Platform-based applications are significantly impacting the way we live in cities. Amongst other things, these platforms promise to improve our lives through easy access to on-the-go transportation, food, entertainment, friendships and dates. As well, some platform operators, including Facebook, Google and Amazon, are taking on the role of large-scale urban developers, seeking to apply their data-based knowhow to other economic areas such as housing, education, work and health care. In this doing this, we see platform monopolising and monetising the various strata of ‘access,’ beyond the realm of convenience. New spatial typologies and cultural imaginaries are being employed to prepare the ground for this massive shift of authority over urban development. What we could soon be experiencing is an urban environment in which any form of participation in public life is contingent on subscribing to commercial platform services. On the surface, platforms pride themselves on substantially improving access to a myriad of things, offering flexible channels for direct and easy connection, undisturbed by the inertia of old-school hierarchical corporations and institutional bureaucracy. But they do so by deploying mechanisms of exclusion, limiting the sphere of interaction to selected partners and externalising all other aspects that are not of immediate relevance. In other words, instead of eliminating these old hierarchies and institutions, they simply replace them. What will be the future urban co-existence if platform services turn access into the most highly priced form of capital? In other words, how can we then sustain access to access?

The word 'spectral', Lefebvre reminds us, has a dual meaning. It signifies, on the one hand, the influence of the dead over the living, and, on the other, a prismatic analysis, able to decompose a beam of light into its constituent frequencies. Through the prism of the spatial dialectic, the postmodern focus on the presence of the past illuminated a 'blind field' in the critique of urban space. If the practice of architecture abandoned its claim upon the process of modernisation, then what was assuming control over modernity's form? What the spatial dialectic proposed was a close investigation of the relationship between the spatialisation of capital and the capitalisation of space, since at the interface between the geography of accumulation and land speculation it was possible to recognise a social transmutation of the urban power of real estate.

Marx famously described capital in gothic terms, a ghoulish horror show composed of phantasms, vampires, werewolves and animated monsters feasting on the flesh of labour. In this system Frankenstein's monster is out of control and driven through the ‘grotesque corpus’ of capital. Bodies and brains have become mutilated into commodities. A werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour describes the extension of the working day in the nineteenth century. Phantasmal bodies stalk the world while their master sleeps.

In the first part of this audio essay, we dive into the rise of smart/platform urbanism and the consolidation of tech capital's power in cities by guiding you through three phases of its development, each one seeking to grab more control over the oversight of city governance, operation of city services, and ownership of city space.