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?

What makes the task of tackling this issue of access so challenging, is the inherent invisibility of the core operations of platform technologies. In most cases, their immediate visual presence consists of nothing more than an app interface, which can be accessed via smart phones or similar digital devices. When not in use, nothing remains to remind us of the functionality of the infrastructures in the background. A smart phone might leave an unsightly bulge in one’s trouser pocket, but other than that these services quickly slip out of sight, and out of mind. Yet the rapid expansion and ubiquity of platform-based services has triggered a cascade of effects that are leaving clearly noticeable marks on everyday urban life. Most notably, they have begun to encroach on a wide range of domains determining the focus, priorities and direction of many societies across the world: whether it is the question of labour, as seen in the rise of a new class of precarious workers required for the provision of new on-demand urban services; whether it is the question of aspiration and imagination, which is increasingly being shaped by the rapid consumption of visual information and influenced by the speed of circulation of new services and commodities; whether it is the question of civic responsibility that arises in the wake of a new gold rush mentality surrounding platform industries, where the pack at the front reaps all the rewards regardless of the damage left behind; or whether it is the question of individual liberties, when even the most basic forms of social participation such as buying a bus ticket or checking the weather forecast become impossible unless one subscribes to the services, and demands, of a platform that handles the entire process.

According to French economist Thomas Piketty, the sharp rise in inequality since the 1980s, which can only be reversed by strong economic growth and the taxation of wealth, is due to particular distributional failures[1]. Taking for granted the key role of knowledge and skills in the distribution of wealth in society, one of the most harmful failures today has to do with distributional issues around the use of new data technologies. Many technologies of data gathering and data extraction that are in use are inaccessible to most people, making it easy for the accumulation and absorption of the profit they enable to benefit the few not the many. What is even worse is that these inequalities are increasingly being planned, realized and regulated by means of structural interventions into urban space, that is, into the space meant to be shared by all of us. The ensuing problem is that we have now arrived at a point where city-making has become an important domain for the consolidation of wealth concentration and not a domain for wealth distribution.

One of the key questions that needs to be raised in response to this situation is how to make sure that it is not just an elite of stakeholders but every citizen who is involved in urban decision-making and that all stakeholders have equal power in this respect, in other words, that we sustain access to access. To achieve this, we need to take into account two things: First, our cities are increasingly data-driven environments, and this means that we need to consider how the forces of change unleashed by digital technologies and big data can be used to extend access to opportunities for engagement in the urban realm. And second, calling for meaningful civic engagement in a Lefebvrian sense is not just about the utilisation of a right to the city. It is about not being excluded from urban form[2] or, in other words, about collectively redefining the terms underlying the production of urban space. As Evgeny Morozov argues in a commentary for the Financial Times[3], claiming one’s right to the city under the reign of data capitalism needs to include demands for our right to data. What is therefore at stake in data-driven environments is a better understanding of the way citizen-data interaction constitutes acts of production and how access to decision-making about new modes of urban mediation can be distributed evenly in these ecologies.

Although in the ecologies generated by platform urbanism the city is being increasingly reduced to its infrastructural capacity with the help of algorithmic processes, representation and mediation play an important role. As in the avant-garde designs produced by Archizoom and Superstudio in the 1960s and 1970s[4], for platform urbanism the city no longer represents the system but rather becomes the system. The mediation of interests is replaced by a belief in an urban existence free of politics, which is expressed in an infrastructure that takes on the character of a fetish. The envisaged efficiency, optimisation and development of new markets based on the utilisation of data are the central specifications of the requirement profiles of these urban designs. Here, representation is accorded a different function. Rather than simply disappearing into the background, it is supposed to support the system, just as under neo-liberalism the state is supposed to have the task of actively paving the way for the unfolding of free-market forces. In this contest representation thus has a moderating, propitiatory and palliative function that is supposed to enable the system in the guise of urban form to function without restrictions, rather than the task of giving expression to specific interests, of representing and mediating them in visual or spatial terms.

What makes us participate in these processes of profound transformation? We believe it is crucial to acknowledge this “networking” effect of representation in order to gain a better understanding of our own role as protean subjects of interest in the proliferation of platform urbanism. Echoing the pervasive capacity of platform environments to act as an exchange for trading different sets of values (financial, social, aesthetic, etc.), our interest in creating these new urban worlds is also undergoing numerous re-framings as it is communicated back and forth between different platform participants: from desire to expectation and from reward to profit. Both platforms and interest (from Latin: inter-esse) denote situations of “in-between”. With platform environments employed to direct interest to the socio-aesthetic performance of interest itself, speculative operations become de-coupled from their contexts and risks externalised to somewhere else, i.e. outside the platform.

Skilfully manipulating the spectacle of interest becomes the preferred way of managing a collective belief in speculative investments and expanding the reach of what Franco (Bifo) Berardi has conceptualised as the reign of semio-capitalism in which “semio-capital is capital-flux that coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materializing itself”[5]. Functioning as a derivative, representations of interest might propel the rise of platform urbanism through the logics and inclinations of semio-capital, but signification alone does not fully account for the complexities of urban life. The current boom of e-scooters and other novel forms of mobility, for instance, might help to imagine a global market around innovative individual transport systems and contribute to the rise of a gold-rush mentality, with numerous competitors hoping to benefit from this investment bonanza, but realities on the ground pose rather different challenges.

Indeed, many cities have begun to embark on defensive actions, seeking to end a situation in which nobody appears to be accountable for unresolved legal issues, rising tensions among urban populations and mounting environmental costs. The increase of digitally mediated informal practices in the urban realm (unregulated private transport, short-term urban sharing, co-living and co-working schemes) that goes hand in hand with such developments[6] is backed by what Manuel Aalbers has termed “regulated deregulation” [7] – a systematic approach ensuring that greater freedom from state control is given to some economic agents at the expense of others. In the case of digital-platform economies, this approach has often led to an undermining of city authorities’ ability to use data for public benefit, because data is often deemed as being part of a commercial relationship between the city’s (human and non-human) infrastructure and companies whose business model relies on exploiting the potential of big data techniques.

Key to all these frictions that are increasingly configured and played out in the urban environment is the question of access. Access has become the new capital not just for the majority of millennials who are purported to prefer access over ownership, but for everyone wishing to be part of the experience and possibilities of urban life. Organising access to the material, social and symbolic dimension of the city has long been a form of the social and political order, whose features are orientated to the configuration of political participation and the exercise of power and in many cases result in discrimination in terms of class, gender and ethnicity. By contrast, platforms represent a technology with which this access can be transformed into a tradable commodity. Access is no longer something that is granted or denied in a political sense, but becomes a purchasable product, measurable and exchangeable in accordance with its monetary equivalent. In conjunction with platform technologies, access is traded as a form of capital that is bound up with other novel currencies, such as social esteem, trust, value orientation, friendship networks and lifestyle attributes.

The notion “platform” is usually relative to its design, utility and environment, but can be represented by a spatial analogy, as a “raised structure” or literally “levelled shape”, an idea echoed in the way digital platforms provide improved access to people, goods and services. Platforms are often promoted as a kind of superimposed infrastructure that offers an improved range of access or more efficient way of connecting, but they do so by excluding that which is seen as an obstacle or potential interference to the desired action. As an elevated structure, platforms provide better service by leaving something else behind or below. Structurally then, the promise of platforms to offer improved access is thus inherently bound up with acts of exclusion. They exclude what could impinge upon the desired service, and they exclude those who do not happen to be on the platform concerned. In other words, platforms do not just provide access but, by way of this process, gain control over access as such, turning it into an experience of privilege. By not only controlling access (in the most direct sense) to consumer goods and services but by fundamentally reorganising access to a wide spectrum of fundamental domains, such as education, housing, health care, or even political information, platforms are destined to become the most powerful players regulating the way we live in cities. And consequently, some of the fiercest political struggles that are going to arise in cities around the world will inevitably revolve around questions of digital access control.

In bringing these different lines of thinking together and concluding here, we propose reflecting on access in the urban realm as the critical moment in the process of defining the terms of co-producing the cities we live in, rather than as the moment of accepting the terms presented to us. In Irit Rogoff’s words, access is “the ability to formulate one’s own questions, as opposed to simply answering those that are posed to you in the name of an open and participatory democratic process”.[8] Sharing resources across different members of society is never a level playing field. In platform economies, it is very clear that those who formulate the questions produce the playing field, while everyone else is supposed to play along. So as long as access is designed as something that can be granted or sold to people acting in the role of users, subscribers or followers, there will always be an alienating tension between the images projected by service providers and the substance at the core of urban life. In keeping with Neil Brenner’s insistence that “the world economy is a design problem”[9], the consequential demand can only be to deny platforms unrestricted control over access. Rather than simply accepting the prevailing design monoculture of platform urbanism, it is in the public interest to give democratically legitimate organs the opportunity to design access to access – whether in the form of digital access portals that regulate central elements of urban life or in the form of digital communication that can provide a framework for a diversity of social being. As long as access is traded as an investment worthy sort of capital on the free market, the design of new urban forms will be determined by a matrix of privileges and exclusions, scarcity and pricing. We require ways of deploying and further developing technologies that provide equal access to the city for everybody.