The City and the Platform: A Dialogical Keynote

As the ubiquity of digital media has created new informational layer to urban spaces and shifted how urban residents interact, a nascent body of research has begun inquiring into the relationship between cities and platforms.

The event brings together Justus Uitermark, an urban geographer, and Daniela Stoltenberg, a communication scholar, in a dialogical keynote to discuss how the city and the platform relate, interact, and conflict with each other.

Will Cities Survive Platforms? (Justus Uitermark)

An embryonic yet vibrant literature examines the rise of “platform urbanism”—the progressive fusion of platforms and cities. In this talk, Justus Uitermark argues that “platform urbanism” might be an oxymoron. Bringing into conversation classic literature on urbanism and contemporary work on platform capitalism, he proposes that we view platforms and urbanism as different kinds of complex systems that are fundamentally in tension. Abstract as this sounds, it lets us examine how platforms threaten urbanism. As digital platforms are designed to enclose, encode, and monetize social life, they are on a collision course with the city’s serendipity, authenticity, and diversity. The talk draws upon computational and qualitative research on different platforms—TikTok, Google Maps, and Instagram—to show how platform logics undermine urban places and networks. However, Uitermark also shows that the city is not so easily subsumed by platforms—the city “talks back” through sustained collective resistance, as well as everyday practices of evasion and negotiation.

On Urban Movements and Local Public Spheres: How Platforms Shape Local Communication (Daniela Stoltenberg)

While research on political communication in digital environments has often focused on phenomena of transnationalization and geographic extension, the ubiquity of digital platforms has equally refigured how local spaces are discursively constructed and negotiated. In her talk, Daniela Stoltenberg will review multiple of her studies on social-media based local political communication – ranging from local housing discourses to translocal hashtagged movements to symbolic struggles over places of illiberalism – through the lens of platform affordances. The concept of platform affordances captures the way digital infrastructures intersect with user practices to enable or constrain the roles of digital media in sociality. The talk develops a series of theses regarding how the local has become networked, multiscalar, newly infrastructured, and differently contested within the added layer of digital discourses.

No registration required!

About the Speakers

Justus Uitermark is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam. By combining computational with interpretive methods, he examines emerging fault lines in digital cities. His books include Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into Digital Modernity (Routledge, 2025, with Petter Tornberg) and On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (Oxford University Press, 2024, with John D. Boy).

Daniela Stoltenberg leads the DFG-funded junior research group “Local Digital Public Spheres” at the Weizenbaum Institute and is an associated member of the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces”. Her research interests include digital public spheres, the relationship between political communication and space, as well as computational and mixed-methods designs. She has published the book The Spaces of Public Issues (Routledge, 2024).