Digitalisation of Indian smart cities: post-Covid-19 approaches to data, recognition and health monitoring

There is a proliferation of digitalisation of urban and health services in India under the Smart City and Digital Health missions, respectively. This study brings digital and feminist geographies together to understand the role of technologies in urban areas, particularly in health service delivery and how healthcare workers mediate these health platforms. Using a case study of Varanasi city in Uttar Pradesh, India this study documents whether-and to what extent-digital technologies and services enable citizens and service providers to access and improve their lived experiences. The findings indicate a top-down, innovation-focussed model is adopted which excludes and alienates different user groups and citizens shaping their interaction and access to these services.

Platform urbanism in a pandemic: Dark stores, ghost kitchens, and the logistical-urban frontier

As demand for e-commerce surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, investors began pouring billions into start-ups promising to accelerate digitization and automation in small-margin, winner-take-all sectors, such as retail, grocery, and dining. I examine two business models that feature prominently in this swell of financial optimism: dark stores and ghost kitchens. Both sacrifice consumer-facing real estate to create logistical spaces for online order fulfillment, and both are predicted to become permanent fixtures of the post-pandemic economic landscape. However, few have commented on the consequences of this future-in-the-making or who is likely to suffer them. The essay therefore anticipates how "going dark” may impact consumers, workers, and urban geographies. I argue that going dark represents a new threshold in the spatial materialities and financial imaginary of platform urbanism, what I call the logistical-urban frontier. I theorize how this frontier threatens historically disenfranchised urban communities, and I conclude the essay with a reflection on the conflicted temporalities of logistical speculation.

From brick-and-mortar to location-less restaurant: The spatial fixing of on-demand food delivery platformization

Location has historically been vital to a restaurant's success. However, in the past decade, on-demand food delivery (ODFD) platforms like Meituan, Deliveroo, and Uber Eats have progressively increased their market shares, recently facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the new circumstances, are restaurants still constrained by conventional locational factors, such as transport accessibility, customer proximity, and industrial agglomeration? How do ODFD platforms impact the geography of restaurants? This paper innovatively offers a comparative analysis of the different spatial distributions of brick-and-mortar and platform-dependent restaurants. Based on the case of Nanjing, China, robust empirical evidence demonstrates how platformization has spatially affected the catering sector. Using data from the most popular Chinese ODFD platform, Meituan, we analyze the following spatial characteristics of the catering sector in the urban core of Nanjing: transport accessibility, density pattern, agglomeration degree, and horizontal and vertical locational patterns. The findings suggest that platform-dependent restaurants have reduced dependence on transport accessibility. Compared with traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants, platform-dependent restaurants are more dispersed spatially, not only horizontally but also vertically. The digital turn in the catering sector is also noticeably associated with the rise of informal restaurants, such as ghost kitchens in vacant high-rise office spaces.

Centering social-technical relations in studying platform urbanism: intersectionality for just futures in European cities.

Platform-based services are rapidly transforming urban work, lives and spaces around the world. The rise of platforms dependent on largely expendable labour relations, with significant migrant involvement, must be seen as connected, and as replicating larger social processes rather than merely technological changes. This perspective paper urgently calls for an intersectional perspective to better understand social-technical relations crossing the digital-urban interface of platform urbanism in contemporary European cities. Critics of platforms and gig work, to date, have mainly focused on algorithms-based social control, degraded working conditions, problematic employment relations and precariousness of gig work. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has both disrupted and amplified these issues, intensifying the vulnerability of gig workers. For example, in Sweden, migrant groups and gig workers were separately identified as being hardest hit by Covid, but with little attention to the interconnectivity between these categories, nor to how these groups are co-positioned vis-a-vis larger socio-economic inequalities. Thus, we argue for a deeper understanding of the social processes underlying platforms and for active investigation of how inequalities are being produced and/or maintained in/by these processes. Urban planners, designers and policy makers will need to actively address the hybrid (digital and physical) urban spaces produced in platform urbanism in order to prevent spatial and economic inequalities. We argue for a stronger recognition of interrelated and overlapping social categories such as gender and migrant status as central to the construction of mutually constitutive systems of oppression and discrimination produced in and through the platform urbanism.

A smart urbanism management platform: Case of amenagement regulations

We all aspire to urbanism that recognizes the social, economic, political, cultural, and physical-spatial dimensions of cities: urbanism, which, based on working tools (SDAU, planning regulations, etc.), based on a quality model, will allow good practice and good translation of these systems on the territory (neighborhood, city, rural environment, etc.). Due to that, the authors propose and develop an automated urban planning amenagement platform for the generation of updates proposed by urban planning experts in order to improve the quality of amenagement regulations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Beyond the smart city: a typology of platform urbanism.

Platform urbanism has emerged in recent years as an area of research into the ways in which digital platforms are increasingly central to the governance, economy, experience, and understanding of the city. In the paper, we argue that platform urbanism is an evolution of the smart city, constituted by novel, digitally-enabled socio-technical assemblages that enable new forms of social, economic and political intermediation. We offer a typological framework for a better conceptualization of platform urbanism and its complex socio-economic relationships. We further outline several directions for future research on platform urbanism, specifically: a.) the need to critically investigate new power geometries of corporate, legal and regulatory alignments; b.) how platform urbanism may be expressed in, and affect, cities in the Global South; c.) how it may need to be critically engaged with in regard to its development in response to emergent events such as the Covid-19 pandemic; and d.) how it may shape visions of the current and future city.