scholarly journals Platform economy: (dis-) embeddedness processes in urban spaces

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Hardaker
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Essential Dynamics ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Platform Economy

AbstractDigital platforms, understood as multi-sided matchmakers, have amassed huge power, reimagining the role of consumers, producers, and even ownership. They increasingly dictate the way the economy and urban life is organized. Yet, despite their influential and far-reaching role in shaping our economic as well as sociocultural world, our understanding of their embeddedness, namely how their activities are embedded in systems of social and societal relationships and how they conceptualize their main functions and actions in relation to their wider setting, remains rudimentary. Consequently, the purpose of this frontier paper is threefold. Firstly, it reveals the need to discuss and evaluate (dis-)embedding processes in platform urbanism in order to understand the underlying dynamics of platform power and urban transformation. Secondly, it aims to reveal the main reasons in regard to the difficulties in pinpointing digital platforms embeddedness. Thirdly, it seeks to propose future research unravelling the (dis-)embeddedness of the platform economy.This paper argues for three main reasons namely unawareness, unaccountability and non-transparency of digital platforms that drive the lack of embeddedness and reaffirms platform power. This is mainly based on the configuration of new commodities, platforms’ strategic avoidance of labour protections and other regulatory frameworks as well as platforms’ secrecy in which they operate. This frontier paper argues that transferring the concept of embeddedness to the platform economy might serve as a valuable tool to understand and pinpoint essential dynamics and relationships at play, therefore proposing embeddedness as a basis for future research on the platform economy. It strongly argues that a more detailed understanding is urgently needed, in order to be able to understand, accompany and actively influence the development of the platform economy in regulatory terms.

Knowledge co-creation in Open Innovation Digital Platforms: processes, tools and services

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (7) ◽  
pp. 1434-1447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tindara Abbate ◽  
Anna Paola Codini ◽  
Barbara Aquilani
Keyword(s):  
Open Innovation ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Case Study Method ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Innovation Intermediaries ◽  
Innovation Platform

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand how Open Innovation Digital Platforms (OIDPs) can facilitate and support knowledge co-creation in Open Innovation (OI) processes. Specifically, it intends to investigate the contribution of OIDPs-oriented to successfully implement all the phases of interactive coupled OI processes. Design/methodology/approach The paper carries out an exploratory qualitative analysis, adopting the single case study method. The case here investigated is Open Innovation Platform Regione Lombardia (OIPRL). Findings The case study sheds light on how OIPRL supports knowledge co-creation through its processes, tools and services as a co-creator intermediary. In its launch stage, the platform simply aimed at giving firms a tool to “find partners” and financial resources to achieve innovative projects. Now, however, the platform has developed into an engagement platform for knowledge co-creation. Research limitations/implications One limitation lies in the particular perspective used to perform the case study: the perspective of the digital platform itself. Future research should focus on the individuals engaged in the platform to better investigate the processes, tools and services used to implement the OI approach. Practical implications The paper suggests ways in which OIDPs could be used by firms for effective exploration, acquisition, integration and development of valuable knowledge. Originality/value The study conceptualizes the role of OIDPs in shaping knowledge co-creation, assuming that the platforms act as Open Innovation Intermediaries (OIIs). Specifically, OIDPs can be observed to function as “co-creator intermediaries” that define, develop and implement dedicated processes, specific tools and appropriate services for supporting knowledge co-creation activities.

scholarly journals ROLE OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION IN SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY - A CASE OF INDORE CITY

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 108-117
Author(s):  
Soma Anil Mishra ◽  
Mayank Saxena ◽  
R.K. Pandit
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Irreversible Process ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Social Sustainability ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Theory Review

Urban Transformation is an irreversible process and is bound to happen. The urban spaces also witness change in Social Sustainability with time. The question aroused out of this situation is that whether there is any linkage between Urban Transformation and Social Sustainability. The research paper is about Urban Transformation of Indore city and variation of Social Sustainability therein. Researcher’s aim is to analyze the level of social sustainability which persists along with the Urban Transformation faced in four distinguished locations of Indore city. The four areas are identified according to their social status. The researcher wishes to identify that process of Urban Transformation can make Social Sustainability better or worse despite of having citizens of similar background. Participation of the community, social bonding, cultural homogeneity and many such factors complement the process of Social sustainability. The paper is an effort for creating consciousness among designers of urban environment focusing upon their role as a social human being towards society. Cities should be designed in a manner so that they have proper interaction spaces and promote involvement of citizens for their own safety and security. Social bonds among neighbors develop a sense of responsibility in citizens. It should be taken care of and monitored as the conditions of society change along with Urban Transformation. To achieve the above objective, researcher has discussed various experts’ points of view regarding Urban Transformation and Social Sustainability. Then a field study is prepared complementing the theory review. The study comprises of ground observations and analysis of questionnaire, which is prepared to have residents’ view regarding Urban Transformation and Social Sustainability. The questionnaire is weighed in five point Likert scale. Later the results are subjected to statistical analysis for testing the hypotheses.

New Urban Spaces

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

scholarly journals Between Village and Town: Small-Town Urbanism in Sub-Saharan Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1417
Author(s):  
Jytte Agergaard ◽  
Susanne Kirkegaard ◽  
Torben Birch-Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Small Town ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Starting Point

In the next twenty years, urban populations in Africa are expected to double, while urban land cover could triple. An often-overlooked dimension of this urban transformation is the growth of small towns and medium-sized cities. In this paper, we explore the ways in which small towns are straddling rural and urban life, and consider how insights into this in-betweenness can contribute to our understanding of Africa’s urban transformation. In particular, we examine the ways in which urbanism is produced and expressed in places where urban living is emerging but the administrative label for such locations is still ‘village’. For this purpose, we draw on case-study material from two small towns in Tanzania, comprising both qualitative and quantitative data, including analyses of photographs and maps collected in 2010–2018. First, we explore the dwindling role of agriculture and the importance of farming, businesses and services for the diversification of livelihoods. However, income diversification varies substantially among population groups, depending on economic and migrant status, gender, and age. Second, we show the ways in which institutions, buildings, and transport infrastructure display the material dimensions of urbanism, and how urbanism is planned and aspired to. Third, we describe how well-established middle-aged households, independent women (some of whom are mothers), and young people, mostly living in single-person households, explain their visions and values of the ways in which urbanism is expressed in small towns. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of this urban life-in-becoming of small towns for urban planning, emphasizing the importance of the development of inclusive local governance. Ultimately, we argue that our study establishes an important starting point for further explorations of the role of the simultaneous production and expression of urbanism in small town urbanization.

scholarly journals COMMUNICATING MARKETS: COMPETITION POLICY DISCOURSE AND DIGITAL PLATFORM POWER

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pawel Popiel
Keyword(s):  
Competition Policy ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
Digital Platform ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Role Of The State

Digital platforms elude legal and regulatory frameworks traditionally used to address market power, speech, and disinformation issues. One of the dominant policy responses to addressing these issues involves reforming competition policy to better manage digital platform markets. This case study examines how stakeholders, including tech giants, their competitors, regulators, and advocacy groups deploy competition policy to address platform power in a series of 2019-2020 U.S. congressional hearings on the subject, with implications for the wider global debate. The article traces the politics underlying these debates, which manifests in variations in stakeholders’ definitions of platform power and their proposed solutions, reflecting tensions over the role of the state in managing markets and in addressing non-economic concerns associated with digital platforms. The article concludes with a consideration of what this politics implies for policy interventions aimed at addressing platform power.

scholarly journals Change by Activism: Insurgency, Autonomy, and Political Activism in Potosí-Jerusalén, Bogotá, Colombia

2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-81
Author(s):  
Juan Usubillaga
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
The One

Cities today face a context in which traditional politics and policies struggle to cope with increasing urbanisation rates and growing inequalities. Meanwhile, social movements and political activists are rising up and inhabiting urban spaces as sites of contestation. However, through their practices, urban activists do more than just occupy spaces; they are fundamental drivers of urban transformation as they constantly face—and contest—spatial manifestations of power. This article aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the role of activism in the field of urban design, by engaging with two concepts coming from the Global South: <em>insurgency</em> and <em>autonomy</em>. Through a historical account of the building of the Potosí-Jerusalén neighbourhood in Bogotá in the 1980s, it illustrates how both concepts can provide new insight into urban change by activism. On the one hand, the concept of insurgency helps unpack a mode of bottom-up action that inaugurates political spaces of contestation with the state; autonomy, on the other hand, helps reveal the complex nature of political action and the visions of urban transformation it entails. Although they were developed at the margins of conventional design theory and practice, both concepts are instrumental in advancing our understanding of how cities are shaped by activist practices. Thus, this article is part of a broader effort to (re)locate political activism in discussions about urban transformation, and rethink activism as a form of urban design practice.

scholarly journals How the Presence of Newly Arrived Migrants Challenges Urban Spaces: Three Perspectives from Recent Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
Martina Bovo
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The City

This article explores the notion of arrival spaces in the recent urban studies literature, and it outlines three emerging perspectives on their role and the associated processes and complexities. Recently, within changing migratory trajectories, the dimension of arrival has gained increasing relevance, and scholars have discussed the growing complexity underpinning it. Within this framework, some contributions reflect on the role of arrival spaces, which currently represent a rapidly changing research subject. However, by the term ‘arrival space,’ authors refer to various types of space, and the article argues that a clearer reference to the spatial dimension of arrival is needed. Spaces are contexts where different actors interact and intervene in the city, and their understanding represents a preliminary step for future research. In this sense, this contribution aims to unpack the previous decade’s debate on arrival spaces. It outlines three main perspectives: The first discusses the role of trans-local contexts, working as nodes in international migration networks; the second follows the debate on arrival neighborhoods; the third suggests that arrival spaces may be defined as all those parts of the urban fabric with which newcomers interact at the moment of arrival. Finally, drawing from this review, the article underlines that arrival spaces are not only specialized areas with migrant newcomers’ concentration, but they may also be ordinary urban spaces that temporarily work for arrival. Hence, future research should further deepen this perspective and more explicitly investigate the relation of arrival spaces to the city and its actors.

Addressing platform power: The politics of competition policy

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pawel Popiel
Keyword(s):  
Competition Policy ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Role Of The State

Digital platforms elude legal and regulatory frameworks traditionally used to address market power, speech and disinformation issues. One of the dominant policy responses to addressing these issues involves reforming competition policy to better manage digital platform markets. This case study examines how stakeholders, including tech giants, their competitors, regulators and advocacy groups, deploy competition policy to address platform power in a series of 2019‐20 US congressional hearings on the subject, with implications for the wider global debate. The article traces the politics underlying these debates, which manifests in variations in stakeholders’ definitions of platform power and their proposed solutions, reflecting tensions over the role of the state in managing markets and in addressing non-economic concerns associated with digital platforms. The article concludes with a consideration of what this politics implies for policy interventions aimed at addressing platform power.

Temporal arbitrage, fragmented rush, and opportunistic behaviors: The labor politics of time in the platform economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 1561-1579
Author(s):  
Julie Yujie Chen ◽  
Ping Sun
Keyword(s):  
Food Delivery ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Digital Work ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Platform Economy ◽  
Demand Service

This article examines how on-demand service workers on digital platforms make and live their time in the case of China’s food delivery industry. Using ethnographic data, the study elucidated multiple facets of couriers’ temporality in their struggle to meet the exacting delivery time imposed by platforms while moving through biased urban spaces as marginalized temporal subjects. It is argued that a new temporal order, referred to as temporal arbitrage in this study, has been normalized in the recent platform economy. It shifts the customer’s cultural expectation to on-demand service at the expense of an increasingly hectic tempo for the workers. We demonstrate the mundane, and sometimes opportunistic, tactics deployed by workers to reconstruct their temporality. The article connects the workers’ temporality to the urban spaces, digital work process, and socioeconomic structures. It fills an important research gap by addressing the under-explored yet essential temporal dimensions in the expanding “just-in-time” labor force.

scholarly journals Governance and Design of Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Research Directions on a Meta-Organization

2021 ◽  
pp. 014920632110450
Author(s):  
Liang Chen ◽  
Tony W. Tong ◽  
Shaoqin Tang ◽  
Nianchen Han
Keyword(s):  
Building Blocks ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Governance Mechanisms ◽  
Design Features ◽  
Organizational Governance ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Integrative Framework ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
And Control

The burgeoning digital-platforms literature across multiple business disciplines has primarily characterized the platform as a market or network. Although the organizing role of platform owners is well recognized, the literature lacks a coherent approach to understanding organizational governance in the platform context. Drawing on classic organizational governance theories, this paper views digital platforms as a distinct organizational form where the mechanisms of incentive and control routinely take center stage. We systematically review research on digital platforms, categorize specific governance mechanisms related to incentive and control, and map a multitude of idiosyncratic design features studied in prior research onto these mechanisms. We further develop an integrative framework to synthesize the review and to offer novel insights into the interrelations among three building blocks: value, governance, and design. Using this framework as a guide, we discuss specific directions for future research and offer a number of illustrative questions to help advance our knowledge about digital platforms’ governance mechanisms and design features.

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