October 4th, Stefania will kick off the Stads Salon Urbains Lecture series: Platform Urbanism: Data Commons, Citizen Contestation and the Governance of Cities with her work: ‘Beta-testing democracy? Platforms forging citizens & how to resist them’.

About the lecture series:
Digitally enabled platforms are reshaping cities in the twenty-first century. Platform-based activities are spatially concentrated in cities and build upon existing uneven geographies while feeding into wider urbanization dynamics of economic development, environmental action, and everyday life. Urban platforms connect people and resources in new ways, recasting infrastructures as services, and make it possible for big data and monitoring logics to steer urban development. This raises questions about who determines such connections, who has the power to shape data-driven decision-making and what are possible modalities of contestation.

This public lecture series investigates the logics and rationales of digital platforms, the role of data and code in urban governance and surveillance, the infrastructural channeling of urban knowledge, and the progressive potential of platforms to facilitate sharing and the commoning of data.

Organized by BCUS, LSTS, SMIT, Cosmopolis, CRIS & Brussels Academy