Digital Platforms and the Maintenance of the Urban Order

Abstract

Neighborhood digital platforms – such as Nextdoor, Citizen, Neighbors, anti-crime Facebook groups, Ring surveillance technology, and 311 see-click-fix applications – are recent entrants into urban life. Existing accounts suggest they help build intra-community relationships, but that they also amplify paranoia, racism, and carceral impulses of American homeowners. We ask: how is the new technology increasing solidarity and exclusionary impulses, and what role does it play in the changing American urban landscape? Using offline and online ethnography of one community’s year-long contestation over public space, we find that three effects of the platforms help explain the maintenance of urban order in this case. First, the platforms push residents to see disparate instances of urban disorder as a linked manifestation of organized crime. Second, the platforms help to turn fleeting and uncorroborated accounts into durable events that foster community efficacy. Third, by increasing perceptions of urban disorder and greater community efficacy, the platforms facilitate the accrual of offline material resources. We suggest that in highly contested areas of American cities – areas where wealthy residents vie with a largely Brown and Black working-class for use of space – neighborhood digital platforms help to funnel services that support property value into smaller sections of otherwise disinvested neighborhoods.