The duality of platforms as infrastructures for urban politics

ABSTRACT Scholarship has recently sprouted up around the notion of “platform urbanism.” In this article, I outline an approach to the specifically communicative politics emerging through, and in relation to, platform infrastructures by drawing on research and observations in London, UK. Defending a phenomenological perspective, which sidesteps an a priori definition of platforms or infrastructures, I put forward a way of thinking about the experiential duality of platforms for urban politics. Here, platform infrastructures can appear as both: emergent objects of urban political concern; and withdrawn media, shaping spatial experience and the political meanings that are made of those spaces.