Knowing the City: Platformed Maps and Citizen Power

• In Event: Paradoxes of Participation: Open Platforms, Closed Knowledge?

Abstract

Maps and other knowledge infrastructures that connect people to place and space are increasingly “platformed,” i.e. made more participatory by the capacity for volunteered data to be added or mashed up with other data. This “platformization” of cartography and urban data introduces a set of parallel tensions that underpin the experience of making and communicating knowledge, as platforms expand. The broadest conflict is between infrastructures and platforms as modes for organizing knowledge (Plantin et al., 2016), but within this, we can also see a tension between decentralization and recentralization, and between open and participatory models of collaboration and the particular forms of enclosure associated with platforms.


The fact that mapping and navigation platforms increasingly organize essential spatial knowledge in society bears consequences for how we understand and communicate about the places that we live in - that is, how we are able to enact digital citizenship (Isin and Ruppert, 2015) or develop data citizenship (Powell, 2016). This raises questions about not only what information is shared, but how access to it is provided. As a result, the tensions between infrastructural control and platform participation enfold other tensions between the openness and enclosure of knowledge, and between its public or corporate control. The key question in this paper is therefore: How are relations of power that exist in the construction of spatial knowledge transformed by the tensions between platform and infrastructure?


We focus in this paper on these changes in the organization and dissemination of spatial knowledge, and how they affect the ways citizen envision and enact their citizenship. We use the case study of urban traffic applications (such as Citymapper), as they are both a participatory cultural practice but also a key means of representing and controlling knowledge about the spaces and places where people live. We show how such platforms represent the alternance between the configurations of infrastructures and platforms, and how they shed light on major transformations in how citizens create, know, and communicate about their world.

Authors

• Jean-Christophe Plantin, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Alison Powell