Special session 3:
Digital Platforms as Fixes to Urban Challenges: Promises, Pitfalls, and Power Shifts

This session critically examines the role of digital platforms in addressing urban challenges. As cities worldwide grapple with mounting social, economic, and environmental crises, digital platforms have been increasingly promoted as solutions (Datta, 2015; Basiri, Azim, and Farrokhi, 2017; Kumar et al., 2020). From smart city technologies to digital governance models, platform-based interventions promise to enhance urban efficiency and innovation. However, their growing influence as apparent technological fixes demands critical scrutiny (Repenning and Hardaker, 2024). This session explores how digital platforms shape urban governance, impact inequalities, and transform public spaces—while exposing contradictions, gaps, and tensions in their use.
Scholars across digital, political, and economic geographies, as well as media studies and allied fields, have analyzed how platforms shape urban environments and power dynamics (Barns, 2020; Rolf and Schindler, 2023; van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018). Platforms are often celebrated for increasing efficiency, democratizing services, and fostering innovation, yet their integration into urban governance has led to unintended consequences: deepening inequalities, new forms of social exclusion, and shifts in power relations between governments, private actors, and citizens. Operating through public-private partnerships, platforms blur the lines between state regulation and corporate control, creating new mechanisms of surveillance, exclusion, and marginalization. As collaborations between digital platforms and governments become more frequent, it is crucial to examine how these partnerships reshape governance frameworks and redefine market boundaries (Hardaker and Appel, 2025).
In addition, the increasing prominence of platforms in work and leisure practices of daily life increases the dependence on platform companies, while the benefits for local stakeholders, such as independent shop owners, are very difficult to foresee and thus remain largely uncertain (Repenning and Hardaker, 2024).
The rise of AI-powered technologies further complicates this landscape, raising pressing ethical concerns around algorithmic governance, automated decision-making, and the opacity of platform-driven urban management. In addition, problems of the structuration of daily life through platforms are contradictory fixed through AI technologies. For instance, the constant hunger for data that platform interfaces implicate is fixed through AI-enhanced data, text, and image creation supporting instant content uploads. While platforms offer solutions for urban mobility, waste management, housing, and public service delivery, they also introduce new vulnerabilities: exacerbating inequalities, undermining transparency, and threatening data privacy.
This session invites both conceptual and empirical contributions that critically engage with the role of digital platforms in urban problem-solving. We welcome presentations that explore the intersection of digitalization, inequality, governance, and sustainability, addressing themes such as:

•    Digital platforms as urban “fixes”: How and why platforms are framed as solutions to urban crises, and what problems they actually solve—or create. 
•    Short-term solutions vs. long-term consequences: Examining whether platform-driven interventions address structural urban challenges or merely provide temporary fixes. 
•    Platform-led infrastructuralization: How digital platforms develop, control, and integrate physical infrastructure to shape urban environments.
•    Digital platforms in urban governance: Their role in decision-making, policy implementation, and regulation.
•    Platforms and inequality: How platform-based urban solutions reinforce or mitigate socio-economic and spatial inequalities.
•    AI and automation in urban spaces: Opportunities and risks in integrating AI-driven technologies into city infrastructure.
•    Environmental impacts of digital platforms: Examining sustainability challenges and ecological costs.
•    Privacy, surveillance, and data sovereignty: Platform-driven governance and its implications for citizen rights.
•    Case studies of platform interventions: Successes, failures, and lessons learned from urban platformization.
This session provides a space for critical discussions on the promises and pitfalls of using digital platforms to "fix" urban challenges. By engaging with diverse perspectives, we aim to deepen the understanding of how platforms reshape urban landscapes, economies, and governance structures.