【Open Lecture】Platform Urbanisation Across Scales: How the Digital Impacts our Cities

Open Lecture Information

Title:

【Open Lecture】

Platform Urbanisation Across Scales: How the Digital Impacts our Cities

Lecturer:

National University of Singapore, Assistant Professor : Naomi C. Hanakata

Day and Time

January 16th, 2026(Friday)    17:00 –18:40

Venue：

Building #11　Room 803　 Waseda Campus

Language:

Presented in English (No translation)

Admission:

Free and open to everyone

 

Talk Details:

Abstract:  In this talk I present platform urbanisation as a key driver of contemporary urbanisation processes and a lens for re-grounding spatial analysis in the digital-urban age. Digital platforms – acting simultaneously as infrastructures, governance systems, and socio-political environments – reshape spatial, political, and experiential dimensions of urban life across a planetary scale. By linking material infrastructures, algorithmic governance, and everyday practices, platforms constitute a new techno-political arena in which power, participation, and rights – and everyday life – are continuously reconfigured.

Drawing on ongoing research into e-commerce platforms, I examine the case of Singapore, where platform infrastructures extend as cross-border logistical assemblages while also generating new interstitial, semi-private spaces along the last mile. These developments illuminate how platformisation reorganises not only flows of goods and data but also forms of labour, visibility, and urban encounter.

This talk highlights the political stakes of platform urbanisation, including democratic accountability, inclusion, new constituencies, and collective agency, and calls for a renewed analytical and normative approaches to digital platform practices capable of addressing the uneven, planetary realities of the digital-urban condition.