Earlier this century, they were heralded as creative cities where—once the right amenities were in place to attract the creative class—innovation would spur economic growth and wellbeing. More recently, we have embraced the belief that our cities could become ‘smart’; data sensing and algorithmic processing at an urban scale bear the promise of producing a collective intelligence, enabling a smoother, safer, more efficient and more comfortable city.

To this list, I’d like to add another such generative metaphor: the city as a licence. Licenses can be understood as permits that give their bearers a particular right. We are already familiar with some of these: think of a permit that allows parking a car in a particular zone, one that grants the right to perform as a street musician in a public space, or one that gives you permission to fish in a public pond.

The frame of ‘the city as a licence’ invites us to look beyond these mundane examples and see the distribution of all urban resources and services as a rights management issue. Access to (public) transport, public spaces, enjoying leisure or sports activities, using urban infrastructures and utilities—we can think of these as rights that can be granted, bought or earned.

I find this lens helps us to critically assess the consequences of an emerging ‘platform urbanism.’ Platform urbanism¹ is a name for the way in which many of our urban services are now managed through digital platforms and their algorithms. Ordering a taxi, finding a date, deciding where to go for a run, finding a place to shop or eat: there’s an app for that! From a consumerist perspective, this development turns urban infrastructures and activities into ‘services’ that can easily be ordered through an app. But from a civic perspective, this leads to questions about the right to the city: who decides on which people receive access and priority to these urban resources? I will argue that the shift toward platform urbanism is no mere a matter of convenience, but may bring about shifts in urban governance.

The City as a Service: algorithmic allocation of urban resources

Let’s make this clear through an example: imagine a parking space in a street not far from the city centre. Not so long ago, such a parking place would have been accessible to all drivers on a first-come, first-served basis. Perhaps there would have been a few restrictions in place: parking could be limited to one hour; no parking on market days; and during office hours, drivers would have needed to deposit a few coins in the parking meter. Perhaps residents would also have been able to apply for a licence to exempt them from these restrictions.

Now imagine this scenario in the ‘smart’ city. Our navigation app will give us a route into the city with the least traffic congestion, offering to reserve a parking spot in a private garage before we depart. The pricing, however, will vary. It could be dependent on the weather; a Dutch beach town has started to charge more for parking on sunny days. It may vary based on the type of car we are driving; in Paris, SUVs must pay triple the rate for regular cars. Prices could also vary based on the real-time calculated demand, assessed through the combination of various data sources: historical demand data, the weather forecast conditions, current traffic conditions, etc.

This second scenario will be sold to us as an upgrade from the first: it’s the city as a service! Thanks to sensors and the technologies of the smart city, finding a parking spot may no longer be the hassle it once was. Dynamic pricing will ensure that there’s always a spot available, provided we are willing to tap our credit card at the chip reader. And indeed, if we subscribe to the smart-city ideal of ‘the city as service’, this may make urban mobility for drivers more comfortable and convenient.

When we apply the lens of ‘the city as a licence’, however, more critical questions emerge. From such a perspective, parking is doled out as a temporary right to access that sought-after spot. This immediately raises the question: who is distributing those rights, based on what conditions, and who is entitled to receive such rights?

In our analogue example, it would have been rather clear: the parking rules would have been set by the municipal government, through democratic procedures. If there are limitations, they were likely intended to protect collective interests, e.g. accessibility, against the individual desire to park one’s car wherever and whenever. Crucially, the same rules would apply equally to all citizens.

So, what has changed in our digital city example? What are the rules in place, and why do different people at different points in time have to pay such different prices? The question becomes more urgent, given that soon these systems may become much more complex. Imagine discounts for holders of a particular brand of credit card, priority for premium subscribers, or privileges that can be earned through loyalty schemes to digital platforms. Perhaps the system has assessed that you are likely to spend lavishly in nearby shops or restaurants, and lures you in with free parking; perhaps you get punished with extra service fees if you have a low credit rating; perhaps, for that same reason, the parking spot may not show up at all in your navigation app. Or perhaps the algorithm has assessed your ability and willingness to pay, and will charge you the maximum amount that it calculates it could extort out of you.

Platform urbanism: from functional to territorial sovereignty

This all may not seem that consequential; the case of parking is perhaps somewhat banal. But let’s extend this scenario beyond the act of finding a parking spot. How do we find our way through the city these days? How do we find a place to eat, to shop, or to wind down on a park bench? How do we access public transport, find medical aid, or meet our friends? The chances are high that we use one or more a digital platforms for searching, evaluating, coordinating, wayfinding, identifying ourselves and paying for services. We have entered the era of platform urbanism, where the algorithms of digital platforms are increasingly steering urban life. As the late William Mitchell pointedly stated: "In the design of smart things and places, form may still follow function. But only up to a point. For the rest, function follows code."²

This may have huge consequences for the ways that cities are governed. The algorithmic governance exercised by the owners of digital platforms may partially replace or compete with democratic governments. Law scholar Frank Pasquale even warns of a shift from "territorial" to what he calls "functional sovereignty." The former refers to our current system, wherein a democratic city government exercises control over its geographic territory, as the legitimate party for setting and enforcing rules. Functional sovereignty, meanwhile, indicates that new actors—mostly platform companies—have become central to and powerful within a particular domain of urban activity, such as room-letting or ride-hailing services, and that they increasingly determine the rules of engagement in that particular sector for service providers and customers alike.

We are currently seeing just such a shift playing out in the management of urban traffic. In cities around the world, local governments—and the residents of normally quiet neighborhoods—have seen streams of cars suddenly appearing on their secondary and non-arterial roads. The culprit was frequently found to be a navigation system such as Waze or Google Maps, diverting traffic off the main thoroughfares and through quieter parts of town to optimize travel time for their users.

However, their few minutes of gain in their commutes meant a loss of quality of life in the affected neighborhoods, plus more exhaust fumes, more risk of accidents, and higher demands on roads that weren’t designed to handle that much traffic. So far, municipal governments have found it difficult to negotiate with platform companies about the algorithmic strategies that are routing traffic through their jurisdictions; the navigation apps have started, de facto, to govern urban traffic flows. In the terms of our metaphor: they have handed out temporary ‘licences’ for the use of secondary city streets to their clients, while not taking into account the interests of the residents of these streets. Beyond the specifics of any given case lies another problem that may be even more important: it is mostly unclear how these algorithms work, what they are optimizing for, and how they handle tensions between various interests; there is no democratic control, nor any debate about the ways they operate. The Austrian cultural theorists Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer have described this as a fundamental shift in the way we think about rights: from constitutionally enshrined rights that are universally granted to all citizens, to rights that are legally determined by ‘‘terms of service” provisions.³

Regulating or contesting the power of these companies is difficult because they are often international operators, organized in complex corporate structures. For instance, Uber drivers in South Africa who wanted to go to court against the platform company eventually discovered that they were formally employed by a subsidiary of Uber in the Netherlands, and therefore active in a very different jurisdiction than the one they were actually driving in. Moreover, as cultural geographer Ola Söderström⁴ has argued, these companies also exercise their "data power". To successfully regulate platform companies, governments need access to the data that these companies have collected, but they are often unwilling to share it.

Data politics in practice

In reaction to such problems, we are witnessing the emergence of what we could call ‘data politics’. Finding that they have limited power to set the rules of the systems that govern them, citizens and governments have started instead manipulating the data that these systems rely upon. Citizens in Los Angeles and, more recently, the beach town of Zandvoort in the Netherlands have collaborated to collectively report fictional road blockages to these navigation services in order to influence their algorithms. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, the city of Sneek followed a similar strategy, indicating to the national traffic database that some of its bridges were out of order and traffic would not be allowed to pass; there was actually nothing wrong with the bridges, but the city did not see any other way to intervene in the routing algorithms. The politics of the future may be more about contesting what data can be legitimately used as input in algorithmic processes, rather than discussing which outcomes would be preferable.

The futures of platform urbanism that we have been anticipating here are, of course, not a given; alternative futures are also possible, in which different actors will play a role in granting access to urban resources. For instance, there is also a lot of interest from groups working on urban commons and civic economies in the use of digital platforms and technologies such as blockchain to manage and regulate urban activities⁵; they see these platforms as alternative accounting structures which, in combination with rights management, might lead to more just cities. They have experimented with designing local currencies or alternative accounting systems, and considered how rights and governance might be tied to acts of citizenship, rather than economic profitability. In such systems, volunteering could be rewarded with voting rights, and expected externalities, such as impacts on the environment, could be factored into the algorithmic governance processes.

These changes, and others like them, could make the city of the future a complex structure to navigate. We can imagine a future in which currencies, rights management schemes, reputational scores and digital profiles become intertwined in the algorithmic processes through which access to urban resources and services is regulated. Multiple jurisdictions, currencies and operative logics may be in effect at the same place and time; some may be operated by hyperlocal commons organisations, others by globalized platform companies, with others again run by municipalities or national governments.

Thinking about the city as a licence challenges us to ask: who gets what, under which conditions — and who is left out?