Abstract
This chapter addresses the rise of platforms through the lens of platform economics, a particular sub-field of microeconomics active since the dot-com era. This field has developed important insights into specific tactics of platform influence. Key focus areas include the use of ‘steering’ tactics to engineer value-sharing, relational forms of platform intermediation and the framing of markets through the lens of platform ecosystems. This chapter addresses not only the widespread advocacy of platform business models across diverse economies, but also how data accumulation has emerged as a significant tactic of market ‘steering’ and value extraction within platform ecosystems, which ensure platform companies can leverage programmability and interconnection in order to entrench value capture and also influence. The financialisation of platform intermediation is also discussed in the context of key urban services, including office space provision, design and construction and transportation. The integration of platform intermediation and financialisation, achieved in the context of datafication, is discussed as being critical to the constantly speculative pursuit of platform scale.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abe, F. (2015). Why Couldn’t BlackBerry Keep Up? Harvard Business School Digital Initiative.
Accenture. (2011). Building and Managing the Intelligent City.
Barns, S. (2014a). Open Data and the G20: The Value Is There to Share. The Conversation.
Barns, S. (2014b). Platform Urbanism: The Emerging Politics of Open Data for Urban Management. American Association of Geographers Annual Conference, Tampa, FL.
Barns, S. (2016). Mine Your Data: Open Data, Digital Strategies and Entrepreneurial Governance by Code. Urban Geography, 37, 554–571.
Benkler, Y. (2004). “Sharing Nicely”: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production. Yale Law Journal, 114(2), 273–358.
Berners Lee, T. (2009). The Next Web: TED Talk. Available from: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.
Berners Lee, T. (2017, March 12). I Invented the Web. Here Are Three Things We Need to Change to Save It. The Guardian.
BIS. (2013). UK Department of Business Innovation and Skills Smart Cities Background Paper.
Botsman, R., & Rodger, R. (2010). What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Business.
Brown, M. (2016, Winter). The Making of Airbnb. Boston Hospitality Review, 4.
Chase, R. (2017). Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs.
Choksi, M., & Fujiu, R. (2016). Behind the Wheel. Available from: https://www.uber.com/en-AU/newsroom/behind-the-wheel/. Accessed 6 June 2016.
Crommelin, L., Troy, L., Martin, C., & Pettit, C. (2018). Is Airbnb a Sharing Economy Superstar? Evidence from Five Global Cities AU—Crommelin, Laura. Urban Policy and Research, 36, 429–444.
Fowler, G. (2015, May 5). There’s an Uber for Everything Now. Wall Street Journal.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2008). Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for Other Worlds. Progress in Human Geography, 32(5), 613–632.
Graham, M. (2019). The Global Gig Economy: Towards a Planetary Labour Market? First Monday, 24(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i4.9913.
Graham, M., Hjorth, L., & Lehdonvirta, V. (2017). Digital Labour and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labour Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23, 135–162.
Gray, J. (2014). Open Data and the Politics of Transparency. European European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2014. University of Glasgow, Glasgow.
Gurran, N., & Phibbs, P. (2017). When Tourists Move In: How Should Urban Planners Respond to Airbnb? Journal of the American Planning Association, 83, 80–92.
Hern, A. (2014, October 8). Sir Tim Berners-Lee Speaks Out on Data Ownership. The Guardian.
Hickey, S., & Cookney, F. (2016, October 30). Airbnb Faces Worldwide Opposition. It Plans a Movement to Rise Up in Its Defence. The Guardian.
Hirshon, L., Jones, M., Levin, D., McCarthy, K., Morano, B., & Simon, S. (2015). Cities, the Sharing Economy, and What’s Next. Washington, DC: National League of Cities.
Hugill, D., & Slee, T. (2016). The Sharing Economy Blues. Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political. Available from: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/10/03/sharing-economy-blues/.
Isaac, E. (2014). Disruptive Innovation: Risk-Shifting and Precarity in the Age of Uber (BRIE Working Paper 2014-7). Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, University of Berkeley.
Lathrop, D., & Ruma, L. (2010). Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency and Participation in Practice. Sebastopol, CA: O’Relly Media.
Lessig, L. (2001). The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House.
Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press.
Luque-Ayala, A., & Marvin, S. (2015). Developing a Critical Understanding of Smart Urbanism? Urban Studies, 52, 2105–2116.
Mazzucato, M. (2018). The Value of Everything. New York and London: Allen Lane.
Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane.
Nestor, M., Davidson, J., & Infranca, J. (2016). The Sharing Economy as an Urban Phenomenon. Yale Law and Policy Review, 34.
OGPD. (2011). Open Government Partnership Directive. In GOTUSO America (Ed.), Changing the Culture of Government.
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.
O’Reilly, T. (2010). Government as a Platform. In D. Lathrop & L. Ruma (Eds.), Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency and Participation in Practice. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
Orszag, P. (2009). Open Government Directive. In The White House (Ed.), Memorandum No. M-10-06.
Pettersen, L. (2017). Sorting Things Out: A Typology of the Digital Collaborative Economy. First Monday, 22.
Pollio, A. (2019, July). Forefronts of the Sharing Economy: Uber in Cape Town. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12788.
Research, G. (2013). Towards Reimagining Governance: Mapping the Pathway Towards More Effective and Engaged Governance (GovLab Research Working Papers).
Rifkin, J. (2014). The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rowe, P. C. M. (2017). Beyond Uber and Airbnb: The Social Economy of Collaborative Consumption. Social Media + Society, 3, 1–10.
Russo, F., & Stasi, M. L. (2016). Defining the Relevant Market in the Sharing Economy. Internet Policy Review, 5.
Sanyal, R., & Ferreri, M. (2018). Platform Economies and Urban Planning: Airbnb and Regulated Deregulation in London. Urban Studies, 55(15), 3353–3368.
Slee, T. (2016). What Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. New York: OR Books.
Socrata. (2013). Ian Kalin Joins Socrata from the White House as Director of Open Data.
Söderström, O., Paasche, T., & Klauser, F. (2014). Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling. City, 18, 307–320.
Solazo, G. (2015). Open Data: Where the Movement Started and Where It’s Headed. ComputerWorld (UK).
Sundararajan, A. (2016). The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Tiwana, A. (2013). Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture, Governance, and Strategy (1st ed.). Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Ubaldi, B. (2013). Open Government Data: Towards Empirical Analysis of Open Government Data Initiatives. Geneva: OECD Publishing.
Van der Zee, R. (2016, October 6). The ‘Airbnb Effect’: Is It Real, and What Is It Doing to a City Like Amsterdam? The Guardian.
Van Doorn, N. (2017). Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the ‘On-Demand’ Economy. Information, Communication & Society, 20, 898–914.
Wachsmuth, D., & Weisler, A. (2018). Airbnb and the Rent Gap: Gentrification Through the Sharing Economy. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50, 1147–1170.
Wingfield, N. (2018). Hear Steve Jobs, at the Dawn of App Store, Predict the Future of Mobile. The Information.
Yu, H., & Robinson, D. (2012). The New Ambiguity of ‘Open Government’. UCLA Law Review.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barns, S. (2020). The Uberisation of Everything. In: Platform Urbanism. Geographies of Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9725-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9725-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9724-1
Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9725-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)