How does digital technologies impact cities and urban living? This course aims to examine how digital platform services work and operate in urban settings, and  how they it affect urban public cultures and everyday living.

Today cities work both as an inspiration and a testing ground for a range of digital platform services, within fields such as transport, food and goods delivery, and specialized service provision. This  contributes to an ongoing digital reshaping of urban public cultures and everyday living. To handle this development there’s a need to develop more specific knowledge about how urban cultures and social relations are affected by the continuously evolving world of digital platform services. This is the main topic of this course.

The course will consist of a series of fieldwork studies and exercises related to mapping digital service platforms and how they work, both in relation to its online and offline dimensions.

The theoretical component of the course will consist of readings on issues of platform urbanism, both understood as a technological phenomenon and as a specific mode of urban service provision. Furthermore, we will look into the world of urban theory, as a background for discussing how digital platform technologies affect urban cultures and social life.