URBINARY

S2526 / EPISODE 1

Urban studies and political economy in the digital era

Written by Dafni Riga, Yioryos Chatziefthymiou, and Ahmed Ades 

This episode brings together Jeremy Gilbert and Christian Schmid to explore how digital capitalism and Lefebvrian theory can shed light on the changing nature of urban space. Jeremy Gilbert opens the conversation with his work on Platform Capitalism, examining how digital platforms, such as Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon, colonise everyday life and restructure the material and social fabric of cities. He highlights the ways in which platform power operates across scales, from the household to planetary logistics, transforming labour relations, deepening spatial inequalities, and embedding surveillance and algorithmic governance into urban life. In this account, the city no longer functions as an autonomous entity but as a node within vast digital networks, reshaped by the logics of data extraction and platform accumulation.

Christian Schmid then situates these developments within the intellectual legacy of Henri Lefebvre. Revisiting Lefebvre’s notion of the urban revolution, Schmid reflects on the concept of Planetary Urbanisation: a new stage of urbanisation, distinct from the industrial age, that is the product of the digital era. He considers how digital infrastructures and physical spaces are increasingly entangled, producing hybrid spatialities that destabilise bounded definitions of the city. This entanglement, he suggests, redefines public space, accessibility, and inclusivity while also revealing ontological shifts in the city’s essence and functionality. Schmid emphasises that urban planning, historically shaped by transformations in production, now faces the challenge of responding to Platform Capitalism: either through adaptation or through a radical rethinking of its foundations.

Together, Gilbert and Schmid provide complementary perspectives on the contemporary urban condition. Their insights span questions of power, inequality, and planning, and point towards a critical horizon: can urban planning resist Platform Capitalism’s centralisation of power and imagine more democratic futures, or must the discipline itself be transformed to meet the conditions of digital urbanisation?

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Guests

Christian Schmid

Christian Schmid is a geographer, sociologist, and urban researcher. Since 2001, he has held a lectureship in Sociology at the Faculty of Architecture of ETH Zürich, and since 2009 he has been a full Professor at the Department of Architecture there.  
His academic work examines the relationship between the built environment and social development — combining urban/spatial theory with empirical social-science methods to inform architecture and urban design.  
Over decades, Christian Schmid has contributed extensively to research on urbanization processes, both in Switzerland (e.g. metropolitan Zürich) and globally. His comparative urban studies draw from diverse contexts such as Havana, Tokyo, Singapore, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City, among others.  
He also played a foundational role beyond teaching: in 1999 he became scientific director of the project ETH Studio Basel — a major urban research initiative

Jeremy Gilbert 

Jeremy Gilbert is a scholar of cultural and political theory at the University of East London, where he also serves as editor of the journal New Formations. His recent work includes Twenty-First-Century Socialism (2020) and Hegemony Now (2022, with Alex Williams), alongside a long list of earlier academic publications. Beyond academia, Jeremy contributes regularly to public debate, writing for outlets such as The Guardian, The New Statesman, openDemocracy and Red Pepper, as well as for policy organisations including IPPR and Compass. Politically active since his youth, he has been involved in both Labour Party organising and grassroots movements, from the social forum networks of the 2000s to ongoing projects that connect different strands of the British left. Jeremy also works at the intersection of politics and culture. He has long been involved in London’s musical and sonic scenes and helped establish two well-known dance collectives—Lucky Cloud Sound System and Beauty and the Beat—where he continues to DJ. Committed to making ideas accessible beyond universities, he leads Culture, Power, Politics, a public series of seminars and a podcast, and co-hosts the podcasts Love is the Message and #ACFM. 

Resources

Suggested readings  

Cloud Capitalism

Barns, S. (2020). Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities. Palgrave Macmillan.

Gilbert, J. (2024). Techno-feudalism or platform capitalism? Conceptualising the digital society. European Journal of Social Theory, 27(4), 561-578. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310241276474 (Original work published 2024)

Gilbert, J. (2020). Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. Pluto Press.

Graham, S. (2020). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Verso.

Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge.

Holt, J., & Vonderau, A. (2015). “‘Where the Internet Lives’: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. MIT Press.

Kitchin, R. (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. SAGE.

Leszczynski, A. (2020). Digital Economies at Global Margins. MIT Press.

McNeill, D. (2022). “The Global Architectures of Cloud Urbanism.” Urban Studies, 59(14).

Planetary Urbanization

Brenner, N., & Schmid, C. (2011). “Planetary Urbanization.” In Urban Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy. Jovis.

Brenner, N., & Schmid, C. (2015). “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City, 19(2–3), 151–182.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.

Sassen, S. (1991). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press.

Sassen, S. (2001). Global Networks, Linked Cities. Routledge.

Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge.

Kitchin, R. (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. SAGE.

McNeill, D. (2022). “The Global Architectures of Cloud Urbanism.” Urban Studies, 59(14), 2912–2928.

Datta, A. (2021). The Digital Turn in Smart Urbanism. Routledge.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso.