Platform City People

Abstract

Platform City People

In the course of my research on what I am now thinking about as the transition from smart cities to platform cities, I almost immediately began to ask what are the characteristics of the proposed platform citizens, the humans who will live in these places. How are the proposed inhabitants of platform cities are imagined by the developers and promotors of these cities? In other words how the developers understand the “nature” of the inhabitants of these neoliberal smart urban developments. Drawing on a range of examples from state models like Saudi Arabia’s NEOM and the Japanese Super Cities program to libertarian start-up city Próspera and the Praxis Network State, and the I show that the envisaged inhabitants of such platform cities are a specific kind of human being, not humanity in general but platform city people who combine a technologically-enabled class and political identity (property-owning, entrepreneurial, libertarian) with generic environmental 'goodness', that verges on an imagination of transhumanist speciation (data-driven, surveillant, robotic). I conclude by asking what this means for understandings of collective humanity in the digital.

This talk is part of the series "Critical Data & Surveillance Studies" organized by Professor Azadeh Akbari.

 

Date & Time

The talk will take place on July 6, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. at the Seminarhaus, room SH 1.101 (Campus Westend, Goethe University).

It is also possible to join the talk online via Zoom.

 

Photo by Lianhao Qu auf Unsplash

Bio

David Murakami Wood

David M. Wood is the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies at the University of Ottawa, Director of the CSS/Lab, and a full Professor in the Department of Criminology. He is also a Visiting Professor at the C3S at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and the Catholic University of Lille, France. His is founding editor and current Co-Editor-in-Chief of Surveillance & Society, the international, open access, peer-reviewed journal of surveillance studies, and a founder-member and a member of the Board of Directors of the Surveillance Studies Network. His main current research interests are around smartness, and post-smart cities / AI cities / platform cities, AI and ambient intelligence, the resurgence of authoritarianism, and the emergence of a planetary surveillance society.