Junk Maps: How Urban Mobility Apps (Re)Produce Digital Waste and Infrastructural Overload in Milan and Amsterdam

The article examines mobility app ecosystems in Milan and Amsterdam as digital infrastructures that organise practices of movement, waiting, and urban consumption, while producing specific forms of digital and material waste. Starting from a systematic mapping of mobility apps, the study focuses on applications that provide journey-planning solutions—such as Google Maps—and shows how forced choices, traffic concentration, technical malfunctions, delayed updates, service insufficiencies, and forms of passenger exclusivity contribute to making urban travel a more complex and uneven practice, while generating multiple forms of productive waste. Drawing on the walkthrough method, beginning from the app store search phase, the research compares interfaces, access logics, registration requirements, tracking systems, monetisation strategies, and communicative rhetorics. The analysis highlights how design choices produce different kinds of waste: digital waste, generated through data accumulation, advertising, and persistent notifications—often raising privacy concerns—and material waste, linked to physical infrastructures, urban congestion, and the intensive consumption of public space. Based on two years (2023–2025) of digital ethnography in the two cities, the study reveals that, despite the promise of service integration, institutional apps and private navigation platforms yield a fragmented user experience, accompanied by an increase in data extraction and a diffuse production of digital waste. In conclusion, it argues that mobility apps do not merely facilitate movement but actively reconfigure urban ecologies, participating in the production of urban space and, consequently, generating new forms of pollution, commercial opacity, and infrastructural overload.