Seeing Amsterdam through Google Maps: Uneven visibility and crowd-based mapping

How is the city represented and shaped through Google Maps? Through a computational analysis of over 106,000 places in Amsterdam, this paper examines how Google Maps represents and creates urban hierarchies and differences. Drawing on critical cartography and platform studies, we examine how Google Maps’ affordances and modes of crowd-sourced data collection generate uneven platform geographies: consumption-oriented places, scenes, and neighbourhoods stand out while others are pushed to the background. However, we also show that Google Maps intervenes into processes of segregation and gentrification in complex ways; we do not find straightforward platform-promoted displacement. Through a granular analysis of one street, we show that there are synergistic connections between places that may seem to be in competition and that different communities use Google Maps to appraise the street in culturally specific ways. Both our city-wide and street-level analyses demonstrate that Google Maps functions as a constitutive urban infrastructure that creates platform geographies by spawning hierarchies of visibility and marking differences.