Provincialising platform citizenship: Citizen participation in and through civic platforms

Commercial digital platforms possess a universal design and interface regardless of cities or particular political-cultural traditions. This is also the case for corporately owned platforms designed to facilitate citizen engagement in civic issues. In contrast, civic platforms rooted in a FOSS approach are configurable and can be adapted in context to produce tailored interactions. In this paper, we examine what this adaptability means for citizenship when citizens can be involved in the making and running of platforms, and can take an active role in city governance using civic platforms. We revisit the analytical framework developed by Cardullo and Kitchin (2019a) – the scaffold of smart citizen participation – to consider the platformisation of urban living designed to empower citizens to take an active role in management and governance processes and decision-making. In particular, we focus on the scaffold’s least explored rungs, ‘citizen power’, providing a comparative analysis of instances of Decidim, a civic platform designed to engender collaborative governance, along with its associated soft infrastructure, in Barcelona, New York and Brazil. We highlight how different instances of the same platform can confer different citizenship relations depending on how it is framed, configured and used. In other words, platform citizenship is provincialized, enabling alternative futures to emerge from mainstream knowledge claims about citizens’ role in platform urbanisation.