CfP 2027 Spring Special Issue | Algorithmic Frictions in Platform Urbanism

Digital platforms have become a central feature of contemporary urban spaces and societies, driving profound transformations in how cities are inhabited, governed, and experienced (Hodson, McMeekin and Lockhart, 2024; Vale, Ferreira and Rodrigues, 2024). While these transformations affect multiple dimensions of urban life—ranging from mobility and consumption to work and everyday spatial practices—they are often analysed through abstract or system-centred lenses. Less attention has been paid to how such platform-mediated transformations are lived and negotiated on the ground, and to the concrete tensions and frictions that emerge at the intersection of subjects, urban territories, and algorithmic systems and infrastructures.

This Special Issue invites contributions that critically examine these transformations by focusing on the tensions, negotiations, and frictions that emerge in platform-mediated urban life. Rather than approaching platforms solely as abstract technological systems, the issue foregrounds the situated encounters between algorithmic infrastructures, urban territories, and the subjects who inhabit, work, and move through cities.

The notion of algorithmic frictions—inspired by Anna Tsing’s understanding of friction as the unequal, unstable, and productive qualities of interconnection—serves here as an analytical entry point rather than a restrictive framework. Frictions draw attention to moments where digital logics encounter material urban realities, exposing both the conditions that enable platform operations and the limits, conflicts, and possibilities that arise from these encounters. The Special Issue remains open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches that engage critically with these tensions, particularly those attentive to lived experience, embodied practices, and uneven power relations.

We welcome contributions that engage critically with platform-mediated urban life and its tensions, including but not limited to the following themes:

• Situated analyses of digital platforms in urban contexts, focusing on how algorithmic systems intersect with specific territories, infrastructures, and regulatory environments.
• Tensions and frictions between digital mediation and material urban space, including mobility, public space, housing, logistics, and everyday spatial practices.
• Lived experiences of platform users (workers, consumers, residents, intermediaries), and how they negotiate, interpret, and adapt to algorithmic systems in their daily practices.
• The role of subjectivity, embodiment, affect, and situated knowledge in navigating platform-mediated urban environments.
• Socioeconomic relations and conflicts within platform urbanism, including inequalities between different groups of users and workers, as well as relations between platforms, institutions, and urban communities.
• Forms of agency, adaptation, creativity, and everyday resistance emerging from tensions between subjects, territories, and algorithmic systems.
• Platform-mediated mobility and logistics, including on-demand delivery, ride-hailing, micromobility, and other data-driven circulation systems in cities.
• Intersectional perspectives on platform urbanism, with attention to how gender, race, migration status, nationality, and legal precarity shape urban experiences and opportunities.
• Methodological and epistemological approaches to studying platforms in urban contexts, including ethnographic, participatory, experimental, and situated methods that engage with everyday practices and move beyond purely system-centred or “black box” analyses.

Submission guidelines and timeline

The deadline for full paper submissions is 1 May 2026.
Manuscripts should be submitted through the CIDADES, Comunidades e Territórios online platform. While submitting, authors should indicate the title of the special issue in the comments section.

Articles may be submitted in Portuguese or English and must follow the journal’s editorial guidelines (available at: https://revistas.rcaap.pt/cct/about/submissions).

All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review by independent experts, in accordance with the journal’s review procedures. The Special Issue is expected to be published in March 2027.

 

References:

Hodson, M., McMeekin, A., & Lockhart, A. (2024). Urban infrastructure reconfiguration and digital platforms: Who is in control?. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 50, 100816.

Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press

Vale, M., Ferreira, D., & Rodrigues, N (Eds.) (2024). Geographies of the Platform Economy. Springer.