Local Best Practices: Urban Governance and the Ongoing Platformization Process

1 Introduction

Numerous scholars concur that cities serve as the primary venues for the development of the platform economy, where novel labor relationships and processes of accumulation and disintermediation in production relations rapidly emerge and stabilize. However, while cities are acknowledged as the geographical spaces where the social and economic impacts of platforms can be directly observed, the nature and potential of the relationship between urban politics and the governance of changes instigated by these platforms remain less defined.

Several challenges arise when attempting to outline and identify the characteristics of local governance concerning platforms and their effects. The first level of ambiguity originates from the difficulty in unequivocally defining the topic from a thematic perspective. The platform phenomenon is multifaceted and tends to relate to a variety of policy domains, including but not limited to labor, welfare, economic development, urban planning, tourism, data management, and digital transformation. Simultaneously, the task of demarcating the scope of local platform governance is complicated by the wide-ranging diversity of entities involved in urban governance. These entities, starting with local governments, differ significantly in scale, power, competencies, and more. This diversity adds layers of complexity to the issue, requiring nuanced understanding and careful analysis

The goal of this chapter is to delineate the constraints, opportunities, and potential for local authorities to govern the urban implications of the platform economy. Where feasible, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the most innovative strategies, methods, and practices trialed in European cities. Drawing on field research conducted as part of the PLUS Project in Bologna, Barcelona, and Lisbon, this chapter aims to encapsulate the key insights garnered and contemplate potential models for urban governance of platforms.

This chapter is structured into three parts. In the first section, we construct the fundamental framework of our theoretical approach to the issue of urban governance within the digital ecosystem. We start by examining the notion of governance through its urban lens, focusing on three main processes: the decentralization of functions and competencies previously handled by the central state, the restructuring of the urban political sphere, and the expansion of the urban policy agenda. Further in this section, we define the ongoing platformization process and address its implications on the urban digital ecosystem. We then integrate these concepts to create a comprehensive theoretical framework for studying and analyzing specific cases of urban digital ecosystem governance. This framework revolves around three primary dimensions: the regulatory framework, the urban public sphere, and the urban digital agency. This theoretical model serves as a common interpretative lens for examining different case studies, capturing the various aspects of the relationship between platforms and local governance across three complementary dimensions.

In the subsequent section, we apply the theoretical framework developed in the first part to describe, analyze, and interpret three specific cases. These illustrate different modes of urban governance addressing the impacts of platformization at territorial and local scales.

The final section will offer concluding remarks, drawing from insights discussed in the previous sections, and provide general recommendations for policy makers.

2 Part I—A Theoretical Framework for the Urban Governance of the Digital Ecosystems and of the Ongoing Platformization Process

This section proposes a conceptual framework to deal with the relationship between the urban governance, the digital transformation of urban societies, and the challenges posed by the rapid spread of platform economy and its impact on the production and use of urban spaces.

The core assumption of this chapter is that the study of possible examples of urban governance of the platforms’ activity requires to observe their interplay with the broader urban digital ecosystem where these take place. Only in this manner, it would be possible to identify context-related dependencies and enablers of democratic and innovative policies and practices and technological agency, and eventually generalize findings and practices and recommend their dissemination and replication in new contexts.

In this introductive paragraph we start to debate the notions of Urban Governance and of Digital Ecosystem within the ongoing platformization process. We also provide an operational definition of lean and sectorial platforms. Finally, we identify three main variables to assess the local authorities’ actions in the governance of the urban impacts of the platform economy.

The Ambiguous Notion of Urban Governance

The use of the notion of “urban governance of the digital ecosystem” requires a set of preliminary clarifications and reflections that will help to define exactly the focus of this chapter.

The understanding of “urban governance” entails—per se—several ambiguities and can be interpreted differently in different scientific domains. The idea of governance entails a vision regarding how politics should be organized and managed, while outline a shift toward a more flexible, innovative, and adaptive manner to make and implement decisions and public policies. From this perspective it is opposed to the “old fashioned” government methods and techniques that characterized the Keynesian state. In this sense, the same notion of governance is not neutral, and has been widely used as an umbrella concept for a variety of public sector reforms that have been promoted starting from the nineties. Namely, several scholars emphasized the neoliberal genealogy of this term and the fact that his popularity arose along with the diffusion of the new public management agenda that adapted and translated to the public sector several concepts coming from the private sector.

In this perspective, the focus on the “urban” dimension of governance relates to the new role(s) assigned to cities in re-designing the public sector after the ongoing process of reshaping the prerogatives and role of the nation-state (Raco, 2009). The malleability of this notion underpinned, over the last decades, different reconceptualization. This is the case, for example, of the use of the “Good governance” notion used by UNDP, OECD, and other international organizations (Elahi, 2009), centered on the inclusive dimension in policy making. But it is also possible to find even an anti-hegemonic understanding of urban governance as the one proposed by neo-municipalism, where it could be intended as “the strategic transformation of municipal governance by citizen-led movements and the radical democratization of urban political economies” (Thompson, 2020, 5).

Although, what concerns our analysis are three key issues underlining the notion of urban governance:

First, the notion has to do with the urban rescaling of the functions and competencies formerly carried out by the nation-state or other institutional governments, in a process that directly involved several international organizations as promoters of institutional decentralization. The same EU, while planning and implementing a supranational State restructuring process, has been in parallel promoting reforms to restructure national institutions inspired to the subsidiarity principle and assigned to subnational tiers of government a pivotal role in the distribution and use of resources coming from structural funds. This double movement tended to downscale welfare state competences (education and healthcare in primis) toward urban authorities, thus reflecting an attempt to deconstruct the rights to welfare associated to the Keynesian nation-state (Brenner, 2004).

Second, the notion of urban governance has to do with the restructuring of the urban political sphere, and the assumption that urban politics are not limited to public institutions, but also involve a broad variety of individual and collective actors (UN-HABITAT, 2002). As it is easily inferable, there are different understandings of who are the non-official urban actors and stakeholders that shall be considered as part of the renewed urban sphere. On one hand such “extension” can be intended normatively in an inclusive perspective, as an exhortation to involve all city inhabitants and producers of urban space in urban politics, as for example in the case of the democratic innovation experiments deployed in many European cities along the last decades (e.g participatory budgeting, public consultations, citizens assemblies, and juries, participatory urban planning, living labs, etc.) (Allegretti, 2010; Saward, 2003). On the other hand, it can be intended—in a less innovative manner—as a merely descriptive perspective of the reconfiguration of urban political power under neoliberalism: i.e. as a portrait of the shift of political power from public institutions toward mixed urban regimes, including transnational powers, international networks of interests and capitals, as well as those infrastructural actors that are capable to condition the technological choices in the urban political sphere (Blanco, 2013; Mossberger & Stoker, 2001).

Third, the notion of urban governance implies the extension of the urban politics agendas, broadening the scope of intervention of urban politics to a wide range of policy areas, often larger than those formally attributed to urban authorities. The historical rolling-out of the urban governance notion generally relates it to topics and sectors typical of the neoliberal agenda and orients urban governance to several policy areas aimed at creating entrepreneurial and attractive environments for competitive businesses and international capitals. In this perspective a pivotal role is played by the shaping of networks and infrastructures necessary to make the urban environment attractive toward international capitals and for entrepreneurs, including in particular those digital infrastructure (both soft and hard) that compose the urban digital ecosystem (Gauk et al., 2019): i.e. key enablers of innovative businesses development.

Lean and Sectorial Platforms: The Ongoing Platformization Process and the Urban Digital Ecosystem

The underlying assumption of this chapter is that the urban digital ecosystems of European cities are undergoing a process of platformization, meaning that the platforms and their organizational models are reshaping the social and technical boundaries of urban societies. This process is pervasive and not limited to the industrial sectors where certain digital platforms already dominate, but also affects the same complex sociotechnical infrastructures that enable and define the conditions through which the four platforms work.

Recently, van Dijk et al. (2018) suggested an analytical tripartite division to address the layered structure of the ongoing planarization process: (i) the micro-level of the single platforms, (ii) the meso-level of an ecosystem of platforms, and (iii) the macro-level of the platform societies. This analysis also provided a taxonomy to distinguish platforms typologies and their role within the digital ecosystem architecture: Infrastructural platforms (Big five, GAFAM—Google, Amazon, Microsoft Facebook, Apple), Sectoral platforms (Uber, Airbnb, Deliveroo, etc), Complementors.

While infrastructural platforms provide the whole digital ecosystem on which sectoral platforms are based upon, sectoral platforms act as connective platforms between users for the provision of specific service lines (multisided markets). Finally, complementors are organizations or individuals that offer goods or services to end users via platforms. Complementors can be public authorities and governments, private actors such as businesses, micro-entrepreneurs or individuals offering their tangible (such as cars, apartment, etc.) and intangible “assets” (such as expertise and professional skills).

This digital ecosystem is encompassing a set of processes such as datafication, commodification, and selection. Datafication designates the growing capacity of platforms to translate into quantitative measures several spheres of sociality and aspects of reality formerly hardly to quantify (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013), commodification, describes the way in which the sociality relationship become to be exchanged in the market as a commodities thanks to the direct intermediation by platforms, finally, selection, entails the curation mechanism by which the platforms shape their offer for the users, based on data and information on the most relevant topic and research terms.

In urban digital ecosystems, digital platforms are integrated and cross-fertilize with the pre-existing social and juridical structures, adapting to the contextual configuration of power relations. So, there is not a radical rupture, but platforms are infiltrating pre-existing institutions and the practices that structure societal organization, while—at the same time—changing the latter.

Yet, combining these definitions with the conceptual framework proposed by van Dijck et al. we can operate a functional taxonomy, based on the extent of the firms’ infrastructural systems and the capability to create a whole digital ecosystem to which other economic, institutional, social, and individual actors are based upon infrastructural platforms and sectoral platforms. The formers provide a wide range of enabling services (such as search engine, cloud computing, data storing, managing and analytics, messaging, e-mail, geolocation etc.), that are necessary to make the latter works. As revealed by the name, sectoral platforms operate in specific industries and sectors, such as transportation, hosting, food-delivery, information, etc., and act as “connector” between users (sellers and consumers).

Although this does not apply to all cases, many sectoral platforms offering services like delivery, passenger transports, or housing services, are also defined as lean platforms. What distinguishes the lean platforms from other models is the very low dimensions of the proprietary assets. These platforms own the intermediation software which mediates between users and the software of data- management. Any other kind of assets, such as houses, workforce, and cars, are supposed to be external.

Investigating the Data-Territorial Nexus

If sectorial and lean platforms constitute the main characteristics of the case studies analyzed in this chapter, a greater understanding of the ongoing platformization process requires to further clarify the nexus between their territorial dimension (urban) and the role played by data.

Using the conceptualization proposed by Woodcock and Graham (2020), platforms acting are geographically tethered. This means that they are marked by the materiality and visibility of the work performed locally (in the urban contexts) and, thus, eventually with the possibility for policy actors, union representatives, etc. to intervene to regulate platforms’ activities. In fact, the data collected by these platforms, which then give rise to the datafication, commodification, and selection processes, are related to specific territories, and therefore subject to a strict relationship between different administrative and institutional levels

The relevance of data in contemporary organizations and industries is such that they are treated as a form of capital (Sadowski, 2019). In fact, as we argued in the previous paragraph, datafication is at the core of the platform society and the selection processes are gradually being set up on the basis of a data-driven selection. The huge amount of data is produced by the constant activity of platforms users (both workers and customers) and this data collection could be based on informed consent or not: indeed, despite the existence of a formal procedure to ensure informed consent of users, the same platforms users could be aware or not of the fact that their online activities are constantly measured and transformed in data to be valued by Hi-tech companies (Ippolita, 2016). It is also part of the commodification process of ever more social spheres, by which platforms accrue the value extraction from everyday life activities. For example, to describe these dynamics, Christian Fuchs uses the expression informational capitalism: “In informational capitalism, knowledge has become a productive force, but knowledge is produced not only in corporations, in the form of knowledge goods, but also in everyday life, for example, by (...) consumers of media who produce social meaning and hence are prosumers; users of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and similar sites, who produce informational content that is appropriated by capital (...)” (Fuchs, 2010, 186–87). Instead, Antonio Casilli (2019) defines these kinds of activities as online social work (travail social en réseau). So, the globally distributed digital ecosystem enabled an unprecedent data collection, with relevant effects on multiple social spheres, such as urban and political governance, urban planning (for example, smart cities), technological and infrastructural development, business, and industrial models (for example, the Internet of Things and the 4.0 Industry). Furthermore, this data collection enabled an unprecedent society-wide surveillance system (Zuboff, 2019).

3 How to Study the Governance of the Urban Digital Ecosystem?

As one of the purposes of this chapter is to clarify the boundaries, limits, and potentialities of the action of local authorities in the governance of the urban impacts of the platform economy, we identified three main lenses to study and observe how cities are dealing with the governance of their digital ecosystem and what is their actual possibility to influence and steer the way in which sectoral service platforms are affecting urban life. These three variables have been described through three main research questions:

Regulatory Frameworks: to what extent the urban authorities have the formal power to regulate and enforce regulations related to the lean platforms’ activity, either through direct regulation or indirectly, by influencing industry policies or governing key infrastructural choices?

Urban public sphere: in what manner the urban public sphere has been extended to include non-institutional actors in public policy making, and who/what are the social and political actors that gained voice in the process of digitization and platformization of the urban society (with a specific focus on the voice of the weak actors of the platform society)?

Urban Technological Agency: to what extent urban authorities and urban stakeholders are capable to lead and steer autonomously the digital transformation in the city and in particular what is the approach toward data management, considered as a key variable for the contextual configuration of power relations in the platform society?

3.1 Regulatory Frameworks

The first dimension that conditions the approach to the urban governance of the platform society regards the regulatory powers and the level of autonomy of the urban authority in establishing and enforcing regulations on those policy domains that affect, directly or indirectly, the configuration of the platform economy in their urban space. Not only it is a matter of formal power attributed constitutionally to cities in each country, but it is also a spatial matter. Indeed, while the scope of cities power is limited by established geographical boundaries, platforms’ geography can be defined as a “conjunctural geography” (Graham, 2020), since the place where a platform operates is not the same where it is established for fiscal purposes, nor the one where data are stored, and eventually not even the same where a legal responsibility is held by the platform’s owners.

Scientific and grey literature proved that the extreme variety of competences and powers attributed to urban authorities has been representing a major struggle for several research projects aimed at comparing urban policies and governance models between different European countries (Committee of the Regions, European Institute of Public Administration (European Institute of Public Administration (Maastricht, The Netherlands)), and European Center for the Regions (ECR), 2012; Committee of the Regions & European University Institute, 2008). Indeed, the extreme variety of institutional settings at the local level is entrenched in the variety of administrative traditions and political cultures of Europe, that underlies in each context a peculiar different distribution of powers and responsibilities between different governmental scales, and ore in general defines the boundaries of the scope of public sector responsibilities. Nonetheless, many European countries starting from late 80s underwent relevant reforms of the local public sector inspired by common principles derived by the New Public Management culture, and then a new wave of reforms has been receiving further impulse by the financial crisis started in late ‘00s (Schwab et al., 2021). Even though the actual deployment of these local sector administrative reforms generated different results through the reaction with the pre-existing administrative context, some common pattern of transformations could be identified.

First, the reforms of the local public sector require to be interpreted in a trans-scalar perspective, considering the interplay between the redefinition of powers and scope of local governments and the related changes occurring in the relation with regional, national, and European governmental levels. Indeed the expansion of the prerogatives of urban authorities can be inscribed in a broader picture of reorganization of the public sector in Europe, where some powers have been transferred toward the supranational institutions, while subnational governmental tiers have been experiencing a parallel process of decentralization and devolution of governmental competencies. This is for example the case of the Italian reform of 2014 that activated the “metropolitan cities” (Tortorella & Allulli, 2014) or the example of the Portuguese reform of parishes (a sub-municipal institution corresponding to a district) that led to a cut of almost 1/3 in 2011, but in general it could be referred to the role of regional authorities in the organization of funding schemes of the ERDF and ESF. From an administrative perspective, the principle of subsidiarity has been the driver of the reconfiguration of intergovernmental relations and related functions attributed at each institutional level (Article 5 of TEU 1992). It is difficult to describe at a glance what kind of policy areas have been progressively decentralized toward local governments, even if it is possible to observe that the domains more commonly interested by the rescaling have been economic regulations and welfare policies previously held by the nation-state (UCLG, 2011)

Another common feature of most of recent EU local public sector reforms has been the tendency toward downsizing the local public sector and reorganizing public service delivery at the local level. Key to the reforms inspired by NPM has therefore been the assumption that bureaucracy is wasteful and inefficient and the counterargument that a leaner government can be incentivized to seek out efficiency saving and quality-enhancing innovations (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). The driver of efficiency has been commonly considered as a pillar of PS reforms, resulting in cuts to expenditures and overall reduction of the transfer of resources, as well as loss of institutional capacity, personnel, and expertise (Hammerschmid et al., 2019, 5). The loss of resources and the limitation to issue local taxes put local public budgets under pressure and pushed local governments to seek new sources of income primarily by creating attractive conditions and investment opportunities for global capitals in the production of space (Harvey, 2001). First of all in the real estate sector that has been undergoing an internationalization and concentration process in most of the cities studied in this chapter.

The combination of decentralization of regulatory powers and downsizing of the local public sector resources and capacity resulted in a kind of asymmetric subsidiarity (Allegretti, 2012) that paved the way for outsourcing services previously implemented in-house, as well as for agencification mechanisms, and for the launch of PPPs and other kind of hybrid devices that involve non-public actors in service delivery. In this manner the downscaling of competences toward subnational authorities has been interpreted by scholars of the Critical Urban Theory as “in contrast to the project of national territorial equalization associated with Keynesian welfare national states”(Brenner, 2004) and worked as a component of a neoliberal strategy aimed at discussing the universality principles that characterized the public welfare systems consolidated till the 70s in many European states.

3.2 Urban Public and Participatory Sphere

This second dimension focuses on the actors and stakeholders of urban governance of the digital ecosystem, considering the existence of formal arrangements and institutional spaces and channels for the active engagement of societal actors in public policy making.

The shift from government toward governance is commonly associated to the inclusion in decision-making processes of non-elected and non-institutional actors. Different streams of research converged in this direction even if starting from different questions and approaching it from different perspective.

For example, urban studies have been developing (and adapting over time) the notion of urban regime to describe “the informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interests function together in order to be able to make and carry out governing decisions Urban Regime theories tries to describe the way powerful actors can influence public decision making, focusing on the interaction between actual power relations and formal regulatory settings. In this manner they tend to focus on the role played in urban politics by political and economic interests either locally based or originated by global flow of capitals” (Stone, 1989).

According to NPM theories the better efficiency of the private management of public services and the higher capability to generate value from the private transformation and production of urban space led to the legitimation of a growing role for powerful political and economic forces, for which specific formal settings have been also experimented. This is the case not only of the outsourcing of service provision (under the regulatory control of the public authority) but also of more innovative devices as the so-called public–private-partnerships that in some cases have been also covering the management of relevant digital transformation processes.

Finally, the extension of the public sphere has been also advocated by the stream of Democratic Studies, even though with a variety of coexisting understandings. Indeed, in the last 20 years, cities have been the principal stage for a huge number of experiments of democratic innovation: the attempt to create institutions appositely designed to involve inhabitants in public policy making (Smith, 2009). Several scholars analyzed the variables that shape the participatory methods and spaces (Fung, 2006). In this research we focus on the involvement of non-institutional actors in the governance of the digital ecosystem of the city, which is a sub-category that entails additional challenges, related both to the subjects and to the objects of participation (Secchi & Spada, 2019).

3.3 Urban Technological Agency

This third dimension explores to what extent the city’s authorities and stakeholders can be considered as agent of technological choices, capable to lead and steer autonomously the digital transformation in the city or whether if they are just dependent by the choices made at another scale and entrenched into their digital infrastructures. In this perspective, urban technological agency is here intended as the capacity of cities’ authorities to manage technological change and in particular the digital transformation of their organization as well as of the urban society. More specifically, we will frame this agency in the context of platform society and the increasing dominant position in the digital ecosystem of infrastructural platforms and sectoral platforms.

This dimension it is particularly relevant since, in the contemporary stage of capitalism, cities have become central nodes in the data value chains, in the context of what may be defined as data urban market. This raises important questions about the governance of data management as a pivotal process to steer digital transformation and the role local authority and urban stakeholders should play. We know that work, data, and digital ecosystem dimensions have to be considered in an intertwined perspective in order to grasp the urban governance dynamics of the platform societies. Nevertheless, this dimension considers data management strategies as key lenses to investigate the urban authority’s capabilities to interface with a platform-driven organization of urban spaces.

4 Part II—Governance of the Urban Digital Ecosystem: Mini Cases Analysis

In this session, the theoretical framework presented above and its focus on focuses respectively on the Regulatory, Participatory, and Technological Dimensions are mobilized to describe and analyze three case studies that can be described as experiments of governance and regulation of platforms at urban scale.

Selected between the cases studied in PLUS, these experiments focus either on the direct regulation and management of sectoral platforms at urban scale, or in the promotion and experimentation of innovative platform services, models, and practices, alternative to those carried out by platform unicorns. The three selected cases, Bologna, Barcelona and Lisbon, show three different regulatory modalities:

• Sectoral/regulatory in Lisbon

• Sectoral/incentive in Bologna

• Cross-cutting in Barcelona.

The following table illustrates and systematizes the selected cases, the public policies adopted in the each urban context, and the main characteristic of the corresponding profile of each city, relative to Regulatory, Participatory, and Technological Dimension. Furthermore, the table shows the specific economic field of intervention of the urban governance strategy adopted by the three municipal authorities. As is evident, while Lisbon and Bologna represent a case of specific sectoral intervention, the case of Barcelona shows how the action of local institutions has been directed toward a broader theme, that of digital sovereignty. As will become evident during this session, the choice of these measures of Urban Governance depends on the political orientations of the institutions, but the room for opportunity and development of these policies is likewise dependent on the combination of the Regulatory Framework, the Urban Public Sphere and the Urban Technology Agency.

City	Case	Sector	Regulatory space	Participants	Technology	Outline
Bologna	Consegne Etiche https://consegnetiche.it/	Delivery	Agreement between private parties promoted by the municipality	Urban Authority, Innovation agency (FIU),—FIU, negozianti, universitá movimenti riders	Limited technological dimension	Case draws upon a city-driven experiments (with the engagement of several urban actors) to provide an ethical delivery service alternative to unicorn platform
Lisbon	Renda Segura https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-airbnb-short-let-reforms-lisbon/	Short-term rental	Containtment zoning plan (Planos de contencao) + Covid initiative (Renda Segura)	Urban authority, SUbmunicipal authorities, rentiers, housing movements	Digital services to manage licensing process	Case that focuses on the mitigation policies for short-term rental and explores the dynamics of the tension between the city and Airbnb in the context of the Covid 19 emergency
Barcelona	Decode DDDC https://www.decodeproject.eu/	Cross-cutting: pilot on data sovereignty	Experimentation in EU project + structured spaces of digital participatory democracy	Consortium Partners and inhabitants	Blockchain and integration with urban digital ecosystem	Case that emphasizes the high technological experimentality and the active role of the urban authority in promoting a open and sovereign digital ecosystem paradigm (and its fragile sustainability)

Bologna: Consegne Etiche

“Consegne Etiche” is a platform co-op initiative launched in Bologna, which involved a variety of urban platform economy’s stakeholders, such as riders, municipality, institutional, and no institutional organizations. This case is an interesting lens through which read the intersection of the three variables we identified concerning the local authority commitment/capacity to interact with the platform economy in the urban context: regulatory framework, urban public sphere, and urban technological agency.

As for the other alternative ride-hailing and delivery platforms identified, the emphasis on “fair” and “ethical” dimensions is apparent from the courier’s fair compensation (9 euro per hour) and the more stable working contract. On the public operators' side, differently from the Unicorn/traditional model “Consegne Etiche” platform does not retain the high and fix amount of fee (more or less 30%) per each order, but, as reported in the official website, it guarantees equity and transparency let managing the transaction directly to the restaurants and public operators. A further element that marks this alternative platform is the commitment to reduce the environmental impact by using only bicycle.¹ Finally, it is important to evidence that Consegne Etiche is trying to position itself in a specific niche of urban delivery market that is the delivery of groceries and books, thus is not in a direct competition with the big players of the sector.

Regulatory Dimension

To grasp the Consegne etiche’s regulatory dimension it is worth to consider the plurality of civil society and institutional actors which created or supported it, that is: two social cooperatives (“Dynamo” and “Idee in movimento”) and the “Almavicoo - Centro Universitario per la formazione e la promozione dell'impresa cooperativa” (University Centre for the promotion of the cooperative enterprise). Besides these actors, there are the Bologna City Hall and the Hub “Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana”, which created the so-called “Cantiere Consegne Etiche”, a space to promote debate among urban stakeholders aimed to propose innovative solution to face the platform economy. A fundamental step to understand the birth of this platform cooperative is the Chart of “digital workers right in the urban context”, a bottom-up regulation advocated by Bologna City Hall and signed by Mymenù (the traditional food-delivery platform born in Bologna), the main Union (Cigil, Cisl and Uil) and by Riders Union. The Consegne etiche project stems from this local stakeholders’ commitment to regulate (indirectly) the digital labor working conditions. Furthermore, has set up an internal form of regulation drafting a manifest of value organized along 13 points which outline the alternative value dimension of the platform.²

Participatory Dimension

The Consegne Etiche’s governance composition is quite articulated. This characteristic is reflected on the participatory dimension. As reported in the official website, the path toward the creation of the platform co-op has been marked by several steps, with the involvement of local civil society, institutional, and no institutional actors (such as public operators, neighborhood market, individual, organizations, University, etc.) and the development of co-design and co-participation process.³ During this phase (which lasted from April to September 2020), the “Fondazione Innovazione Urbana” tried to make bridges between the different interests and needs of the actors involved, which synthesis has been the Consegne Etiche’s “Manifesto of Values”. This chart summarizes the 13 main principles that guide the platform co-op governance, which can be framed in an alternative and sustainable experiment, in contrast to the extractive and disruptive Unicorn model (Table 1).

Differently from the traditional model platforms, Consegne etiche relies on a consistent and strong involvement of local markets, shops, and municipal libraries, in order to foster a sustainable urban economy and create virtuous circles.

Table 1 Consegne etiche’s Manifesto of values

Technological Dimension

One of the main pillars—in accordance with the cooperativism logic—is prioritize the principle of the open source for possible technological support. The actor which role is to provide technical support regarding technological solutions is “Squiseat”, a start-up born in 2019 which is devoted to collect and deliver unsold goods by using a bot (in a Telegram channel), which is available for free for local merchants that have not any digital marketplace to sold their goods.⁴ A final remark worth to highlight is that Consegne Etiche has not an app, but is accessible only as a web service. Thus, the technological dimension is rather reduced, a factor that can represent a “brake” for the introduction, diffusion, and use of the platform by inhabitant and public operators.

Lessons Learned in Context

The “Consegne etiche” case stresses limits and the potentiality for an urban authority to produce alternative digital path through the intersection of interests of a variety of actors. The political will to minimize the sectoral lean platforms’ disruptive effects on working condition and public space, as well as on environment, had made possible the convergence of a plurality of ideas aimed to promote co-participation and co-design process. In many cases this process has been supported and advocated by Bologna City Hall and the related agency/hub (namely, “Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana”) with the involvement of the effervescent civil society context. From this breeding ground is born Consegne etiche.

The difficulties regarding Consegne etiche (which are detectable in many platform co-ops experiences) concern the technological capacity and the scalability of the experiment, which cannot be comparable to unicorn model, which is based on a huge venture capital leverage: local authority does not hold the tools to invest such an amount of capital. Nevertheless, the platform co-op of Bologna has tried to fit into an alternative niche without entering into direct competition with the big players of the delivery sector, trying to enable a virtuous circle by involving local public operators, namely municipal libraries and neighborhood markets.

Lisbon: Short-Term Rental Regulation

This second considers an initiative implemented by the municipality of Lisbon, with the goal of regulating short-term rental industry and related impact on housing policies through the development of urban containment zones.

Containment zoning is a local policy which has been approved in 2019. It defines a maximum quota (25%) of short-term rental establishments, in Portuguese known as AL (alojamento local), for specific districts within Lisbon city center. The impact of the Portuguese tourist market expansion along the decade before the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 led to an exponential increase in short-term rental offers in Lisbon city center. This process has generated an increase in the cost of rents and has led to a reduction in the number of inhabitants in the various districts of the center. Faced with these dynamics, there was a reaction from the citizens and inhabitants of the Portuguese capital, with the aim of protecting their housing conditions. The policy initiative discussed in this chapter are the result of these reactions, aiming at putting short-term rent under control. However, if we look at the actual effectiveness of these policy initiatives, as well as their capacity to envision technological solutions to the problem of the platformization of short-term rental sector, the measures here discussed show a contradictory picture.

Regulatory Dimension

Until the summer of 2018, the possibility of establishing urban containment zones for ALs in urban centers was a specific competence of the central government. With Law 62/2018,⁵ which alters the regime of use and exploitation of ALs, this competence passes to the municipalities (the process leading to the transmission of these competences will be explained in the next session). After the approval of this law, in October 2018 the municipal assembly approved a recommendation to the city government to promulgate a regulation for AL activity, and to define urban containment zones. In the period between the approval of this recommendation and the entry into force of this regulation, new registers for AL activity were suspended within the central areas of the city.⁶ The final regulation establishing urban containment zones in some of the neighborhoods in the center of Lisbon have been approved on 7 November 2019.⁷

In addition to defining these containment zones, the approved regulation also provides for two other mechanisms for supervising the AL sector: the publication of an annual technical study on the effects of this measure, with the aim of monitoring the development of AL, redefining its parameters, and adapting the regulation to any changes; and the establishment of an accompanying commission for the AL sector. This commission’s activity lasts one year, and its role is decisive, its main tasks being: (a) Follow up and monitor the execution of the present Regulation; (b) Formulate proposals and recommendations, whenever it deems appropriate; (c) Prepare opinions requested by the municipal bodies or external entities.⁸ However, both the discussion of the technical rapporteur on an annual basis and the implementation of the commission have been diastatic. With regard to the technical rapporteur, there was a delay of more than a year, while the commission was never actually convened and formalized.

Participatory Dimension

The approval of urban containment zones is the result of the combination of bottom-up and top-down participatory processes running at different scales, including the protests of urban movements for public housing toward the government of the city, the proactive capacity of civil parishes (sub-municipal bodies elected by citizens) to condition the implementation of these policies. Finally, this debate around the regulation of ALs running in Lisbon proved capable to condition the activity of the central government.

To give a clear picture of this process, it will be good to follow the chronology of the events of the last years, which led to the formalization of urban containment zones.

In May 2017, the first citizens’ initiative was launched to stop the proliferation of AL. The title of the petition is very clear: “Putting the brakes on AL and saving what's left of renting”.⁹ Following this petition, three recommendations were debated by the municipal assembly in July of the same year and, despite some of the points were rejected, two essential points are approved.¹⁰ In October of the same year, at the same time as the local elections, an independent list named Citizens for Lisbon (part of the coalition that won the elections) introduced the need for a profound revision of the legal framework of AL activities, with the aim of limiting the authorizations granted.¹¹ In December 2017, civil parishes promoted a study with the aim of: “provide technical underpinning for improved political action at the local level, trying to respond to urgent issues of very significant impact and avoiding short-term, case-by-case, unsubstantiated solutions”, in the regulatory action of AL activities.¹² This study had an important influence on the decisions that were taken by the municipal chamber in the following period and shows the existence of a conditioning by the local parishes on the city government that does not pass through the traditional institutional mechanisms. Immediately after the local elections, which awarded victory to the coalition led by the Socialist Party, a motion was passed in January 2018 for the alteration of the legal framework of AL activity, reinforcing the need for municipal government action vis-à-vis the central government and the national parliament, to “enable municipalities to limit authorizations granted for specific areas, by establishing quotas to ensure a balance between permanent housing and tourist use”.¹³

Through this process the Law 62/2018¹⁴ was enacted in August 2018, allowing municipalities to establish urban containment zones.

However, the approval of a municipal AL regulation for Lisbon had to wait until November 2019. During this time, the assembly had to approve, in the October of 2018 a formal commitment,¹⁵ already mentioned above, mandating the municipal government to develop a study on the impact of tourism in the city,¹⁶ and suspending the registration of new AL activities in the areas of the historic city center, until the promulgation of the containment areas.¹⁷

This process reflects the variable geometry of powers between bottom-up actions and institutions situated at different scales. However, is important to emphasize that this process, described as a participatory process, didn’t actually follow institutionalized mechanisms of participation. Indeed, an initial citizens' proposal succeeded in influencing the public debate, and on the other hand, through an independent group, in becoming part of the city's government agenda. This pressure has conditioned the municipal government to act with the central government, in order to obtain a greater room for maneuver in regulating AL. The local parishes most affected by the expansion of ALs also played an important role in pressuring higher institutional levels.

Technological Dimension

From a technological point of view, the implementation of containment zones reflects is the inability of the municipal chamber to establish agreements—and enforce them—with the digital short-term rental platforms. This undermines, firstly, the monitoring capacity of the sector and, secondly, the effectiveness of the policies themselves. This last consideration is particularly true for containment areas.

The City of Lisbon has 19,292 ALs establishments, which provide maximum accommodation capacity for about 111,000 people. For the regulation of this economic activity, the municipal authority has established a licensing and registration system. The evolution of the number of AL registrations reveals a successive and intense increase of units, starting in 2014, culminating in 2018, the year in which the suspension of registrations began, with the highest annual value of new registrations (6,812) The same evolution translated into percentages shows that the most significant years in the registration of new units are 2014 and 2015 (variations of 156% and 198%, respectively).

As of 2018, and with 2019 marking the beginning of the urban containment zones, 1,961 new records are still recorded. In 2020 and early 2021, the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, marks negative evolution, resulting from the decrease in new registrations and the cessation of several existing ones. The period prior to suspension and containment has an average annual growth rate of around 100%, while from that date until April 2021, the balance is around 20%.

Lessons Learned

The strategy chosen by the Lisbon City Government to deal with the impact of the tourism market on the housing sector is depowered by 2 elements: (1) first, the limited monitoring and control capacity of the city, that makes it hard to enforce the regulation, and (2) the lack of a clear fiscal differentiation between the different typology of rental relations (short term vs. residential).

In this sense, this case led to provide two indications. The first one is the need to structure a policy of containment of AL activities, establishing different legal regimes, with a tax system oriented to reduce the concentration of ownership. Secondly, Lisbon should reinforce its monitoring and supervisory action, through the signing of protocols with digital platforms for the transmission of data, with a short and medium-term time frame, and making this data public and accessible to all. This measure, in spite of the fact that it is foreseen as a prerogative of the Municipal Commission for the activity of AL, as we have seen in the municipal regulation for urban containment areas mentioned above, has never been carried out. Therefore, a revision of these legal provisions cannot be separated from the full application of the legal measures, and the strengthening of the mechanisms for monitoring and supervising the sector.

Barcelona: DECODE (+ Decidim)

Decentralized Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem (DECODE) is a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, but its implementation interacted with a complex and multi-layered network of institutional, social, and technological actors composing the urban digital ecosystem of Barcelona.

The case of DECODE is more complex than the other two just presented, because it does not refer to a specific innovation related to a sectoral platform but focuses on a project that aimed to strengthen the digital sovereignty of citizens and explore the potentiality of data commons through the active involvement of social and institutional actors of the city, first in an experimental setting (a pilot) and then by standardizing the results. The digital sovereignty is here intended as the control of citizens on their data, including the possibility to make them “data commons for the public good”.¹⁸

This very complex project can be simplified in two core elements.

First, a set of technological tools and in particular a data wallet (DECODE app) has been developed, tested, and deployed. This app enables full control of users over their data and allows each user to choose which personal data to share with the different applications that interact with the DECODE app. Being the app based on decentralized ledger technologies, the community of users replaces the public authorities (or authorized third parties) that normally play the role of identity providers in most electronic identification systems in Europe.¹⁹ Users can therefore decide what kind of use to make of their data: whether to share them, or to give them up, or to enhance them, etc.

Second, the DECODE project itself deployed three different pilots in Barcelona with the double purpose of testing the DECODE app, and at the same time to experiment its integration within the urban digital ecosystem. The testing entailed indeed the integration with the Barcelona City Hall data architecture, the integration with the dedicated participatory portal DECIDM, the integration with sensors and devices hosted by inhabitants with the purpose to crowdsource and share data regarding environment, pollution, traffic, etc. Finally, the pilots include also the deployment of new tools that would allow to explore the potentiality of the reuse of data commons, as the platform BCNNow,²⁰ an open-source environment that enables citizens to easily explore city-related data (Marras et al., 2018) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

DECODE pilots in Barcelona. Source Sagarra et al. (2019, 3)

As a general result the urban digital ecosystem of the city has been cross-fertilized with concepts and practices of data commoning both in the technological and regulatory domain, paving the way for the standardization and long-term sustainability of the solutions experimented (Sagarra et al., 2019)

Regulatory Dimension

The regulatory dimension of DECODE is grounded in the active engagement of the Barcelona city council in the project. During the project itself, the collaboration of the City Council has allowed to test the feasibility of the proposed solutions into real-world scenarios, making a strong impact regarding innovative data policies and approaches tested by cities. It included the testing of a legal framework for data commons that moved on the thin ice between the enforcement of personal data protection and the opening and publicly releasing of anonymized data, with the additional challenge of using innovative technologies. According to the final report of the pilots has been working during the project lifetime, but “legal fit of the solutions will only be properly tested after they have been rolled for a long period of time in production, as legal hazards can be foreseen but are only fully known after real issues emerge”.

Looking at the long-term impact on regulatory frameworks it is worth mentioning that DECODE’s approach has influenced the ethical digital standards set up by Barcelona City Council.²¹ These standards also include a section dedicated to technological sovereignty where best practices tested in the project have been translated into prescriptive norms for the future technological choices of the urban authority. Not only the innovations tested in decode scaled up and impacted local regulations but indirectly there is an attempt to scale out technological sovereignty principles by leveraging the behavior of service providers through public procurement.

Participatory Dimension

The Decode Project involved several non-institutional actors. It is possible to distinguish at least two levels: the international partnership that ran the Horizon2020 project, and the involvement of urban actors in the pilot in Barcelona.

At the level of the partnership, it is important to stress that DECODE was coordinated by the Municipal Institute of Informatics (IMI), a local autonomous body of the Barcelona City Council that was born in 1990 with the aim of providing all information and communication technology (ICT) services to the Barcelona City Council and related public agencies. In addition, the partnership included the University of Catalunya and two local software houses (EureCat and Dribia Data Research S.L.), representing a mix of expert and applied knowledge.

At the city level, in addition to the political and administrative staff of the urban authority, also groups and networks of inhabitants have been involved in pilots. A relevant group is Metadecidim,²² “the democratic community that manages the Decidim project in all its dimensions and has a direct role in the configuration and management of the Decidim Platform for its use in Barcelona”.²³ The community has been involved with the purpose to define requirements for the integration of the DECODE tools with the Decidim.barcelona platform, used by more than 60,000 inhabitants involved in a variety of citizen engagement initiatives carried out through it. In this manner the first actual use of the DECODE app has been to authenticate users to take part in public decision-making processes and participatory democracy experiments (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

DECODE + Decidim: citizen engagement scheme. Source https://tecnopolitica.net/en/content/digital-democracy-and-data-commons-dddc/

Technological Dimension

The technological dimension is central to this project, which has set the objective of developing technologies capable of entrenching in their code ethical principles and a political vision such as that of technological sovereignty (to which is also linked a vision of the economic value of personal data).

The main technological innovation is the DECODE app, based on an innovative technology such as distributed ledger (DLT). This app performs two functions. First, authenticating users that in this manner can access digital services that require strong identification without having to provide their data each time for registration. The second feature of the DECODE app is the “data wallet”. In practice, it is a virtual “wallet” of personal data that is stored directly on the user's mobile: the users from time to time can decide which data to transfer to the different services asking for access to their personal data and also establish how to reuse it by third parties. The combination of these two elements (DLT+data wallet) has the objective to enforce users’ command on their personal data and enable the possibility to license their anonymized data as digital commons.

Around the DECODE app, the technological infrastructure necessary for its operation has also been developed and adapted, including DECODE OS (a private and anonymous peer-to-peer network for getting DECODE up and running) and Zenroom (the smart contracts engine powering DECODE).²⁴

Finally, in order to run the pilots and test on the field the usability of the DECODE app, integrations have been made with the data management and publication system of the city of Barcelona, including the main open data portal and a new visualization platform developed ad hoc to explore the potential of data handled via the DEECODE app.

All software and hardware solutions developed under this project have been publicly released along with related documentation on GitHub with licenses pertaining to the FLOS domain.²⁵ It is also important to remember how the collaborative development of the code of the various digital decode solutions was based on the dialogue between expert knowledge (represented by the consortium's tech partners and more generally by the community that contributed to the development and consolidation of the code) and non-technical knowledge, through the active involvement of citizens and administrative staff in defining the requirements and specifications necessary for integration into the digital ecosystem of the city.

Lessons Learned in Context

This case study (unique among those presented in this report) observed the effects and potential of an international research and innovation project (funded under the Horizon2020 programme) which had its center and field of experimentation in the city of Barcelona. A first lesson that can be drawn, however obvious, regards the opportunity that international research projects can offer to experiment with innovative techno-political solutions to the challenges posed by the platformization of the urban digital ecosystem. If we consider the city profile of Barcelona described in Sect. 3.1, and in particular the characteristics of its digital urban ecosystem, it is evident that a project like DECODE has been enabled by the combination of (i) existence of a public debate over the urban challenges of digital platforms and political will to tackle them, and ii) open digital infrastructures, skills, and institutional capacity to develop and experiment technologies consistent to the political objective of improving technological sovereignty (Lynch, 2020). Indeed, this is the only case that tries to address the challenges of digital platforms with a transversal approach that is not necessarily linked to a specific sectoral policy.

At the same time, it is useful to wonder to what extent the innovations tested in DECODE are capable of producing long-term effects, mitigate the disruptive impact of platformization of the urban, and eventually scale up and out the innovation proposed (Moore et al., 2015). First, in order to generate organizational change within the urban authority it is necessary to consolidate regulatory frameworks and policy instruments capable to enforce the principles of data sovereignty. In this perspective we have seen that DECODE tried to implement regulatory standards (in particular through the ethical digital standards approved by the IMI), as well as to ensure the compliance between the technologies developed and the prescriptions of GDPR. Second, to reach larger numbers of users and expand the community of users it would probably be necessary for a sovereignty-enforcing tool to achieve the status of technological standards for the urban ecosystem and to establish as a requirement for the delivery of digital services not only in the public domain but including also commercial digital services.

5 Part III—Conclusions: Policy Orientation for Platform Governance at Urban Scale

The conclusions of this chapter are organized according to the three primary variables of our structure: regulatory framework, urban public sphere, and urban technological agency. These conclusions should be interpreted in conjunction with the case studies detailed herein, as well as those comprehensively covered in the “PLUS Guidelines for policy makers on socioeconomic larger impact on urban economies” (Secchi et al., 2021).

Regarding the regulatory framework, urban contexts where administrative decentralization has gone further are those where urban authorities have the greatest room for maneuver. From this point of view, an active trans-scalar collaboration involving the different levels of government seems to be a precondition for implementing strategies to regulate or mitigate the impacts of lean sectoral platforms. Nevertheless—and in some way counter-intuitively—cities may exercise a soft power, as in the case of Bologna’s promotion of a regulatory framework—the so-called “Chart of digital workers’ rights in the urban context”—to which urban actors of the platform economy can voluntarily adhere.

Since the entrenchment of digital platforms may generate conflicts between groups of inhabitants with different interests, a recommendation stemming up from this chapter is to consider the role of infra-municipal institutions to offer a bottom-up understanding of the local impact of platform economy. Regarding the policy areas investigated in this chapter, some findings and recommendations for the Tourism sector concern the necessity to consolidate patterns of regulation of short-term rental. If the cities studied in Plus have taken some measures to limit the negative effects of Airbnb by introducing specific initiative and norms (e.g., a licensing system and other measures aimed to limit the concentration of listing), what emerged from our study is the difficulty to enforce some of these norms.

Regarding the urban public sphere, the main recommendation emerging from this chapter is the need to broadening the urban governance to non-institutional actors in order to make the public sphere more inclusive. Integrating platform-related issues in structured (top-down) democratic innovations can enable the creation of bottom-up alternatives to Unicorn platforms, for example, through the Participatory budgeting tool. It is the case, for example, of platform cooperatives such as “Consegne Etiche” in Bologna. The cases of DECODE app in Barcelona shows up the relevance to open the public debate on the same digital transformation strategies pursued by the cities. Thus, municipal authority, with a democratic governance approach and broadening the participation channels, may play a supportive role by providing incentives and dedicated funding opportunities.

Finally, related to the urban technology agency variable, a remarkable recommendation regards the topic of the technological sovereignty of cities and the investment in open technological infrastructure that enable the creation of alternative to lean sectoral and unicorn platforms The incorporation of principle of collaboration and cooperation between urban stakeholders in the code these infrastructures is pivotal to guarantee a real enabling process. The two key principles here recommended are the use of the FLOS approach and technological sovereignty. As regards to the former, the cases of the digital ecosystems of Barcelona reveal the consistency in adopting such principles. Anyway, our analysis confirms that an open technological data and artifacts approach per se is not enough to guarantee public value generation in urban digital ecosystem. Thus, it is recommended to consider the shaping and consolidation of “open government” strategies in relation to the “technological sovereignty” of cities. In this regard, already existing experiences of forms of data commoning represent a promising path, although it is still experimental in practice. Even in this case the issue of data management seems to have a decisive relevance, particularly the management of personal data and the intellectual property of the knowledge produced by the inhabitants, organizations, and institutions insisting in the urban space. An important element observable in the report is the discrepancies related to the levels of digital literacy and collaborative culture of the inhabitants, which affect the concrete development and implementation of digital services: where digital literacy and skills are higher, as in the case of, Barcelona, achieving this objective is greater, also depending on the extensive dissemination of digital skills and collaborative culture in the population. Thus, digital literacy represents a crosscutting enabling factor. A further recommendation proposed by this report focuses on the means to promote and regulate an open digital economy in order to incentivize the creation of public value.