Not Flattening but Reconfiguring: How Platformization Produces Divergent Creative Geographies in China

Platformization is often seen as either dispersing or recentralizing creative production. This paper challenges both views, arguing that digital platforms reconfigure—not flatten—creative geographies through content-format differentiation. Focusing on China’s film and TV sector, we analyze theatrical films, online movies, and micro-short dramas along a platformization continuum. We identify three coexisting spatial logics: theatrical film remains locked in metropolitan cores; online movies show a bimodal core–hub pattern; and micro-short dramas cluster in algorithmically legible peripheries like Zhengzhou and Chongqing. Critically, cross-format firm overlap is negligible, revealing institutionalized segmentation. This triadic geography emerges from the interplay of path dependency, platform governance, and local resource reconfiguration—only cities whose symbolic capital, labor markets, or policies align with specific format logics become viable nodes. The findings redefine centrality in the platform era as plural, contested, and format-contingent.