Provincialising platform citizenship: Citizen participation in and through civic platforms

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