Should cities be run like businesses?
Should city services and infrastructure be run by businesses?
For some urban commentators, policy-makers, politicians and corporate lobby groups, the answer is ‘yes’ to both questions.
Others are critical of such views, cautious about shifting the culture of city administration from management to entrepreneurship, and transforming public assets and services run for the common good into markets run for profit.
The stories and essays in this book explore how a city might look, feel and function if the business models, practices and technologies of 38 different companies were applied to the running of cities.
They ask: what would it be like to live in a city administered using the business model of Amazon (or Apple, IKEA, Pornhub, Spotify, Tinder, Uber, etc.) or a city where critical public services are delivered by these companies?
Collectively, the chapters ask us to imagine and reflect on what kind of cities we want to live in and how they should be managed and governed.
Professor of Internet Geography
Mark Graham is an economic geographer. His research focuses on digital labour, the gig economy, and digital inequalities. He is the author, most recently, of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI
Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute
Department of Anthropology, The New School in New York
Former Research Assistant
Joe Shaw was an OII DPhil student. His research is concerned with the geography of information, property market technologies (PropTech) and critical urbanism.