Starting from the four classic characteristics of gentrification—capital reinvestment, the arrival of new groups with higher status, landscape transformation, and displacement—this article reinterprets these dimensions through the paradigm of the ‘on-demand’ city, where digital rental platforms (e.g., Airbnb®), social media platforms (Instagram®), transport services (Uber®) and coworking companies (WeWork®) mediate, valorise and restructure urban life. Rather than adding a new typology to the debate on gentrification, the term platformised gentrification is proposed as a critical framework for understanding how algorithmic mediation, digital economies and data-based infrastructures are reshaping real estate markets, urban aesthetics, residential dynamics and modes of exclusion.
The article argues that platform infrastructures not only organise mobility, consumption and visibility, but also anticipate and accelerate new forms of displacement, both physical and symbolic. This concept is developed here as an interpretative tool that is particularly relevant to highly digitised urban environments, where the mediation of everyday life through platforms has become an invisible infrastructure of urban change.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), Grant Agreement No. 101183165.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor REA can be held responsible for them.