City profile: Yiwu and the making of a new platform-corridor city. Logistics, digital capitalism, and bottom-up silk road urbanization

Over the past decade, Yiwu, internationally known as the “world's supermarket” for small commodities, has evolved from a regional trading town into a globally networked commercial and logistics hub. This profile charts its contemporary transformation in the logistics sector and highlights the spatial, economic, and social changes driven by the dual forces of e-commerce and the Belt and Road Initiative. It traces how digitalization and infrastructures have jointly reconfigured the logistics industry space. Moreover, Yiwu's integration into global supply chains represents a distinctive form of bottom-up adaptation to national and transnational strategies, enabled through multi-scalar policy coordination and local entrepreneurial governance. While these dynamics have enhanced the city's global connectivity and economic vitality, they have also generated new spatial inequality pressures. By foregrounding a secondary inland city, the case of Yiwu deepens debates on platform urbanism and infrastructure-led development (ILD), showing how digital platform capitalism and transnational corridor infrastructures co-produce a circulation-led and market-centric urban formation that unsettles conventional ILD models and metropolitan-focused frameworks of platform urbanism. • Defines Yiwu as a “platform–corridor city” shaped by platform economies and BRI • Shows a circulation-led variant of ILD centered on trade intermediation, not production • Identifies polycentric, corridor-oriented logistics expansion and suburban relocation • Exemplifies bottom-up integration into national strategies • Reveals socio-spatial inequalities in platformized logistics urbanization