Everyday platform urbanism in China: Living the digital city through WeChat

This article examines how everyday urban life in China is increasingly shaped through WeChat, proposing the concept of everyday platform urbanism to describe the entanglement of routine platform practices with urban space. While existing research on platform urbanism has largely focused on broader political economy and infrastructural transformations, this study responds to calls for more ethnographic approaches by foregrounding the mundane, situated ways people engage with platforms in daily life. To do so, the article develops a methodological approach termed everyday platform ethnography, integrating online and onsite qualitative methods. Drawing on fieldwork in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Shenzhen, the analysis identifies three sets of practices: digital placemaking, locative platform practices that connect users to specific places and gateways that reconnect users to the platform. The findings show how WeChat operates as an everyday infrastructural layer through which communication, mobility, consumption, and urban experience are organized. Routine activities, such as ordering food, scanning QR codes, navigating transport, or sharing geotagged posts, illustrate how digital platforms mediate how people move through, experience, and reproduce urban life. The article concludes that everyday platform urbanism captures the lived integration of digital infrastructures into the rhythms of the city and highlights the socio-spatial implications of platform urbanism.