Platform City: The “REDization” of Urban Space in Shanghai

The increasing integration of digital platforms into the functioning of urban cities has sparked significant scholarly and public debates. This article has emphasized the attendance of social media platforms in urban affairs, analyzing the practices of social media platforms across both digital and physical spaces, particularly within the Chinese context. Drawing on a methodological framework which includes a walkthrough of the use of RED, a critical analysis of online contents, and an ethnographic fieldwork of the urban space, this article finds that social media platforms have established a delegated co-production with local government in urban spaces, embedding the social factory logic in the urban space. Driven by the platform habitus, merchants and social media users create cultural and spacial capital for urban space, and construct a “vibrant youth culture community” like the RED in physical interface, generating a new mode of production that is self-controlled and self-motivated.