The rise of ‘internet-celebrity cities’ ( wanghong ) has become a new emblem of platform urbanism. Yet existing platform studies offer limited insight into this phenomenon as a product of digitally enabled city branding, an oversight that obscures the new dynamics that digital platforms introduce into entrepreneurial governance. To address this gap, this paper proposes a physical–virtual complementary framework for examining how platforms’ operations and local practices coalesce to (re)shape the image of cities. The framework is illustrated through a case study of Rongjiang , a peripheral Chinese city distinguished by its dramatic internet virality. In Rongjiang ’s digital branding endeavour, digital platforms reconfigured the composition, roles, and power dynamics of the stakeholders involved in city branding, extended the co-creation of city branding by enabling massive and unsupervised participation, and consolidated their own unbalanced control over selective online visibility. These findings highlight a paradox of digital empowerment in city branding: platforms enabled more extensive and decentralised branding participation while introducing and reinforcing a new, algorithm-dominated pattern of participation that redefined local agency in city branding. This research extends platform-urbanism scholarship beyond its predominantly economic and cultural discourses to engage with city branding as an integral part of the urban entrepreneurialism literature. The findings advance understanding of urban entrepreneurialism with particular attention to transforming local practices around plural participation in a platform-mediated urban age.
Building on Tsing's concept of salvage accumulation, which theorized capitalism as profiting without controlling commodity production, this paper takes Chinese apiculture - characterized by vertical integration - as a case study to examine how translation processes are performed and what labor conditions are (re)shaped within honey supply chains. In this system of merchant capitalism, smallholder beekeepers remain outside direct capitalist control during production; instead, they depend on middlemen to purchase their harvested honey for subsequent market exchange. These transactions are more than simple commercial exchanges. They operate as acts of translation that convert a non-capitalist, multispecies product into an abstract commodity value, measured through the Baum & eacute; scale. Yet, due to honey's lively materialities, such numerical indicators are inherently unstable, both ecologically contingent and technically modifiable. The interplay between translation mechanisms, material indeterminacy, and market pressure contributes to precarious livelihoods for beekeepers, who respond through forms of self-exploitation: intensifying labor, accelerating extraction cycles, and exerting metabolic pressure on honeybees to increase output. By unpacking these translation practices and labor dynamics in Chinese apiculture, this paper offers ethnographic and theoretical contributions on geographies of marketization and diverse economies, foregrounding the roles of friction politics, lively materialities, and localized capitalism.
Over the past two decades, the city of Mombasa has undergone significant spatial transformations resulting from multiple large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at improving logistics efficiency along the Northern Economic Corridor (NEC). The Chinese-led Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) and the Japanese-led Mombasa Port Development Program (MPDP) particularly stand out due to their far-reaching effects on national and regional networks of commodity circulation. Although developed by competing powers and connected to rival connectivity agendas that unfold within the Second Cold War (CWII), their material integration drives urban change in Mombasa. This article analyzes the MPDP/SGR interface as manifesting Kenya’s logistics polyalignment—a mode of foreign engagement through which successive ruling coalitions leverage rival powers to produce transnationally oriented corridors and urban nodes. I demonstrate how, on the one hand, this mode of engagement plays out within a regional context shaped by geopolitical-economic rivalries over corridor centrality—a process that has gradually produced the NEC as materially polyaligned . On the other hand, I foreground how the material integration of projects connected to rival connectivity strategies in Mombasa has contingently transformed the city into a gatekeeper city . This urban form emerges as the MPDP/SGR nexus becomes a site of multiscalar power struggles over the circulation, distribution, and capture of value, where competing agendas advanced by rival state and non-state actors converge, with important implications for urban economies and livelihoods.
This essay responds to two critical gaps in the literature on the platformization of informal services: first, existing narratives around the intersection of platformization and urban informality (particularly motorcycle taxis) are primarily focused on precarity and labor exploitation, notwithstanding the fact that digital or algorithmic systems play significant roles in shaping trust, transparency, credibility, and safety. Second, existing understandings of safety in urban research are either limited to policing and street security or rather diffuse, appearing across different disciplines, such as public health and disaster risk reduction, rather than being integrated into urban public safety. In response, this essay aims to foreground public safety in our understanding of platformed informal service provision, positing a conceptual approach that highlights the nexus between everyday risk, informality, and governance. To this end, calling for a more holistic and integrative approach to safety in urban research in the wake of rapid socio-technical changes, I argue that a better understanding of how safety is perceived, understood, or promoted alongside platformization is crucial for (equitable) urban governance.
The rise of emerging e-retailers in cross-border e-commerce reflects shifting competitive dynamics in digital ecosystems long dominated by global platform giants. To recalibrate attention from incumbent platform giants to digital service providers (DSPs) and emerging e-retailers, this paper proposes an analytical framework to conceptualize three groups of DSPs—specifically Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), specialized service providers, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)—as accelerators that mediate the creation and capture of information and innovation rents within digital ecosystems. By shifting the analytical focus from platform owners to inter-firm relations between DSPs and emerging e-retailers, the analytical framework of accelerator reveals how DSPs perform distinctive roles and functions in generating and redistributing rents to emerging e-retailers. Applying this framework to the case of fast fashion in China’s cross-border e-commerce, we demonstrate how strategic collaborations between e-retailers and DSPs allow emerging e-retailers to generate and capture information and innovation rents consistently, thereby reshaping their power relations with incumbent platforms within e-commerce ecosystems. This paper not only responds to calls to reconceptualize platform power in the digital economy but also offers a rent-centric analytical perspective on contested upgrading pathways in digital ecosystems.
