The Journal of Urban Affairs and Special Issue editor Jorge Sequera, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), are seeking contributions for their upcoming Special Issue on Platform Gentrification: New Urban Inequalities in the Age of Digital Capitalism.
Over the past decade, digital platforms have profoundly transformed how cities are inhabited, valued, and contested. Housing, mobility, work, and everyday interactions are increasingly mediated by digital infrastructures, giving rise to a new socio-technical regime of urban capitalism. This Special Issue introduces the concept of platform gentrification to examine how traditional dynamics of capital reinvestment, socio-spatial displacement, and class restructuring are reorganized through platform logics. The journal invites contributions that engage with this transversal process—one that connects algorithmic governance, platform-mediated labour, symbolic economies of place, and anticipatory displacement—in diverse urban contexts across the Global North and South.
Themes of interest include:
Algorithmic financialization of housing markets
Mid-term rental platforms and hybrid tenancy regimes
The symbolic production of place through platforms (e.g. Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps)
Aesthetic homogenization and semiotic displacement
Tech workers, digital nomads, and emerging urban elites
Labour platforms and spatial segregation
Anticipatory, invisible, or algorithmic forms of displacement
Urban regulation, community resistance, and platform cooperativism
Methodologies for studying digital urban transformation and social change
Submission instructions:
Abstracts (max. 500 words) should be sent to the Guest Editor at jorgesequera@poli.uned.es with subject line: “JUA Special Issue – Abstract Submission”. Abstracts are due by November 15, 2025.
Upon review of the abstracts, authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts to the Guest Editor at jorgesequera@poli.uned.es with subject line “JUA Special Issue – Manuscript Submission”.
Upon review and guidance by the Guest Editor, authors will then be invited to submit their papers to the Journal of Urban Affairs. These papers will then be reviewed like any other paper that is submitted to the journal.
For details, visit https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/platform-gentrification-new-urban-inequalities-in-the-age-of-digital-capitalism/