Platform gentrification: a conceptual framework

Abstract

This article introduces and theorises the concept of platform gentrification as a structural mutation in the production of urban inequalities under platform capitalism. Departing from the classical four characteristics of gentrification—capital reinvestment, arrival of new higher-status groups, landscape transformation, and displacement—this paper reinterprets these dimensions through the lens of the on-demand city, where digital rent platforms (e.g. Airbnb®), social media platforms (e.g. Instagram®), ride-hailing services (e.g. Uber®), and coworking companies (e.g. WeWork®) mediate, valorise, and restructure urban life. Rather than adding a new typology to the gentrification debate, platform gentrification is proposed as a critical framework to understand how algorithmic mediation, digital economies, and data-driven infrastructures reshape real estate markets, urban aesthetics, residential dynamics, and modes of exclusion. The paper argues that platform infrastructures not only organise mobility, consumption, and visibility, but also anticipate and accelerate new forms of displacement, both physical and symbolic. This concept is developed here as an interpretative tool particularly relevant for highly digitised urban environments, where the mediation of everyday life through platforms has become an invisible infrastructure of urban change.