This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship; (ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies; and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes worldwide.

Digital platforms operating on a global scale (social media, commerce, services, e-government and e-management services) are increasingly critical means for communication, exchange, and daily life, even without a direct use of platforms or connected devices. Their growing ecosystem and locally specific variations increase possibilities for data collection and targeting specific user profiles. Work life has become increasingly dependent on platforms including, for example, Microsoft's power platform, Google cloud, or the Apple iOS system. But also within community services and urban development, platforms are increasingly forming a firm component that may be for submitting taxes, getting health services, reporting suspicious activities in the neighborhood, profiling a political campaign, monitoring energy performances, or providing new employment opportunities. We argue that these processes in fact describe a specific kind of urbanization that is driven and administered through the digital means of platform technologies. This process of platform urbanization imbues every aspect of the urban environment and has experienced an acceleration during the recent pandemic. This contribution introduces the concept of platform urbanization and investigates the implications on citizenship and its digital realm, followed by an attempt to expand its conception. To bolster our argument, we discuss the case of Singapore, where the monitoring and control of the virus spread expedited the nation’s digitization efforts and where platform corollaries of the pandemic were seamlessly incorporated into an increasingly digital urban environment. In what follows, the last section brings about a series of questions addressing an urban digital citizenship scenario within platform urbanization as a space of empowerment, inclusion and participation.

This manuscript investigates the integration of micromobility solutions in four Swiss contexts, with a primary focus on Lugano as the testing area. Through urban analysis, urban experiment, and social testing, the Inclusive MicroMob project introduced Genny Zero, an innovative micromobility device, to assess its impact on urban mobility. The findings highlight key factors for successful micromobility integration, including the need for an interdisciplinary approach that includes a holistic urban overview, an improved road safety analysis, and clear regulatory frameworks. This study also emphasizes the importance of participatory urban governance in addressing community needs and ensuring accessibility. Policy recommendations are provided to support the development of inclusive and sustainable micromobility systems in medium-sized cities.

In this article, Filippo Bignami and Naomi C. Hanakata mobilize the concept of platform urbanization to investigate the growing influence of digital platforms on citizenship and urban transformation. It sheds light on the intersection between urban transformation process and (urban) citizenship. Using the lens of observation and interpretation, the concept of platform urbanization is also considered a corollary of the virtual/digital as a rising real, immaterial, and planetary political space. In a critical reflection on the implications of platform urbanization, the authors discuss structural and political corollaries of this development and the subsequent need to reconceptualize citizenship today. Furthermore, the article wants to go beyond dominant practices of the present and scan inherent capacities of platform urbanization for possible urban citizenship scenarios. Taking platform urbanization as an inescapable force in contemporary urbanization processes, and by drawing from a heterogeneous set of examples, the article looks at the aptitude of platform technologies to foster an urban condition in which platforms form an immaterial but concrete political condition and explore what it takes in forms of skills to realize a space of inclusion that offers participation empowerment for all.