KMDI Semaphore Speaker Series – Prof. David Wachsmuth

The Digital Curation Institute invites guests the “Data and the lack of data in the politics of the platform economy” lecture, led by McGill University professor, David Wachsmuth.

Abstract

How does data structure the political economy of Airbnb, Uber, and other leading “platform economy” firms? In this presentation, I answer this question through a spatial-big-data examination of short-term rentals, relying on a complete dataset of all worldwide short-term rental activity on Airbnb and HomeAway since 2015. Platforms rely, of course, on having data, but equally crucially rely on others not having data. I discuss this two-sided nature of data availability, first of all by arguing that data should be understood as a key source of platform rents, and second by arguing that data is the key to effective platform regulation. I conclude by arguing that an increasingly central asset of platforms is control over who gets to know what they are doing, and thus that data is not just the currency of platform urbanism, but rather a medium of struggle.

About Our Speaker

Prof. David Wachsmuth is the Canada Research Chair in Urban Governance at McGill University, where he is also an Assistant Professor in the School of Urban Planning and an Associate Member in the Department of Geography. He directs UPGo, the Urban Politics and Governance research group at McGill, where he leads a team of researchers investigating pressing urban governance problems related to economic development, environmental sustainability, and housing markets.

Additionally, he is the co-lead of the Adapting Urban Environments for the Future theme of the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative, where he is part of a broad interdisciplinary team developing new ways of conceptualizing, measuring, and improving urban sustainability.