How have digital mobility platforms responded to COVID-19 and why does this matter for ‘the urban’?

Abstract

Digital mobility platforms have become increasingly pervasive over the last decade or so in a wide variety of urban contexts. Much digital mobility platform activity has focused on city centres and urban cores, where returns on investment are often seen to be greatest, where existing transport infrastructure can be thick and where there are concentrated circulations of people. The global spread of coronavirus from early 2020 resulted in widespread policies of social distancing and lockdowns. Though there was a geographical unevenness to such policies, COVID-19 saw dramatic reductions in urban public transport provision and use, and new forms of experimentation with urban infrastructures, including with digital mobility platforms. How digital mobility platforms have responded to COVID-19 is not clearly understood and requires systematic research engagement. To address this we ask: how have digital mobility platforms responded to COVID-19 and what are the implications of this for ‘the urban’? We develop a stylised understanding of six digital platform responses to COVID-19. The status of these six responses is that they are synthetic and propositional and need to be systematically tested in a variety of actually existing urban contexts.