The City as a Platform

What exactly are shops for today? As architects and urban planners we’ve followed the rise of e-commerce closely in recent years. And so far the apocalypse of the high street, forecasted by many, has failed to materialize in our town centres.

The relationship between commerce and public life in cities goes back centuries. Not least in Amsterdam, a metropolis sustained from the start by energetic entrepreneurial activity. From fishermen selling their catch on the Amstel river in the 12^th century to merchant ships bringing cargo back from the colonies to the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602 (the first and still the most valuable corporation in history, worth at its height ten times as much as Apple today). Commercial success created public value; authorities spent heavily on water-ways and other essential infrastructure, as well as municipal almshouses for the elderly, hospitals and churches.

The relationship between private capital and public investment has become murkier since then, reflected in the way we pay for public services like housing and transport. In the past decade alone we’ve seen the platformisation of almost everything; a phenomenon which began with Napster streaming intangibles like music has crept into the city, with space-as-a-service platforms like Airbnb fuelling rent increases and mobility platforms like Uber fuelling congestion. The retail sector is no exception.

One effect of platformisation is that it turns each of us into a prosumer; as we scroll through our devices we consume information at the same time as producing data about our preferences. The spatial effect of this is to decouple retail from its associated building typologies.

Devices like Amazon’s Alexa bring shopping right into our homes, blurring the boundary between public and private, home and work. We provide unpaid labour in the form of communication – our questions train the Artificial Intelligence which provides the answer. And at an urban scale the uberisation of logistics, where first and last mile deliveries are completed by gig economy workers looking to earn an extra buck, further blurs the line between customer and company.

So what defines a platform? We can think of them as holding spaces, interstitial layers between user and provider. In this way we can draw a parallel with the shopping mall – a building intended to attract visitors and to keep them there for as long as possible. In 2018 we designed an extension to one of the most successful malls in Europe – Westfield White City in London. Its internal walkway curves so subtly round that you can’t perceive the end of it, like an endlessly scrolling Facebook feed. In addition to spatial tricks like this one, Westfield curates a series of installations, pop-ups and activities to entice visitors, in the hope that whilst inside they buy stuff.

Architecture and the language of architecture – platform, blueprint, structure – has in the past few years been reappropriated by the technology sector to give form to its immaterial output. Take Farfetch for instance, the world’s top luxury e-commerce platform (despite owning no inventory itself). Farfetch has a dedicated Architecture Group that designs the digital platform into which other retailers plug their wares. Having mastered the online realm, Farfetch announced in 2017 its intent to move in the opposite direction, launching Store of the Future, an Operating System for physical retail. The suite of technologies aims to increase sales by enhancing interactions between consumers and sales associates, generating valuable data on preferences, connecting online and offline experience.

Architecture and the language of architecture – platform, blueprint, structure – has in the past few years been reappropriated by the technology sector to give form to its immaterial output. Take Farfetch for instance, the world’s top luxury e-commerce platform (despite owning no inventory itself). Farfetch has a dedicated Architecture Group that designs the digital platform into which other retailers plug their wares. Having mastered the online realm, Farfetch announced in 2017 its intent to move in the opposite direction, launching Store of the Future, an Operating System for physical retail. The suite of technologies aims to increase sales by enhancing interactions between consumers and sales associates, generating valuable data on preferences, connecting online and offline experience.