Beyond Pilots: Urban Digital Platforms as Enduring Research Infrastructures

Urban digital platforms (UDPs) increasingly mediate how cities are governed, which services are provided, and to what extent citizens engage in urban life. A growing body of research—often discussed under the label of platform urbanism—has explored the development of UDPs in urban studies, however mostly in relation to phenomena such as the gig economy, short-term rentals, and platform-mediated urban services as profit-driven corporate tools.

This article instead focuses on a smaller but increasingly important category of UDPs developed by municipalities, research institutions, and civic actors, aimed at functioning as  supporting elements for decision-making. Designed for planning, participation, and co-design, these platforms, however, often remain temporary pilots rather than evolving into infrastructures for sustained collaboration and reflexive governance. Therefore, our research question is as follows: how can UDPs be technically designed and institutionally embedded so that they evolve from pilots into infrastructures and support long-term, reflexive urban governance?

Here we conceptualize UDPs as research infrastructures for transformation-oriented urban research: socio-technical arrangements that organize how knowledge is generated, validated, and circulated in cities, laying the groundwork for more democratic, just, and sustainable urban co-production. Drawing on German experiences with Real-world Labs (RwLs) as practice-oriented research settings—which have become central inter- and transdisciplinary arenas for addressing sustainability and urban transformation challenges—we identify three recurring dimensions that shape whether UDPs evolve into infrastructures: (1) their capacity to function as a science–policy interface enabling knowledge transfer across academic, political, and civic domains; (2) the risk of quantitative bias over qualitative insights, drawing boundaries on inclusion in decision-making and creating a struggle to accommodate the qualitative and contextual forms of knowledge that are equally vital for reflexive urban transformation; and (3) their role in institutional learning, particularly how organizational routines and governance structures adapt to embed experimentation over time.
These dimensions suggest that the future of UDPs depends not primarily on technical design but on their institutional embedding. As infrastructures of reflexive urban governance, they can support urban resilience and sustainable urban transformation if they balance efficiency with inclusivity and connect short-term experimentation to long-term urban change. Otherwise, digital urban futures risk being shaped predominantly by technocratic or corporate agendas.