Provisioning otherwise: Platform co-operatives and the reworking of platform urbanism

Urban life is increasingly organised through platforms, but platform urbanism has largely been understood through corporate intermediation, extraction and regulation. This article asks what becomes visible when platformisation is approached instead through the politics of provision. Drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews across a translocal platform cooperative ecosystem, it examines how co-operatively governed digital infrastructures make shared provision workable across places. The article develops platformed mutual provisioning to describe a recursive process through which dispersed capacities are assembled around situated needs, extended through federation, and kept collectively governable through maintenance, democratic learning and data stewardship. The findings show that platform co-operatives matter less as ownership alternatives in themselves than as fragile experiments in organising the coordinating capacities on which food systems, logistics and civic economies increasingly depend. Their significance lies in keeping those capacities revisable as they become infrastructural to everyday provision. The article argues that this opens a wider politics of co-operative infrastructural urbanism, in which digital urbanisation is judged not by growth or technological novelty, but by whether the power to coordinate provision remains answerable to those who depend upon it.