Cities, digital communication and post-pandemic: from smart cities to platform urbanism

The paper will focus on the old connection between cities and digital communication in light of transformations speeded up both in the social, economic and health emergency of Covid-19 and in the post-pandemic. Thereby, the aim of the study will be to notice significant changes in the agenda of our field and its relations with urbanistic dimensions and theories. Therefore, it will undertake a strategy of academic literature review in three fundamental instances. Firstly, attention is turned to the conditions that have made possible to understand urban realities in relation to information machines. Secondly, the study will retrieve the definition and criticism of smart cities whose strength becomes legible as an interpretive framework for many digital technologies in cities of our region and in the particular context of global crisis. Finally, the article will address platform urbanism as a perspective that allows to investigate the spread and reconstruction of metropolitan spaces through platformization and app ecosystems. In these aspects we will find a possible agenda for our field that -if it did not wait for the health emergency to begin- has heuristic capacity for understanding and explaining the future realities of Iberoamerican cities in light of mutations derived from the new normalization.