On 24 October 2025, Waseda University in Tokyo will host a workshop dedicated to the international project Platform Urbanisation and Citizenship: Understanding Platform Territories in a Comparative Context (PUT), coordinated by SUPSI in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and Waseda University in Tokyo, funded by a bilateral ETH-SERI research collaboration between Switzerland and Asia.

The meeting will be attended by Filippo Bignami, senior researcher at SUPSI Competence Centre for Labour, Welfare and Social Research (CLWS) – Research Area LUCI - Labour, Urbanscapes and Citizenship  –  and project coordinator, Marco Palma, also a researcher at the same Centre and Research Area, together with scholars from Singapore, Japan and other international academics, both in person and connected online.

The PUT project, running from December 2024 to December 2025, focuses on the still under-theorised intersection between digital platform governance, territorial implications, and embodied practices of citizenship, and how this concept needs to be re-configured. PUT brings into focus how platform-mediated urban space is reconfigured in a planetary, digitally saturated urban environment and aims to identify specific forms of territorialization that emerge from platform urbanization, with pilot cases on e-commerce operations in Switzerland, Singapore, and Tokyo. 

Along with PUT, Professor Naomi C. Hanakata's newly launched collaboratory at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore plans to organize a panel at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual conference in March 2026, as well as compile a subsequent special issue and follow-up grant proposal. 

The October workshop aims to further discuss the preliminary findings of the PUT project in order to gather feedback and outline possible future developments. The meeting will involve invited international colleagues to explore new research and publication opportunities, as well as to define the organisational aspects of the upcoming AAG panel.

The event will take place in hybrid mode and is open to researchers and partners interested in the themes of digitalisation, urbanisation and contemporary citizenship.

Programme

• 15:30-15:40 - WelcomeOpen with project introduction and workshop objectives
• 15:40-16:00 - Project Advancements
  Updates from the last Singapore workshop
• 16:00-18:00 - Participant presentations, responses to the project
• 18:00-19:00 - AAG panel planning
  Open discussion to consolidate the planning of the AAG panel and explore a potential application for funding

Further information and participation

To participate online, please click on this Zoom link (Meeting ID: 991 4408 6577, Passcode: 563885).

Further information is available in the document available for download on the side.