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Abstract Urbanites increasingly turn to digital mobility platforms to make use of means of transportation and to plan and book journeys. While these platforms can contribute to making urban travel more sustainable and efficient, they can also lead to governance challenges and have negative external effects, raising questions about how public values can best be safeguarded. In this article, public values are defined as normative concepts that describe both the impact on and democratic control of an affected public. This article aims to initiate a more structured discussion about platform urbanism, specifically how and to what extent public values are incorporated in platform design and operation in the realm of mobility. It introduces an assessment framework for mobility platforms that was developed as part of a transdisciplinary research project in the Netherlands. This framework is grounded in two academic debates regarding 1) the rise of platform urbanism and 2) new forms of mobility that accompany the densification of cities. The paper refers to the mobility pilots Kutsuplus, UbiGo and Whim to illustrate how the safeguarding of public values can be evaluated. In the concluding section, the paper discusses some ways in which the assessment framework can be used for future research, for instance through scenarios.

Abstract Background Merwede is an envisioned neighbourhood in Utrecht (the Netherlands) that provides an instructive case to learn about the governance challenges of digital mobility platforms. Unique about Merwede is how the development of a mobility platform is envisioned to be integrated into the development of a new neighbourhood. Methodology This article discusses the case of Merwede and provides insights into its proposed mobility platform and how it is made. It illuminates governance challenges relevant to the design and operation of an unconventional mobility concept by disentangling outstanding practical issues concerning three key governance dimensions—organizational structures, decision-making processes, and instruments. Results The research provides an empirical illustration of governance questions that come up when mobility becomes a service and is integrated into the urban fabric from the very beginning of a development process. Already in the plan development stage, Merwede illustrates that difficult decisions are to be made and competing interests come to the fore.

This article disentangles the complex relationship between depoliticisation and anti-politics in public-private partnership (PPP) policies and practices. By identifying three social mechanisms that underlie dynamics of depoliticisation in PPPs, namely consultocracy, yield bias, and complex contracting, it contrib-utes to the growing interdisciplinary literature on depoliticisation. The article argues that as depoliticisation continues to evolve, it further increases the unbalance between depoliticisation and politicisation, which has negative implications for democratic governance. The depoliticised logic behind PPPs feeds broad sen-timents of political distrust and disappointment, because political decision makers tend to use PPPs as mir-acle solutions for the delivery of public infrastructure without bearing the long-term budgetary conse-quences of their own decisions. This constitutes an expectations gap: the difference between what is prom-ised or expected by politicians on the one hand, and what they can actually deliver on the other. It is here that the short-term rationales and incentives of political decision makers collide with the wider public inter-est in the longer term.