Platformized Care as Urban Infrastructure- Digital Healthcare Systems in Guangzhou

In the rapidly urbanizing landscape of China’s smart city agenda, digital healthcare platforms have emerged as infrastructural cornerstones of everyday urban life. In Guangzhou, systems such as AI-based diagnostics, app-based triaging, and integrated health QR codes are not merely tools of medical service delivery—they function as essential socio-technical infrastructures that mediate access, inclusion, and survival. Drawing on the infrastructural turn in urban studies (Amin & Thrift, 2017; Easterling, 2014), this paper conceptualizes digital care platforms as embedded systems that operate with the spatial reach, regulatory logic, and temporal regularity of public utilities. Rather than existing at the periphery of urban life, these platforms have become integral to navigating the city’s healthcare ecosystem. Residents engage with them to book appointments, receive diagnoses, and access insurance services, while healthcare institutions depend on their data-driven operations for patient sorting, workflow optimization, and compliance reporting. Yet their infrastructural status also reveals new dependencies, forms of exclusion, and uneven navigability—particularly for older adults, migrants, and digitally marginalized populations. By reframing healthcare platforms as urban infrastructure, the paper examines how they reorganize care relations, citizenship, and rights to the city. It also reflects on how such systems, through their algorithmic and automated functions, quietly reshape governance and social reproduction in contemporary urban China. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on platform urbanism and offers an empiricallygrounded reflection on how ‘intelligent’ platforms reconfigure the spatial politics of wellbeing in the platform age