{"id":45656,"date":"2026-05-18T16:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T14:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vnc-china.nl\/?p=45656"},"modified":"2026-05-18T16:45:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T14:45:07","slug":"the-invisible-planner-is-tiktok-mapping-the-future-of-our-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vnc-china.nl\/en\/the-invisible-planner-is-tiktok-mapping-the-future-of-our-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"The Invisible Planner: Is TikTok Mapping the Future of Our Cities?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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by Vici Gao<\/p>

In a world of social media, who decides which cities get seen? How does a city or region put itself on the map? Until recently, it was the work of tourism boards or a unique landmark. Today, individual influencers can make a location trend in the blink of an eye. How are governments in China and the Netherlands responding to this shift? Vici Gao investigates.

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The viral surge <\/b><\/h3>


During the 2025 Labour Day holiday, the Chinese city district of Rongchang received 2,34 million visitors. The city has a permanent population of 660,000. It had done no tourism promotion, launched no campaign, built no new attractions. What brought the visitors was a food influencer who ate braised goose on a livestream and mentioned Rongchang a few times. The algorithm handled the rest. The local government opened its canteen to tourists – 7,000 people ate there in a single day, consuming 280 vats of rice and roughly 750 kilograms of pork. 290,000 geese sold out. Rongchang had not chosen to go viral. It had been chosen. <\/p>

This is not an outlier. In the winter of 2024, Harbin\u2019s Ice and Snow World opened as it does every year, at roughly the same scale. A handful of short videos were amplified by Douyin\u2019s recommendation system, and visitor volumes arrived faster than the city could absorb. Local officials built reception facilities overnight and still could not keep pace. Before that: Zibo\u2019s barbecue, Tianshui\u2019s spicy noodles, Kaifeng\u2019s night market. Every few months, a city goes viral by the same mechanism, then cools by the same mechanism. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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BBQ district of Zibo, Shandong. Photo Vici Gao <\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Giethoorn – fewer than 3,000 residents, canals instead of roads, no through traffic – spent centuries at the edge of the tourist map. TikTok moved it to the centre. Visitor volumes overwhelmed the waterways and the lawns, and residents found their daily lives reshaped by a decision made in an algorithm they had no part in. The village had done no marketing. It simply fit the recommendation logic on a given week, and the consequences arrived shortly after.

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Sudden Visibility: A New Paradigm

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The steam engine rewrote Manchester. The shipping container rewrote Rotterdam. Platform recommendation algorithms are doing the same to cities now, on a faster timeline and with consequences that are harder to assign to anyone. What drives a city\u2019s sudden visibility is no longer sustained brand-building or systematic promotion – it is a distribution decision made by a platform at a particular moment. Some local governments have begun drafting contingency plans for going viral. What has not been seriously examined is the power structure behind it. <\/p>

The old logic of tourist flow was legible. Transport infrastructure determined accessibility. Travel intermediaries shaped visibility. City planning set carrying capacity. The system was slow, but that slowness gave cities room to prepare. <\/p>

That buffer has been removed. Platforms like Douyin, TikTok, and Instagram now allocate attention upstream, through recommendation algorithms that operate faster than any physical infrastructure can respond. A single viral cycle can push an unknown town into global visibility within weeks and sustain visitor pressure for months – while the platforms that generated the flow bear none of the infrastructure cost and carry none of the governance liability. <\/p>

The result is what might be called an attention infrastructure economy: one in which visibility, not geography, determines how a city gets used. The decisions that used to sit with planners and transport ministers now emerge from recommendation models – and the cities absorbing the consequences had no seat at the table when those models were designed. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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The logo I Amsterdam had become a reliable amplifier of the problem rather than a point of civic pride., photo Astrid Bouwman<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Policy Playing Catch-up<\/b><\/h3>

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Amsterdam is experiencing the same developments. The city receives roughly 20 million overnight visitors a year against a resident population of 820,000 – a ratio that has forced a sustained policy response. The municipality has capped Airbnb rental days, restricted cruise ship access, raised tourist taxes, and frozen new hotel development in the centre. In 2018, it removed the \u201cI Amsterdam\u201d lettering that had stood outside the Rijksmuseum for fourteen years, drawing an estimated 6,000 selfies a day, because the sign had become a reliable amplifier of the problem rather than a point of civic pride. <\/p>

These measures have had real effects. But they are downstream interventions. The city manages consequences while the platform economy continues generating demand upstream. That speed differential has not closed. <\/p>

The economic structure here is straightforward, even if the policy response has been slow to catch up. Platforms capture the revenue from attention. The costs – congestion, rising rents, the displacement of local businesses by tourist-facing ones, the erosion of what made a neighbourhood worth visiting in the first place – are borne by residents who had no part in the transaction. This is a textbook externality, and it is being systematically produced at scale.

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The Trend Toward Worldwide Uniformity<\/b><\/h3>


There is a longer-term effect that is harder to price. When billions of people discover urban spaces through the same algorithmic systems, what gets surfaced is what performs best in the feed: high visual contrast, strong emotional register, cultural difference calibrated to intrigue without alienating. Cities adapt to these criteria, consciously or not. The result is a slow convergence toward a globally legible aesthetic – one that the platforms did not design but that their incentive structures reliably produce. The question is whether this is a desirable trend. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, foto Vici Gao<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Diverging Strategies: China vs. NL<\/b><\/h3>

China and the Netherlands have taken different positions on this, and the gap is instructive. Chinese local governments have largely moved to absorb the flow. Coordination teams, scaled-up infrastructure, rapid iteration on tourism capacity – it is an adaptive strategy that accepts the platform\u2019s logic and tries to extract value within it. The limitation is structural: a city that builds its tourism economy around viral selection is exposed every time the algorithm moves on. Attention is a lease, not an asset. <\/p>

The Netherlands has moved more slowly, but toward a harder question. Amsterdam\u2019s policy debates have shifted from how to manage visitor numbers to whether a city has any legitimate claim over how it is represented in the systems that send those visitors. That question has reached the courts – residents have sued the municipality for failing to enforce its own overnight-stay limits – and it has reached Brussels, where the Digital Services Act is already compelling major platforms to accept new forms of accountability in European markets. <\/p>

New Frontiers of Accountability<\/b><\/h3>

That regulatory infrastructure matters. GDPR reshaped global data practice by making European market access conditional on compliance. The DSA is doing something similar for platform conduct. If the principle that platforms bear responsibility for the downstream effects of their recommendation systems can be established in the urban context, it would shift the cost structure of the attention economy in ways that go well beyond tourism. <\/p>

Als we kunnen vastleggen dat platforms verantwoordelijk zijn voor de indirecte gevolgen van hun systemen, zou dat de kostenstructuur van de aandachtseconomie veranderen op manieren die veel verder gaan dan alleen het toerisme.<\/p>

The trend is not reversing. Platforms will continue to allocate human flows through urban space, and their capacity to do so will increase as recommendation systems improve. The policy question is whether cities have any tools to govern that process – not just to manage its effects after the fact, but to establish terms for how it operates. <\/p>

The Dutch Advantage<\/b><\/h3>

Cities are moving into a phase where they are not only built and planned, but distributed and selected. The power to determine which cities get seen, and at what scale, has migrated from public institutions to private platforms. Reclaiming any part of that power – through regulation, liability frameworks, or the kind of market-access leverage that Europe has already demonstrated it can exercise – is what digital spatial sovereignty would actually require. <\/p>

The Netherlands is well placed to push that argument. It has the institutional standing, the live case studies, and a regulatory environment that has already shown it can reach global platforms. The more interesting question is whether it moves before the problem compounds further – or after. <\/p>

Vici Gao is a business journalist based in Eindhoven, with over seven years of experience covering technology, venture capital and China-Europe business for Chinese media. linkedin.com\/in\/vici-g-81655191<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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