Everywhere we go, we’re asked to rate our experience—5 stars for a coffee, a thumbs-up for a park, or maybe just a smiley face at the toilet. Place ratings have become a routine part of digital life, quietly shaping how we navigate cities, choose destinations, and perhaps even how we evaluate the world around us. But what do these ratings really mean? And what are they doing beneath the surface?
In this new article in GeoJournal, I explore the growing role of place ratings in shaping spatial experience and urban life. While they often appear as simple, crowd-sourced opinions, these systems are embedded in powerful digital platforms and driven by complex sociotechnical logics. They influence visibility, reputation, and access in ways that go far beyond the individual click or swipe.
I introduce a framework for understanding the different types of place ratings—from spontaneous reviews to algorithmically generated scores. Through this lens, I argue that place ratings are not just tools of personal expression, but part of a broader system that shapes social and spatial inequalities. This work brings together ideas from geography, platform studies, and critical data scholarship to ask a simple but pressing question: when we rate places, who gets to speak, who gets seen, and who gets left out?
I had lots of fun writing it, I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. 🎓
Image source: ChatGPT
Reference: Ballatore, A. (2025) The dynamics of place ratings: platforms, effects, and their discontents. GeoJournal 90, 83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-025-11327-3 [open access] ✅
Abstract: Digital place has been variously characterised as a set of online augmentations and representations that influence how physical places are imagined, cognised, and interacted with. In an evolving media ecosystem, star ratings enjoy a pervasive presence on platforms. Ratings provide information and alter people’s decision-making not only when choosing consumer products but also places. Focusing on numeric ratings, through a scoping review, this article (1) traces the origins and rapid proliferation of place ratings, categorising them into primary, secondary, volunteered, transactional, expert, and user-generated types, and examines how they are applied geographically, from countries to points of interest. Then, it reports on (2) a global survey of rating platforms, accounting for their variety and similarities across sectors and countries. (3) It engages with significant issues are entangled with place ratings: the challenges in their interpretation and aggregation; their potential cognitive, spatial, and demographic biases; their impact on power dynamics between businesses and consumers; and their contribution to the socio-spatial inequalities that exist between digital and physical realms. These insights converge into a geographical research agenda to study place ratings’ deep and ubiquitous effects.
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 