As rural-urban migration continues, much of the population finds itself in urban areas, which, in most contexts, offer significantly greater opportunities with fewer social restrictions on the livelihood possibilities available to the urban poor. However, these opportunities are increasingly mediated by digital platforms and will be realised only if such platform-based urban development is tailored to the livelihood aspirations of the poor. Currently, there is a focus on place-based economic investments in the built environment that prioritise brick-and-mortar businesses. These businesses rely on sophisticated supply chains to provide and service retail activity. The benefits behind these place-based developments could be argued to accrue largely to the formal economy. Migratory patterns, on the other hand, indicate that the urban poor tend to concentrate in areas of low rent or vacant urban land. In addition, the higher reliance on access to financial assets for their livelihoods creates an added dependence on a rich and accessible informal-formal economy, which is equally dependent on a socio-economically diverse and accessible public realm to achieve desired livelihood outcomes. As a result, the urban poor make a trade-off between the quality and location of their living spaces to be in preferred locations with access to livelihood-generating assets, indicating the importance of a public realm with an informal and formal sector mix that supports the reliance and access to social assets that facilitate financial asset accumulation and transactions (DAG CoCT Urban Poor 2003). This demands the need for a medium bridging the informal and formal economy divide. Affording informal economy users, of which are largely the urban poor the ability to tap into opportunities provided by the interplay of formal and informal activity in urban neighbourhoods. In this context, the concept of a “Livelihood Framework” warrants exploration. Based on the network effect of crowdsourcing, obtaining information or input through contributions from large numbers of people to achieve a collective outcome, it would allow users to create detailed visual maps of their neighbourhoods, highlighting points of interest, attention, engagement, and interaction. The proposition in this paper is that democratising and granting citizens agency over social and financial activities to achieve desired livelihood outcomes allows public spaces to appear and disappear through the two-way dialogue, Shifting public activities from place-based to people-based through collective contributions to the accumulation of livelihood assets.