Platform Workers as Infrastructural Labour: Production of Space and Spatial Tactics of Resistance

Introduction

The goal of this doctoral project is to understand how platforms unravel themselves in our cities, producing and commodifying urban space, and how this process relates to platform delviery workers spatial practices. It aims to offer a more nuanced approach to these dynamics, by relying on place-based knowledge from an external pageurban ethnographiccall_made perspective mixed with external pageVGI datacall_made. The commodification process that is described as spatial abstraction in the external pageliteraturecall_made necessarily creates the conditions for the emergence of as Lefebvre called it, differential space, that is the space shaped by the practices of (in this case) platform workers in Berlin and Barcelona. Therefore, understanding how platform-workers deploy different tactics to navigate, resist or “make-do” of the platform mediated urban environment, becomes a key element to understand the process of spatial production in the age of platforms. The research links global processes, such as the external pageplatformization of infrastructures/Infrastructuralization of platforms,call_made their role in the production on external pageurban cityscapescall_made, and ultimately their relation with the spatial practices of platform workers. Focusing on labour in these processes is highly relevant, because despite the seemingly automatic workings of the platform-economy; we cannot forget that external pagepeople perform the actual labour behind platformscall_made.

The Project

The doctoral research project is guided by the following research questions: how delivery platforms produce urban space and what role they play in the contemporary urban? In addition, how platform delivery workers in urban settings relate and contest these platforms? Lastly, how they experience urban space through their labour?

To address these different questions and the scales concerning this research project, it is structured in two main blocks, a conceptual one, and an empirical one, which is divided in four work packages, deriving in three papers.

The first block work package or conceptual part of the research aims to develop the concepts that will underpin and structure the research. The focus is engaging with theories of spatial production, developing concepts such as strategies of spatial abstraction, and its relations with tactics of spatial resistance, highlighting two of these strategies: external pageDigital Taylorismcall_made and external pageTerritorializationcall_made, as central in the production of space through/by platforms.

The second block or empirical part aims to:

1. Establish the first connections to the field and key actors within the cities of Barcelona and Berlin, as for the success of the urban
   ethnographic approach, and volunteered geographic information stage, “external pageclose relationships with subjects of study emphasizing their agencycall_made” are key factors.
2. Through a external pagemulti-sited urban ethnographic approachcall_made, the project considers that, the phenomenon of platform urbanism and
   its associated effects in the urban and workers is mobile and with several loci. This allows for the comparative dimensions of the
   research to be present as external pagehow global dynamics have similar local expressionscall_made. This stage considers the qualitative analysis of the ethnographic data gathered, which is based in gathering “external pageobservations, interviews and documentary data to produce detailed and comprehensive accounts of different social phenomenacall_made”, and aims to unravel the way in which delivery workers “make do” in urban environments while working for quick-delivery platforms.
3. The last work package uses a mixed methods approach, combining urban ethnography with volunteered geographic information. The approach is based on the work of Professor Blair-Howe, “external pagethinking through peoplecall_made”, which links both approaches, highlighting the trajectories and mobilities of platform delivery workers, but also their modalities of transportation, times of wait and overall use of urban infrastructures.