Urban Platform Economies: Transformations of labour and intersectional inequalities in care services

Objectives

The project builds on feminist geographies as a theoretical framework to address the research question: How does the rise of the digitally mediated care services in the platform economy transform everyday lives and inequalities in cities? It will do so by a set of three sub-questions: 1) What type of care services does the urban platform economy offer, to whom are they tailored to and how do they restructure urban space? 2) How is care labour performed and experienced by the workers when mediated via digital platforms? 3) In what ways does the platformisation of care services (re)produce and (re)shape intersectional inequalities?

These questions are connected to three main objectives: 1) Enhancing empirical evidence of platform urbanism in Europe based on three major care service platforms, focussing on the platformisation of care infrastructures and a systematisation of care service platforms and their enabling socioeconomic conditions. 2) Advancing the theoretical debate on platform urbanism with respect to the transformation of labour and intersectional inequalities. 3) Enriching the methodological debate on researching human-environment-technology interfaces and platform-based everyday interactions in cities. For this, the project uses a qualitative methodology, combining narrative interviews with mobile digital ethnography.

The results will include a systematisation of care platforms according to their business models, the reorganisation and financialisation of domestic work in a comparison of three European cities. They will provide in-depth knowledge on processes of urban platformisation and gendered and racialised divisions of labour. In this, the project innovatively links macropolitical structures of platformisation with the micropolitics of urban everyday life and embodied subjects’ experiences.

Publications

Strüver, A., Bauriedl, S. (2022): Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a technocapitalist transformation of European cities. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag (open access): www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5964-1/platformization-of-urban-life/

Bauriedl, S., Strüver, A. (2022): Practices of platformization of urban life. In: Dies.: Platformization of Urban Life: Towards a technocapitalist transformation of European cities. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag. S. 11-35.

Bauriedl, S., Wiechers, H. (2021): Konturen eines Plattform-Urbanismus. Soziale und räumliche Ausprägungen eines digital divide am Beispiel Smart Mobility. In: sub\urban – Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung 9(1/2): 93-14.

Bauriedl, S., Strüver, A. (2020): Platform Urbanism: Technocapitalist Production of Private and Public Spaces. In: Urban Planning 5(4): 267-276.