Geographies of the Platform Economy

In the era of rapid technological change, digital platforms like Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb are transforming the global economy. This book takes a critical perspective on the geographies of the platform economy, exploring its impact on labour, socio-spatial inequalities, and digital divides. The book organisation is as follows. The first section examines the platform economy’s role in economic organization, discussing terms like the “fourth industrial revolution” and gig economy. Digital platforms reshape value chains, markets, and firms, but concerns arise about worker exploitation and labour rights. The second section focuses on the position of digital platforms in work, addressing challenges faced by gig economy workers, including issues of immigration, gender, and access to citizenship. Cooperative models emerge as alternatives. The third section explores digital spatial divides, emphasizing the platform economy’s rootedness in geographical dynamics. Internet access disparities and algorithmic management contribute to socio-spatial inequalities. The book concludes by unravelling the complex dimensions of the platform economy, shedding light on its profound impact on contemporary society, economy, and geography.

The platform economy has transformed the experiences of everyday transactions, providing convenience and choice for consumers. However, platform companies have been criticised for the exploitation of workers in the gig economy and extracting value from local communities. Drawing on three case studies, this chapter examines the potential of the cooperative organisational model to function as a barrier to extractive capitalism. Cooperatives are democratically controlled organisations that are owned and governed by their members. They espouse the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity (ICA, Cooperative identity, values and principles. Retrieved from https://​www.​ica.​coop/​en/​cooperatives/​cooperative-identity, n.d.). Platform cooperatives are owned by their workers or service users and, therefore, do not have to meet the profit demands of external shareholders. This chapter demonstrates how platform cooperatives can enable a more democratic economy that embeds a wider distribution of ownership and benefits (Morozov E, Bria F. Rethinking the smart city: democratizing urban technology. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2018) or an economy that is “distributive by design” (Raworth K. Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Random House Business Books, 2017). However, we contend that cooperatives are only part of the systemic response needed to counter the social and economic injustices that have emerged within the platform economy.

In Brazil, digital platforms have reshaped mobility since Uber began its operations in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 2014. Since then, the consolidation and interiorization of two main ride-hailing corporations have been observed: Uber and 99/DiDi (originally a Brazilian startup), although other companies with a lower market share have operated in some other cities. Methodologically, this research is based on qualitative and quantitative data that include field research, secondary data, and interviews with driver-partners in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The text, divided into three sections, begins with an overview of the sector in Brazil, followed by an analysis on two geographic scales: (i) the national scale, focusing on the territorial strategies of the corporations, especially Uber, and (ii) the urban scale, associating unequal urbanization in the platforms’ algorithmic management of work and territory. The conclusions indicate that space is a productive factor that enables the geographically unequal extraction of income by companies. A territorial duopoly has quickly formed between Uber and 99/DiDi in the most urbanized, populous, and wealthiest areas across the territory. On the urban scale, ride-hailing corporations have engendered urban algorithmic inequalities based on activities in dynamic areas, to the exclusion, via geofencing, of impoverished, peripheral areas.

Platform-produced data play an important role in techno-capitalist platforms. Especially important in this context are open and free geospatial data, as geospatial data are becoming increasingly relevant in all aspects of daily life as well as for Web businesses. This chapter focuses on the example of the OpenStreetMap project and contrasts it with two techno-capitalist platforms: Meta/Facebook and Grab. OpenStreetMap is often considered the most successful crowdsourced geodatabase, which derives its prosperity from communities of map contributors. Conversely, companies such as Meta/Facebook and Grab are seen as part of platform capitalism, and for them to succeed, they need geospatial data. To satisfy this craving for geospatial data, these companies have chosen not to develop complete solutions or use other commercial data sources. Instead, they tap into data that OpenStreetMap provides and have started to contribute both data and software to OpenStreetMap. This chapter theoretically contextualizes the growing relevance of techno-capitalist platforms for OpenStreetMap: on the one hand, actors of platform capitalism may dominate epistemologies or exploit volunteers by using their “mapping labor” for their commercial purposes; on the other hand, techno-capitalist platforms may also provide incentives for empowering marginalized groups who can now literally put themselves on the map.

In this chapter, we attempt to better understand the conditions for the rapid growth of the digital economy. We begin by examining some of the factors, and their confluence, that have made the rapid expansion of the digital economy possible, including laws and policies, increased access to the Internet, network effects, innovation and entrepreneurship, and funding. Our focus is particularly on the role of venture capital (VC) in this story of unprecedented growth. A substantial part of the chapter focuses on the complex role that VC plays – beyond the ambit of funding – as an intrinsic actor that has shaped the digital economy in a variety of ways and has played a decisive role in interlinking several aspects of the digital economy, from influencing policies to changing market trends. Crucially, we ask what the role of venture capital means for governments as digital technologies, and the firms that create these, become an important part of governance structures. We attempt to understand the role that venture capitalists have played in building and consolidating the technology industry, and why it warrants more scrutiny. The chapter ends by perhaps raising more questions than we can answer and attempts to justify why a closer examination of the history, composition, and interrelations of VCs will help us better understand, regulate, and strengthen the digital economy – and VCs, too.

Drawing on expert interviews and bridging the disciplinary divide between retail studies, economic geography, and platform literature, this chapter critically assesses the changing role of digital platforms such as Amazon as market makers and gatekeepers in the retailing sector. To discuss digital platforms’ increasing power, this chapter uses the lens of “conjunctural geographies”, where digital platforms simultaneously embed and disembed themselves from the space-times they intermediate. Using a strategic deployment of conjunctural geographies, they continue to permanently shape the retail landscape on a large scale, operating rather detached from retailers involved, therewith avoiding accountabilities. Yet, the study expands the understanding of conjunctural geographies by arguing that digital platforms intentionally wish to embed temporarily. They do so on an allegedly more local level in order to increase their reach and their legitimacy, using inter alia institutions, municipalities, and agencies as intermediaries who act more or less on behalf of the platform.

New intermediaries in the form of digital platforms which, in many cases, reorganise existing value chains, are increasingly emerging in various industries. However, it is apparent that platforms often operate under the radar, particularly in business-to-business (B2B) markets, and consequences are thus difficult to grasp. Work-related effects of digital platforms in B2B markets have so far received little attention in research; therefore, we examine the impact of digital B2B platforms on working conditions, and the reaction of unions and works councils to these developments. To do so, we draw on the case of the logistics sector, particularly the transport segment, in Germany, where various digital platforms have emerged in recent years. Based on qualitative interviews, we show that two types of platforms, namely digital logistics marketplaces and digital freight forwarders, as non-neutral intermediaries, have a significant impact on the industry and the actors involved. Through the price transparency they create and the responsibility they pass on, platforms are causing increased competition among carriers, resulting in lower wages and labour standards. Not only the weak bargaining power of transport workers but also the limited production network knowledge of works councils and unions about platform activities in the logistics sector constrain labour agency.

Recently, food and grocery online retail (e-grocery) has experienced rapid growth and created new jobs. This chapter examines how workers in the quick commerce and non-quick commerce sector of this economic segment struggle for the representation of their interests and how their strategies draw on but also conflict with the institutionalised setting of labour relations. The focus is on labour in the German capital city, Berlin. The chapter discusses literature on management control strategies and workers’ resistance. Using a qualitative methodology, the results illustrate that while managements’ labour control practices differ in quick commerce and non-quick commerce, collective labour representation remains a challenge in both segments of the Berlin online retail sector. Moreover, our findings highlight that different geographical scales frame the conditions of workers’ collective representation. These scales are shaped by local labour market characteristics (high share of migrant workers) and the local business environment (vibrant start-up and venture capital scene), as well as by the national legal institutional industrial relations framework. The chapter ends with suggestions for future research and practice.

A rapidly growing body of work explores platform-mediated economy and work under the umbrella term ‘Platform Urbanism’. This focus and academic discourse risk keeping digital spaces and practices in the rural context in the shadow or subordinated to urban-based understandings. Concurrently, digital studies on the rural have for long focused on technocratic approaches to improving information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and connectivity. While recently the potentials of digitalization in transforming agriculture, small businesses, health care, and transportation in rural areas are receiving significant attention, these debates remain surprisingly disconnected from vibrant discussions of the platform economy. Thus, the remaking of rural geographies through the platform economy, and vice versa, remains under-examined. This chapter addresses the importance of spatiality and geography in considering the platform economy with examples of rural small business and agriculture. It illustrates why the nuances and complexity of rural spaces need to become part of understanding the dynamics of the platform economy. Centring rural as important and spatially significant not only lifts the complexity of rural platform processes but also creates opportunities for new questions and patterns. Rural geographical perspectives highlight relational and interlocking spaces found in the rural platform economy and offer the potential for a deeper understanding of social-technical-spatial relations.

Italy was the first Western country to be heavily affected by Covid-19 after the first Chinese outbreak. Apart from the effects in terms of health and emergency issues, mainstream discourses have been early monopolized by the need to reconsider the ways of living and working in post-pandemic times. An ubiquitarian narrative mobilizing a “back-to-the-village” rhetoric transversally emphasized the possibility to permanently or temporarily live in small towns and villages thanks to the unprecedented opportunities provided by remote working, often combined with tourist practices.

This chapter aims at evaluating to what extent remote working has been mobilized in several mainstream discourses to tackle the challenges that small villages, rural areas, and marginal contexts have to face in the country, where the epidemics has emphasized the historically rooted territorial fragmentation.

In particular, the research explores discourses combining smart working and new mobility/tourist models and practices such as “workation” to scrutinize if these innovation practices fall within strategies of local development or, on the contrary, of territorial corporization, by reproducing crystallized stereotyped imageries about marginal places.

Hegel and Marx diagnosed the state of self-estrangement or alienation of the proletarian workers from processes and products of labor, coworkers, community, and the self. Presently, such alienation re-manifests among the immigrant and racially minoritized delivery riders, who comprise the bulk of the workforces of the digital platform capitalism, with repercussions on their societal integration.

Paradoxically, on-demand platform delivery work enables the immigrant messengers’ temporary labor insertion and mobility through the urban landscape of the host city, ergo, a broader scope for day-to-day social and spatial interactions with coinhabitants and their establishments. Such diverse encounters could stimulate the immigrant messengers’ social cohesion within the host communities and acculturation to the host language and customs.

This chapter builds on mental mapping and semi-structured interviews with immigrant messengers from the Glovo and Deliveroo platforms in the Barcelona metropolitan area amid the March 2020 coronavirus lockdown. Reinforced by interactions with immigrant platform riders via their social media and chat groups, the chapter explores their contrasting workaday experiences of alienation and acculturation in the host society, revealing exchanges that could partially diminish their segregation, fostering their integration.

Ride-hailing platforms herald new labor and mobility practices that are disrupting established modes of urban transportation around the world. In the Global South, these disruptions are often meeting strong resistance from the informal transport sector. This is occurring in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, where informal motorbike taxis (xe ôm) have provided an essential means for residents to traverse the city for decades, while also creating viable livelihoods for thousands of drivers. Since 2015, the introduction of digitally mediated motorbike taxis, including ride-hailing “unicorns” Uber and Grab, has redefined this two-wheeled livelihood, challenging xe ôm drivers already plying the city’s streets. Drawing on over 130 interviews with ride-hailing platforms and informal xe ôm drivers in Hanoi, we ground our work in conceptual debates concerning urban livelihoods, mobility (in)justice, and frictions. We analyze the daily frictions and conflicts emerging as “tech” ride-hailing and “traditional” xe ôm drivers compete for socio-spatial space and the rights to sustain their mobile livelihoods. We find that the advent of ride-sharing platforms has resulted in new inequalities and exclusions along specific intersectional lines. Concurrently, both groups of motorbike-taxi drivers have been left to fend for themselves, highlighting the inertia of transport authorities and ride-hailing platform executives in Hanoi.

There is little doubt that we are gradually beginning to have a greater understanding of the platform-based gig economy model and its growing influence on work and labour around the world, and in the global South in particular. Existing accounts from emerging economies like India paint an interesting Janus-faced picture of the gig economy: one that relates to ‘digital dis-intermediation’ or the elimination of traditional third-party brokers and middlemen involved in the exchange of urban services, and another that points to ‘social re-intermediation’ or the re-emergence of social actors that continue to shape gig work and labour’s experiences from within and beyond the local urban context. In focusing on the complex interplay that exists between the ‘dis-’ and ‘re-’ intermediation of gig work and labour in India today, this chapter reveals the vital role played by social relations and extended spatial networks in sustaining the modern gig economy in cities of the global South. Drawing from research exploring experiences of gig workers during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in India, the chapter demonstrates how, given the various gaps created by the lack of digital equality, platform regulation and formal institutions of support for gig labour, it is these informal social relations, actors and intermediary networks that often arbitrate labour market entry and access for workers, as well as to redistribute excessive social costs and risks associated with gig work. Overall, the chapter presents an analysis of gig work and labour in India that views this oscillation between ‘digital dis-intermediation’ and ‘social re-intermediation’ as mutually constitutive counter-tendencies of the contemporary gig economy.

My chapter makes a case for “emergence” as an epistemological reorientation in scholarship on digital urbanism that offers generative openings in our theoretical and analytic imaginaries, beyond deficit- and damage-centered frames. I explore the epistemological and political possibilities of emergence through a close reading of insurgent improvisational digital tactics forged by diverse actors confronting racial violence, surveillant policing, tenant abuse, and more. Opening up the theoretical imaginaries through which we try to understand urban life with platforms is urgent and stands to reveal creatively grounded, deeply relational digital praxes of everyday life that recalibrate urban sociospatialities around emplacement, solidarities, and thriving.