9.1 Rethinking Geographical Enquiries of Platformization
Platforms are no doubt powerful; they are becoming dominant infrastructures, economically and socially (Helmond 2015), as much as information and knowledge (Dodge and Kitchin 2013), language and narratives (Gillespie 2010), and strategic practices (Gregory and Maldonado 2020), in making everyday sense of living and lived spaces (Barns 2019; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Led by the notion of ‘platform urbanism’, an emerging scholarship is documenting new phenomena and consequences driven by platformization in urban contexts reshaping urban environments socially, economically, materially, and symbolically (Caprotti et al. 2022). While this rich body of research is an important and necessary perspective, it also creates a tendency of taking urban spaces and people as the default in studying platforms, and even when studying platforms in rural contexts, the assumptions and approaches tend to be simply the extension of urban underpinnings (Zhang et al. 2023).
The importance of geography in understanding platformization has been increasingly addressed, which has a root in the long interest in the effect of digital technologies on constructing social and economic geography (Zook et al. 2004) but also raises new questions. Not least among these questions have been the geographical questions of scale. Graham and Anwar (2019) have shown how platforms have changed the role of the local labour market and digital platforms have allowed for an upscaling to a planetary labour market. The planetary scale serves capital while workers are still tied to their physical realm. Moreover, digital platforms simultaneously disembed workers from place-based institutional protection while steering workers to rely on place-embedded social ties to carry on unpaid labour (Wood et al. 2019b). Further, empirical studies show that while platforms can seem placeless, the practices and strategies of workers are indeed spatial and place-rooted (Webster and Zhang 2020; Wells et al. 2021). A recent study affirmed the importance of context for platform-mediated gig work by highlighting the importance of the local geographic factors including the role of proximity and institutional factors (van Slageren et al. 2022). While the embedding of digital platforms for people and into places seems to have come to such an extent that people’s everyday activities are standardized, normalized, and routinized to be digital; a recent study argued that, relying on place-based strategies, people can also intentionally disconnect and disentangle themselves from the digital (Adams and Jansson 2022). Looking at how social relations are shaped by digital and computational interventions highlights the ways urban spaces are controlled and resisted (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022). These debates suggest in the big picture that there is indeed a digital turn in conceptualizing geography as diverse geographies are produced through, by, and of the digital (Ash et al. 2018).
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Nevertheless, these interests in the role of space and geography are mostly bound to cities and treat urban as the norm. It is, of course, challenging to capture the messiness of digital spaces intersecting with multi-layered relations, and yet the question of various types of spatialities demands attention. We do not wish to undermine the complexity of platform urbanism which consists of varied configurations (Leszczynski 2022), but we want to lift out the unique contexts of rural areas. Digital presences and practices characterized by uneven geographies of underlying infrastructures, material forms, component resources, and sites of creation and disposal (Ash et al. 2018) are yet to be explored in rural contexts. Our argument in this chapter is largely conceptual. We argue that the type of space where digital practice occurs matters. We take the call for recognizing the spatiality further by arguing that platforms create more than new spatial strategies: the type, role, and meaning of space matter in the platform economy. Massey (2005) argued that places are never singular and are also in relation to other places and scales. For platform geography studies, this has often manifested in a relation between the digital and physical. Studies have shown a complex relationship between these binaries, and increasingly platform geographies see these relations have nuances (see for example Merrill et al. (2020) and Montserrat Degen and Rose (2022)). The physical realm is not a container to the manifestation of digital practices as often suggested in the literature. However, according to many geographers, the messiness of spatial differences should be part of the larger discussion. By treating different types of spaces as homogenous, or as normatively defined, in the platform economy, i.e. cities with various contexts, we are missing many of the relational aspects of platform social-economic practices. It is increasingly clear that the emphasis on the binary relation of physical to digital has not adequately unpacked what is meant by different types of physical spaces and the heterogeneity found within spaces and places. Consequently, studies make assumptions about the role of urban spaces in digital relations, but also we are perhaps at risk of missing the role of particular spaces in shaping platform geographies.
Scholars are increasingly curious about how platforms unfold in rural areas while recognizing rural spaces have other kinds of social-economic relations and technological and market conditions (Li et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2022; Young 2019). This reflects a wider challenge facing wider understandings of economic activities in rural areas. Tillmar et al. (2022) highlight the ways rural entrepreneurship has been under-explored, and this is even more say with non-normative groups such as women entrepreneurs. Adjacently, as our recent literature review of global digital studies in rural areas (Zhang et al. 2023) shows, in the large field, rural-digital relations lack conceptual depth, and rural is positioned in vague and aggregated ways and as a recipient of digital. The infrastructural and material meanings of platforms and digital in general remain dominant. When rural contexts are identified as the research gap, many only draw on the rural as a backdrop, a spatial container rather than a context. Referring to a technical or quantitative definition of the rural is also common, especially among European studies, which renders the rural decontextualized. Moreover, most take rural merely as new empirical sites, extending conceptual ideas developed in urban contexts without thinking deeper about what rural spaces and rurality really mean and how these endogenously would define the meaning of platforms and associated operations differently. Furthermore, rural areas, for example, those in Europe, are identified as in need of intervention to prevent population shrinkage and further marginalization. ICT, social intervention, and communications infrastructure are highlighted as a way forward at multiple policy levels (ESPON 2020). Nevertheless, these rural-digital debates are largely disconnected from the theoretical and methodological development of platform economies. Still, there is also a small group of exceptional examples which we will draw on to show the potential of rural geography in enriching geographical understanding of digital platforms and vice versa.
We argue the strong focus on exploring urban-digital-spatial relations risks creating an urban bias with significant implications: (1) taking urban as the robust and normative space of understanding digitalization while leaving rural mirrored, shadowed, marginalized, or ignored; (2) limiting the contribution of rural contexts to empirical and theoretical understandings; and (3) amplifying the framing of new technological development within an urban approach, which further marginalizes the rural. This chapter aims to position rural contexts in geographical enquiries of platformization. We demonstrate the unique contribution that geographers can make to platform research and why context needs to become a more robust discussion in the geographies of the platform economy.
9.2 Creating Space for Rural Geography in Platformization
Rural geography has undergone massive shifts in perspectives over the course of the discipline. A clear concise definition of rural geography is a nearly impossible task as rural can mean so many forms of spaces and places and presents differently between and within countries (Woods 2009). Halfacree (2006), in his highly influential conceptualization, argues that rural consists of the imaginative, material, and practice forms what he calls the threefold model: (1) rural locality, (2) representations of the rural, and (3) lives of the rural. Together, these configure rural spaces but do not necessarily lead to a unified definition of rural spaces. What emerges as important from this is the understanding that rural spaces are heterogeneous, and they are vital for sustaining cities and nation states. In fact, it is hard to imagine the concept of ‘rural’ without relating it in some way to cities. Certainly, like other spaces, rural areas are part of relational geography (Massey 2005). Interestingly, narratives regarding the role of rural areas are often selective. Forsberg (2001), for instance, has drawn parallels between rural and gender studies by illustrating how normative constructions shape knowledge production on certain topics and as a result position certain topics always on the periphery.
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Rural areas are not simply non-urban, rather they are distinctive systems and networks that engage with and support urban areas but have meaning in themselves as well. Rural areas are distinctive and important as a geographical site of study and worthy of consideration. This debate is certainly not new and is articulated differently in different countries (Forsberg et al. 2006). Yet, the importance of rural processes continues to be undervalued. The COVID-19 pandemic also pushed rural areas to the fore through new working forms, increased value of space, and new digital social norms, such as platform-mediated work (Maclaren and Philip 2021). According to Brown and Schafft (2011), rural areas deserve particular attention outside the urban-rural binary because they encompass important natural resources, critical infrastructure, food and resources to urban areas, and not least, rural areas provide homes to a portion of a given country’s population. Rural areas are not without challenges – particularly regarding digitalization (Brunori et al. 2022).
Interestingly, despite these images of social and economic challenges, the rural idyll remains an important component of constructing a shared national identity. Lagerqvist (2011), for example, traces the changing symbolism of the Swedish croft (the quintessential red houses often seen on postcards) and links these rural homes to the production of meaning in rural areas that affect and effect national understandings of rural spaces. Rural idyll, that is of timeless and unchanging landscape (Horton 2008), has important implications for how we understand the position of rural in larger national and global systems. In fact, rural idyll plays an important role in our affective experience in digital spaces and places as illustrated by Sutherland (2020). Thus, rural areas are not only composed of physical spaces but are also key building blocks to a shared imagined community; the nation state (Andersson 1983). Rural areas are both physical and imagined. They are produced in and out of space and places and are essential to the well-being of urban areas and the sovereignty of the nation state.
Perhaps due to the imaginative quality of characterizing rural, these areas are often seen as homogenous and unchanging. As much as rural areas can be spaces of inclusion and shared understandings, they can also be exclusionary. Rural areas can be sites for exclusion, for instance, ethnic or racialized belonging or gender (Askins 2009). This has important implications for understanding rural areas in their complexity, especially regarding digital geographies and the platform economy. These challenges surface in other disciplines and geographic conceptualization. For example, rural areas are not often seen as sites of migration or globalization. However, like their urban counterparts, rural areas do receive migrants, are multicultural, and are deeply globalized (Woods 2007). The idea of rural as part of transnational and global networks is not new (Woods 2009). Moreover, rural geographies are related to each other as well such as social-economic ties between rural areas (Webster 2017). These studies illustrate the need for thinking about rural knowledge and processes as dynamic and complex, and not only from the margins or stemming from deficit orientations.
This complexity highlights the importance of understanding rural beyond binary thinking as apart from the urban, contemporary or positioning rural areas as insignificant in the platform economy. Rural scholars have long called for more place-based studies that take up questions of rurality, as research praxis, politically as well as ontologically, and this chapter seeks to be part of that process. Like previous processes that neglected the rural as part of larger processes, such as globalization, leaving the rural outside platform geographies threatens clear understandings of platform economies and the rural.
9.3 Centring Rural in the Geographies of Platformization
We are in a dynamic moment of thinking and rethinking geography’s encounters with the digital as object, context, medium, and subject of inquiry (Elwood and Leszczynski 2018; Leszczynski 2022). Rural geography scholarship as mapped in the previous section should be part of this ongoing digital turn based on understanding the rural as heterogenous and specific contexts, just as digital spaces are increasingly understood as diverse and experienced through subjectivities (Armano et al. 2022). Conceptualizations and understandings of the platform economy need to take such rural geographies seriously to grasp the complexity and diversity of various modes of infrastructure, knowledge, and practices within digital geographies. Rural geography has the potential of filling in gaps in geographical thoughts in the field of platform research. In this section, we turn to the geographies of platforms and make linkages to rural spaces.
The conceptualization of platform is contested, and sometimes in confluence with participation and mediatization (van der Graaf and Ballon 2019). From the early days, the term ‘platform’ had its original computational meaning focusing on the technical material dimension as infrastructure, architecture, and structure – “something to build on and innovate from” (Gillespie 2010, p. 352) but soon moved to become discourse work which “depends on terms and ideas that are specific enough to mean something, and vague enough to work across multiple venues for multiple audiences” (Gillespie 2010, p. 349) so as to serve distinctive economic purposes. This discursive positioning creates a metaphor, for example, “opportunity to act, connect, or speak in ways that are powerful and effective” (Gillespie 2017), which works to imagine and visualize new digital geographies (Zook et al. 2004). While Srnicek (2017) examines platforms as companies and business interests driving capitalist expansion, recently they have been debated as the algorithms of surveillance and control (Wood et al. 2019a), but also increasingly as interfaces of negotiations and resistance (Anwar and Graham 2020; Christensen 2022). Platforms can be seen as corporations with transformative institutional power to (re)order workforce relations (Frenken and Fuenfschilling 2021), a distinctive type of governance mechanism different from markets, hierarchies, or networks (Vallas and Schor 2020), but as well as participatory ecosystems governing interactions and value sharing (Barns 2019), and mirrored structures of different types of social relationships (Schüßler et al. 2021). Interestingly, within these conceptualizations, the offline or non-digital sites of platformization are often under-conceptualized (Leszczynski 2022); in contrast, this demonstrates the importance of platforms as transforming the material elements of streetscapes at the urban neighbourhood level (Richardson 2020; van der Graaf and Ballon 2019). Extending their arguments, it is likely that platforms would have similar transformative qualities on other spatialities. How these would materialize in rural spaces could highlight differing forms, types, roles, and meanings of platforms. These are not only useful for showing platforms are in diverse, ephemeral, and polymorphous forms but more important for opening doors to exploring platformization as processes. Drawing on Poell et al. (2019), we can generally define platformization in the rural as, on the one hand, platforms becoming the dominant infrastructures, economic models, and governmental frameworks in different economic sectors and spheres of life, and on the other hand, cultural practices and imaginations reorganized around these platforms.
As mentioned in the introduction, geographers have sought to show that geographical relationships are at the centre of platformatization. These perspectives may be still relevant to understanding rural-digital geographies but in contextualized ways. Richardson (2020) argues that platforms are flexible spatial arrangements which do not have fixed territories but draw on territorialized networks to actualize in place-based forms. This perspective draws our attention to place-attached actors and networks and their capacities of coordinating territorialized and material elements in specific spaces. From a different perspective, Graham (2020) uses the term ‘conjunctural geographies’ to highlight that platforms strategically deploy a way of being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate. Wood et al. (2019b) rather show from a gig worker’s perspective how labour is embedded within localized networks while simultaneously may be disembedded from the cultural and legal norms. These political economic approaches constitute a large part of academic efforts so far to understand the role and meaning of Internet and digital technology for our lived spaces. Yet, seeing platform activities as involving and jumping scales, critical geographers also ask what the associated innovations actually mean to the local qualities of place and community (Odendaal 2021). These geographers have convincingly shown us that spaces are always co-created and co-constituted through the mediation of digital artefacts, where the reality is always augmented by the digital (Graham et al. 2013). Platforms not only configure and infrastructure our experiences, they function as important sites of imaginaries (Törnberg 2022) of everyday life (Barns 2019; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Törnberg 2022). Yet, we still need to unpack more time- and place-specific processes of platformization, especially in rural spaces; the instability and contingency of platforms demand our careful scrutiny through empirical details and specificity (de Kloet et al. 2019).
Infrastructure, a particularly rural question, manifests often in the forms of material objects and mediates environments and human engagement with digitality (Ash et al. 2018). In the dominant urban-based techno-economic perspectives, infrastructure concerns how platforms as online marketplaces can be computed for business models, but more recently as a conceptual lens with significant meaning for spatiality (Barns 2019). In rural studies, infrastructure is instead simply taken as a connectivity question most of the time (Palmer-Abbs et al. 2021; Philip and Williams 2019). An infrastructural perspective that differs the rural from the urban is especially common in the literature. For example, a recent study on global remote work (Braesemann et al. 2022) argues the existence of spatial polarization and pinpoints the lack of enabling institutions in rural including underdevelopment of digital infrastructure that fosters specialization and complex economic activities for its left-behind situation. This confirms a classical view on the left-behind position of rural in capitalist development. Accordingly, the unevenness of digital infrastructures with implications for social inequalities and divides has been a focus of exploration in rural-digital studies. However, Young (2019) heavily criticized this singular focus and way of understanding the role and meaning of digital to/in the rural. Since the early days, Zook et al. (2004) already emphasized that the extension of digital infrastructures is a place-based social and political process rather than technologically determined because the ways places and people become ‘wired’ or ‘unwired’ depend upon historically layered patterns of financial constraint and cultural and social variation. Infrastructures are about not only material objects but also discourses and visions, and they are manifestations of power interactions.
Moreover, power and scale are clearly at the centre of the platformization question about the relationship between multiple spaces and how they alter different kinds of geography in relation to land, labour, and capital. The recent trend of shifting our views to smaller scales and focus on everyday practices and lived experiences responds to this trend and is likely to open new venues for understanding platform economies. Russell (2020) argues that digital spaces are heterogeneous and experienced and used differently by actors situated in varying contexts, which should include rural. For example, what does it mean to have limited or slow access to digital spaces when using platforms for work or leisure? Recent ethnographical studies highlighting the practice aspect of platforms suggest that they are commanded through agential practices in specific lived spaces and producing specific social-technical-spatial relations (Webster et al. 2023). Leszczynski and Elwood (2022) raise epistemological questions on how to understand the pervasive role of the digital, creating mediated and mediatized environments. In a similar way, we can question in what ways platforms transform rural environments. Yet, different from urban spaces where the major concerns are directly connected to consumers, rapid scaling and antagonistic to government and industries (Sadowski 2020), there is no focused agenda in critical analysis of the rural-platform mixture.
The above suggests that platforms are relational to spaces and places. The platform economy is not neutral to the context of actors. In the next section, we further illustrate why the nuances and complexities of rural spaces need to become part of understanding the dynamics of the platform economy.
9.4 Positioning Rural Geography into Platform Economies: Two Examples
Moving discussions and research beyond the urban-rural divide by 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. Drawing on previous research, we explore opportunities for considering the importance of rural and aim to illuminate why breaking the deterministic urban stance in platform economies is important. We explore this through examples of rural business and agriculture (two main topics in the global rural-digital literature, Zhang et al. 2023) by emphasizing the unique local-context configurations, and the relational and interlocking spaces found in the rural platform economy.
9.4.1 Platforms and Rural Small Business
Rural businesses in general face many challenges including distance and isolation (Anderson et al. 2016), and digital technologies are often presented as a solution. Rural areas in Europe remain disadvantaged and do not always meet criteria needed to create profitable businesses (Dubois and Sielker 2022). Roos (2021) has shown that entrepreneurship in practice is contingent on the local environment and she argues, the role of context shapes not only the types of businesses which may be feasible but also the ways in which business may be done, for example, gender roles. Yet, for rural-digital businesses, there are further challenges in doing business. The digital divide – a lack of infrastructure and speed – also shapes the particulars of rural business and platform economy (Ye and Yang 2020). The lack of easy access to platforms is an issue unique to rural areas. This should not be interpreted as a lack of a platform economy, however, nor as an impossible hurdle. For example, Strover et al. (2017) have shown that rural libraries in the USA serve ICT hubs given the limited infrastructure and cost of data plans. Rural areas may be particularly interesting for platformization as there is potential socially and economically. For example, Atkočiūnienė and Vaznonienė (2019) have identified tourism, virtual tours, and selling of goods and services, such as traditional crafts as some options for platform innovation and business development. In their study of Lithuanian smart village potential, they highlight the complexity of content and differences even within the same region in terms of viability. Examples such as the US library or Lithuanian smart villages affirm that the role of place shapes how platforms are being used as well as potential challenges and solutions. It, then, becomes critically important to understand how platforms are part of rural practice, knowledge, and infrastructure.
Koo and Eesley (2021) show how offline environments shape online behaviour in e-commerce platforms. They show that rural users struggle to adapt to changes and may not have the same access to resources and networks as their urban counterparts. Importantly, what they highlight is the role of context and the need for platforms to develop responses that are more place based, for example, considering rural contexts. Rural businesses have differing relational geographies to platforms. This has policy implications given that many policy interventions emphasize the role of private business and platformization as solution (ESPON 2020). Eckhardt et al. (2018) show that mobility-sharing resources, for example, cars and rides, offered through platforms, should be ideal for rural areas, but the particularities of rural spaces make it difficult for businesses and governments. They argue that, for instance, the lack of competition in rural areas may be a challenge for businesses, and the roles of different levels of government can be unclear. Similarly, Sorooshian (2021) finds several challenges for developing digital tourism in rural areas in Sweden and finds them most at risk in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. They also find a potential disconnect between tourist motivations and the role of platforms in tourism. Leeuwis et al. (2018) argue that the issue of platforms in rural areas is more complex and needs to be tied to local practices and knowledge. Through these examples, the interconnection between platform geographies and rural geographies exposes the need to complement, explore, and comprehend existing norms and not be separate or externalize platform usage and practices from the complexities of rural life.
9.4.2 Platforms and Agriculture
Agriculture and farming practices are experiencing the most systematic, large-scale platformization in the rural through activities and discourses under the umbrella term ‘smart farming’ or ‘precision agriculture’. In modern history, technological changes have been seen as fundamental for agricultural change to keep market competitiveness as much as to catch up with the need of feeding the growing population. Digitalization of agriculture follows this logic and is thus taken globally as the necessary way of enhancing agricultural productivity and efficiency by leveraging digital capacities (Bolfe et al. 2020). As this platformatization involves complex forms of technology and heavily depends on data collection and algorithmic management to supervise farming practices, a mixture of state and business actors are involved in creating and reshaping farmers’ everyday interactions with digital artefacts, digital spaces, and infrastructures. While farmers are incentivized by the promises of profits and efficiency, their strategic moves are clearly constrained by their economic, social, and political relations with the other actors. This is not totally new given the long global history of externally driven technocratic approaches to modernizing agriculture, but an emerging group of critical social science scholarship draws attention to the new ways smart farming platforms are accommodated or alter the everyday lives, practices, social networks, identities of farmers, and even human-animal relations. As Carolan (2020) shows, farmers in North America have come to rely heavily on digital platforms – interfaces and dashboards on their smartphone screen, aided by satellites, predictive analytics, drones, and broadband Internet – to see/know what is going on in their fields. This digital approach has several tendencies to disembed or distance farming as knowledge, practice, and infrastructure from the place-based fields. Platform-dependent farmers are less likely to follow the older generation’s analogue approach depending on walking in the field, taste and smell the soil, and look at the plants to manage the fields. The platform-mediated digital knowledge suits the promotion of large-scale farming well while rendering what is knowable and actionable to actors at a distance based on an exogenous infrastructure. There is a risk of lock-in situations where platform-based knowledge would be favoured and intensified (Carolan 2020) and in association would displace farm labour while creating new forms of digital labour (Stock and Gardezi 2021). From a different perspective and based on studying farmers in the Netherlands, Visser et al. (2021) rather argue that precision farming is often imprecise, mismatching farm-based social and biological realities. The assumptions, values, and subjectivities in algorithms can be wrong but when mistakes occur, there is often a tendency to blame the farmer for lacking digital skills and knowledge though they actually make essential efforts in making the technologies more accurate based on their historical knowledge of the field and in-field inspections. Gardezi and Stock (2021) more critically argue that farmers’ sustained engagement with precision technologies is because agrotech firms have successfully positioned their knowledge as superior to farmers’ experiential knowledge, as part of defining what a good farmer is.
Platformization of agriculture can be considered a sub-field for exploring platform-rural relations. Emerging studies suggest the centrality of a place-based and context-sensitive approach for making sense of women’s role in precision livestock farming (Hay and Pearce 2014), gendered digital labour along the division of home and outside (Marshall 2021), the simultaneous reconstruction of the environment and human-animal relations (Søraa and Vik 2021), and ultimately social-ethical challenges in smart farming (Eastwood et al. 2019) and situating digitalized agriculture in the longer history of racialized dispossession and exploitative relationships (Liu and Sengers 2021).
9.5 Concluding Marks
This think piece argues that there is a need to explore the diversity of contexts, spaces, and places connected to and from the platform economy, and a need for a specific understanding of ruralism in the platform economy. By stepping outside binary urban-rural relations, we show considering relations between rural geography and platforms is an opportunity to ask new kinds of research questions and challenge to the replication of dominant and normative ‘othering’ of rural areas. Our chapter has demonstrated the impact of taking categories and ways of knowing for granted. By bringing in and centralizing rural geography in studies on the platform economy, we can not only more deeply understand new patterns but also allow emergent understandings of social-technical-spatial relations to come to the fore. In this chapter, we have sought to position rural geography to enrich the ways of imagining and studying platform economies. Instead of transposing geographical learnings of platform economies based in urban spaces to rural spaces, we depart from rural geography scholarship and take digitally mediated spaces as heterogeneous, distinctive, and non-normative. We affirm the need for place/space-based theoretical inquiries, which considers the rural as a specific and unique context yielding conceptualization(s) and understanding(s) of the platform economy that highlight the complexities and diversities of digital geographies. Our examples have shown indeed the relational practices within digital spaces. In rural business, we see digital practices shaping and moulding from context. Likewise, in agriculture, we see digital reconfigurations of knowledge, labour, and human-land relations are always space and context specific.
In Massey’s (2005) approach to relational geographies, no spaces are left behind and need to catch up. This is certainly the case, as we have shown, for rural geography and platform geographies. We argue for greater attention to the role of rural space in platform geographies – not just as it informs digital processes but as the space itself is a unique configuration in the practices, strategies, and relations created and produced in rural platform relations. Digital-rural relations should be connected to and can contribute important views to the debates on the platform economy. The platform economy should not be considered as a parachute in rural areas. The rural should not just follow up the shifting themes and agenda of urban studies. The research field needs urgently to go beyond a normative economic view as the platform economy is moving fast and creates new phenomena in more tangible scales in the urban.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Formas (A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) [grant number: 2019-00445], Stockholm University Funding for Strategic Investments [ref. no.: SU FV-3165-21] and Vetenskapsrådet [grant number: 2022-05314].
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