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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the meanings of ‘control’ and ‘autonomy’ among food delivery riders in Madrid. Our aim is to show how the application-mediated practices generate different frameworks in which the riders express their agency in various ways.

Paper long abstract:

The algorithms of food delivery platforms codify the expected sequences and performance timing at each stage of the process. In operational terms, the algorithms produce coordination practices in order to optimize the times and movements needed to complete the successive step of an order. Although the practice of the riders contextually adjusts (to) these patterns, the literature on algorithms has tended to rely on approaches that emphasize their role as devices that limit the riders’ agency to a greater or lesser extent: On the one hand, when addressing the algorithms as a means that ‘control’ the riders’ ‘autonomy’ and ‘flexibility;’ on the other, when assuming that the algorithms favor dynamics of ‘precarity’ and ‘self-exploitation.’ In contrast to these approaches, we understand that algorithms do not totalize or unify workers’ frames of experience, nor do we assume that these devices necessarily privilege one of these frames. On the contrary, we understand that the meanings that emerge in rider-application agencements are expressed and embodied in situated ways. This approach gives rise to de-centering some commonly used categories in the literature, such as those of ‘control’, ‘flexibility,’ and ‘autonomy.’ Based on an ethnography carried out in Madrid (Spain) with riders from Glovo, Uber Eats, and Getir, we analyze different frames of experience among workers, considering employment relationships, workday, work experience as a rider, and gender.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation interrogates the popularization and even acquittal of the arguably exploitative conditions of on demand service providers as consistent with a notional shift when assessing urban space: from the city conceived as a comprehensive spatial unit that has mutated to become a cloud.

Paper long abstract:

In spite of the emerging legal literature[1] raising concerns about the working conditions of riders, the progression of so-called platform capitalism has gained a momentum that seems to resist criticism. Engaging depictions of peddlers in billboards, promising outlets for income, and where the employee is self-promoted, the confidence in a Zeitgeist of pervasive spheres ruled by algorithms and time-spatial dislocations, the lure of instant satisfaction; all these stand in the way of articulating a contestation proper. Yet, beyond the acumen of self-advertising campaigns, the stubborn expansion of platform capitalism, I claim, rest on its unchallenged entitlement to two imperative resources: first, a constant supply of compliant urban bodies that, penetrated by various degrees of social subalternity, are ready to take in. Second, a warranted access to a new type of urban space that, by having assimilated to the self-generating pulses of the cloud, provides the conditions for mobile precarity to thrive. I am speaking here of a modality of actor-network city, that is imagined, governed, networked and built following the concepts and tools of platform urbanism: a cloud-like city introducing territorial relationships organized around a technocapitalist production of private and public space.

Assessing the perils of mobile precarity in its singular actualizations (how it happens and what it causes) is not enough. What I suggest instead is a broader interrogation of its urban propitiating framings with questions as to, how will the actor-network urbanism of the future truly promote a fair share in the territorialities of environmental and social wellbeing?

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Paper short abstract:

We will analyze the waiting among riders as a moment of subjectivation, where (and when) multiple alliances can be plotted in common. Beyond the rider on the move, we will think about waiting as another phase in the circuits of precarious mobility. Before and after the movement, there is waiting.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation we will analyze the waiting among riders as a space and a moment of subjectivation, where (and when) multiple alliances can be plotted in common. Precarious and vulnerable alliances that are not only produced from the consubstantial precarity of platform capitalism, but that make this the basis of their creative articulation, although they often perish or are quickly transformed. We will rely on our ethnographic fieldwork in the city of A Coruña, using techniques such as participant observation and in-depth interviews. To make move materializes between the digital, the corporeal and the urban as an algorithmic and disciplinary imperative where livelihoods and lifestyles are assembled; but at the same time, just as to make wait also functions as a mechanism of control, production and surveillance by the platforms, the everyday life of riders invents a knowing how to wait where a complex web of relations can illuminate tactics of resistance and collective ways of care. Beyond the rider on the move, always moving from one place to the other or mobilizing punctually in public demonstrations, we will pay attention to waiting as another phase in these circuits of precarious mobility. What do they do when they wait? Analyzing waiting in a dynamic and polysemic sense, and not in a static way, could be useful to think a politics of waiting among riders: waiting for the algorithm, waiting for food, waiting for pay, waiting in the plaza... Before and after the movement, there is waiting.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper engages the times and spaces of reproduction by and among food-delivery workers of several mainstream platforms in urban Spain. The intense blurring of labor and life prompted by the rider economy constitutes a key site for practices of care within and beyond the domestic sphere.

Paper long abstract:

Labor contracts, conflicts and work arrangements have been regular topics in research on riders. Embracing an intersectional approach to precarity and mobility, this presentation engages riders´ everyday practices of care. Four ethnographers, all well-aware of their care commitments, brought their feminist understanding of precarity to their field, as part of a multi-sited research project called RIDERS I+D+i focused on the food-delivery sector in urban Spain. We center upon questions of gender, race, dis/ability, migratory status, and other axes of social hierarchization in our analysis.

Specifically, we have identified spaces of encounter and informal hang-outs among delivery workers in a Spanish urban landscape that speak to the possibility of collective care beyond domestic space. During our ethnographic visits, we noticed how specific street benches in the downtown area act as gathering points for riders. Observation after observation, the same anonymous public seating places, become sites for resting and gathering, beyond strictly waiting time between orders. This set of street benches in strategic central plazas of the city, constitute spaces where labor journeys intersect with the needs and joys of caring practices.

This preliminary analysis is based on our ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Zaragoza, using mainstream techniques such as in-depth interviews, and developing a series of methodological tools adapted to this fluid and ubiquitous field: riders´ everyday urban itineraries. We briefly review ad-hoc methods which turned out to be very productive in terms of providing unexpected insights, such as "itinerant perception" and "photographic urban tours".