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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?