Paper short abstract:

My paper uses the example of platform-based services to discuss how Berlins night is disruptive transformed by platform-driven digitisation and what social figures this new digitized night produces. It aims to understand the transformation of the urban night through the shift to the smart city.

Paper long abstract:

New technologies and business models are increasingly blurring binary frontiers between day-time and night-time. Digital technology fundamentally transforms the city and thus our urban public space. It also enables a fundamental transformation of the urban night through the expansion of technological infrastructures and the growing ubiquity of platform-based services. As a result, we are living with highly networked infrastructures, in augmented cities.

Cities are becoming brighter and brighter thanks to computer-aided LED lighting systems. ICT-Service labour is often outsourced across the globe, which is leading to a re-territorialization of temporalities and global inequalities of labour and time. Concrete digital infrastructures enable workers to extend their work activities into the night-time urban space. At the same time, platforms are emerging that expand consumption possibilities at night and people increasingly ask for services that other people have to work for at night. Thus, a new spatial configuration of the usage of the night is emerging.

My paper uses the example of platform-based services to discuss, firstly, how the Berlin night is transformed by platform-driven digitisation and, secondly, what social figures this new digitized night produces. It aims to understand the transformation of the urban night through the shift to the smart city.

I focus on a crowdwork platform, a food delivery platform and a mobility platform. Research questions are: How do platform workers interact with the urban night? What (technological) infrastructures are required for the platform labour of the night? To what extent does the digitalized night promote new practices of mobility?