Political Ecologies of Platform Urbanism: Digital labor and data infrastructures.

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2020

Department

Geography and Environmental Systems

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Political ecologies of platform urbanism: digital labor and data infrastructures. 2020. Chapter in Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformations in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge and Everyday Life. With Anthony M Levenda and John G Stehlin. Routledge link

Rights

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Abstract

This chapter builds from earlier work (Mahmoudi and Levenda, 2016) to reformulate data collection in the built environment with particular attention to labor and the platform economy.The chapter contributes a new way to connect deskilled platform labor with the programmers who make the platforms. Our approach builds from digital political ecology (DPE) to understand the physical infrastructures and digital components of platform urbanism. We combine insights from more recent scholarship on the city and digital geography to examine the infrastructures that undergird platform urbanism to understand how a new division of labor (re)inscribes social disparities in the uneven geographies of the city and its hinterland.