The rider as an agent of urban assemblage: The case of Seville (Spain)

Source abstract

The development of platform urbanism gives strategic value to riders or home delivery drivers as necessary actors in the spatial connection of supply with demand. In this paper, we examine the role of these workers in the assemblage of urban space, using the city of Seville (Spain) as a case study. We provide an ethnographic description of various situations in which the spatial configuration of urban space envisaged by the platform is incomplete, insufficient, or directly contradictory to the socio-spatial solutions required by riders in their daily work. The main contribution of this paper is to ethnographically document the socio-spatial practices through which workers complement and make effective the “spatial-fix” provided by the delivery platforms. The results suggest that applying the ethnographic method to the study of the platform/city interface highlights the limits of the “spatial fix” projected by such platforms and the crucial role of riders in implementing responses to glitches as situations of failure or mismatch.