Affective platform urbanism: Changing habits of digital on-demand consumption

Abstract

This paper develops geographic debates on platform urbanism by exploring the overlooked consumption practices that digital on-demand platforms have generated. Extending recent work on the affectivity of platforms which explain how specific bodily experiences are ‘engineered’ into the design of platforms, the paper argues that the onflow of urban life can complicate these logics. In the context of on-demand food delivery platforms, the paper moves beyond the explanatory logic of convenience to provide a richer understanding of how digital on-demand food delivery platforms might be changing everyday habits in the city for people in different circumstances. Through analysis of qualitative interviews with consumers who use digital on-demand food delivery platforms in Melbourne, Australia, the paper investigates how such platforms are ongoingly evaluated by urban inhabitants. Through a micropolitical lens that views bodies in terms of their changing indeterminate capacities, the paper explains how on-demand food platforms can both enhance and deplete bodily capacities in time, and that this changeability is contingent on diverse circumstances of urban dwelling. The political value of this perspective is to acknowledge a more diffuse set of power relations at play and to enhance our sense of the multiple subjectivities that emerge through ongoing immersion in digital worlds.