Abstract
Digital technologies and services are increasingly used to meet a wide range of urban challenges. These developments bear the risk that the urban digital transformation will exacerbate already existing socio-spatial inequalities. Graham’s assumption from nearly 20 years ago (2002)—that European cities are characterised by various forms of socio-spatial segregation, which will not be overcome by digital infrastructures—thus needs to be seriously acknowledged. This contribution critically scrutinizes the dominant narratives and materializations of standardised smart urbanism in Europe. We investigate how the prospects of improved efficiency, availability, accessibility and quality of life through digital technologies and networks take the demands and effects of the gendered division of labour into account. By zooming in on platform urbanism and examples related to mobility and care infrastructures, we discuss whether and to what extent digital technologies and services address the everyday needs of all people and in the same way or whether there are exclusionary lines. Our objective is to bring digital and feminist geographies into dialogue, to stress the mutual construction of society and space by platform economies and to ask how gendered geographies in cities are produced through and by digitalisation.
Highlights
The increasing platformisation of everyday life has recently become a subject of research among social sciences
In this article we take the everyday as point of departure to look at how platforms connect services and consumers: How gendered norms in urban everyday life are re-produced by the platformisation of services, especially by mobility and care-work platforms
We rely on approaches rooted in feminist digital geography, as they open up a view of diverse scales of urbanization, relate everyday practices to public and private spaces, and examine the production of socio-spatial difference and inequalities
Summary
The increasing platformisation of everyday life has recently become a subject of research among social sciences. We rely on approaches rooted in feminist digital geography, as they open up a view of diverse scales of urbanization, relate everyday practices to public and private spaces, and examine the production of socio-spatial difference and inequalities We consider it essential to address how urban platforms produce embodiments, subjectivities, normative frames of social and spatial interactions, and gender norms to understand the social implications and variations of digital divides. In large European cities, demand in these sectors is increasingly organised through platforms, and the same platform companies are active in most major European cities (e.g., ShareNow in the mobility sector, care.com in the care sector) Against this background, we investigate whether and to what extent digital technologies and services address and treat all people or whether there are socio-spatial regimes at work that include and exclude certain categories of individuals along gender lines (and their intersections with class and race). We take a systematic look at the explicit role of and production of space in interconnection with the socio-technological changes that sectoral platforms bring about, and seek to bring digital feminist geography into a dialogue with critical urban studies
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