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This book provides a wider understanding of the geographies of the platform economy, focusing on the critical perspectives that have emerged on this new economic and digital context. Technological development, particularly the emergence of big data in combination with platforms, additive manufacturing, advanced robotics, machine learning and the internet of things, has created conditions for the appearance of a new economic context predominantly based on new forms of services. This new economic context has been described as the platform economy or platform capitalism. Other designations have also appeared to describe particular consequences of this new phenomena, such as the gig economy or the sharing economy.
There is a significant diversity of scientific fields that are studying topics related to the platform economy. Several studies have emerged from different fields, including, but not limited to, geography, economy, sociology, information science, management, marketing, or the humanities. However, geography has become an important field to understand the platform economy given its critical position over the economic, cultural, and social issues that stem from this new economic context. The purpose of this book is to approach these discussions and offer a critical view of the platform economy from the perspective of geography, stemming from the different subfields of the discipline and not restricted to what has been referred to as Digital Geography.
This book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences. It will be particularly relevant to those with research interests in digital geographies and economic geography, economics and business.
List of contents
Part I: Introduction.- Chapter 1. Critical perspectives on the geographies of the platform economy.- Part II: Platformization and new forms of economic organisation.- Chapter 2. Platform cooperatives: an organisational model to counteract extractive and exploitative practices in the platform economy?.- Chapter 3. Ride-hailing corporations, territorial selectivity, and urban algorithmic inequalities in Brazil.- Chapter 4. Crowd-based geo-data production and platform capitalism. The case of OpenStreetMap.- Chapter 5. VCs, technology firms, and governance: examining the tentacles of digital growth.- Chapter 6. A critical perspective on the increasing power of digital platforms through the lens of conjunctural geographies.- Part III: The effects of platformization on work and employment.- Chapter 7. Digital platforms and labour agency in the logistics sector - the role of production network knowledge.- Chapter 8. Digital work and the struggle for labour representation: the food and grocery online retail sector in Berlin (Germany).- Chapter 9. Positioning rural geography into platform economies: why we need to ask new questions when researching the rural platform economy.- Chapter 10. Digital platforms for (or against?) marginal areas: smart working and back-to-the-village rhetoric in Italy.- Part IV: Platforms, gig economy, and social-spatial vulnerabilities.- Chapter 11. All in a day's work: impacts of on-demand platform delivery work on immigrant riders in Barcelona.- Chapter 12. The new kids on the street: ride-hailing platform drivers competing with informal motorbike taxi livelihoods in Hanoi, Vietnam.- Chapter 13. The digital dis-intermediation and social re-intermediation of labour in India's gig economy.- Part V: Digital urban life futures.- Chapter 14. Digital politics, urban geographies: emergence as an orientation to life with platforms.
