Planning for platform urbanism

Abstract

As urban areas become increasingly digitally mediated via smart technologies and app-based services, urban planners find themselves navigating newer infrastructural, spatial, and governance challenges brought about by digitalization. Adding to this set of challenges is the meteoric rise in e-commerce and app-based digital platforms, i.e., the platform economy. The platform economy has profound socio-spatial impacts, which are particularly felt in food delivery work as the urban streets are transformed into workplace. How might planners overcome the challenges and impacts posed by the normalisation of just-in-time deliveries and platform-mediated gig work? In this commentary, I highlight the dominance of a piecemeal approach to food delivery work – using examples from transport and climate planning in Canadian cities – which makes delivery workers subject to different layers of precarity. Following this, I show where and how planning might intervene and argue for concerted efforts in anticipatory urban planning that (i) bridges the work/non-work dichotomy prevalent in contemporary planning processes and, (ii) meaningfully engages with mobile logistical workers towards creating inclusive cities. Planning for platform urbanism, thus, requires urban planners to learn from policy levers that have worked in different sectors and adapt them to a still-unfolding complex ecosystem of platform-based urban service provision.